Resurrection
Resurrection or anastasis (Greek: ἀνάστασις, romanized: anástasis) is the concept of coming back to life after death. This differs from reincarnation, a process involving a person or deity returning to life in a different body. Some religions also include beliefs about the disappearance, or assumption, of the body, which is a related but distinct concept. The English word derives from the Latin resurrectio, from surgere, "to rise".
With the advent of written records, the earliest known recurrent theme of resurrection was in Egyptian and Canaanite religions, which had cults of dying-and-rising gods such as Osiris and Baal. Ancient Greek religion generally emphasised immortality, but in the mythos, a number of individuals were made physically immortal as they were resurrected from the dead. Frazer treated these as a single dying-and-rising god pattern, a reading many later scholars have held to distort the sources. Figures such as Achilles, Alcmene and Heracles were held to have been raised to physical immortality, though Greek attitudes to returning from death were generally negative: Asclepius was killed by Zeus for reviving the dead.
In the Hebrew Bible resurrection is rare and unsystematic, confined to a few prophetic miracles and to Daniel; the afterlife is more often framed in terms of Sheol. Beliefs diversified in the Second Temple period, with bodily resurrection affirmed in 2 Maccabees, accepted by the Pharisees and rejected by the Sadducees, and it was later fixed by Maimonides among the Thirteen Principles of Faith.
The universal resurrection of the dead at the end of the world is a standard eschatological belief in the Abrahamic religions. The term is used in two distinct senses: the ongoing, individual resurrection of individual souls, as in Christian idealism and realized eschatology; and a general bodily resurrection of all the dead at the end of the world. Some hold that the soul is the vehicle by which people are resurrected. Early Christianity inherited the Pharisaic belief, and the resurrection of Jesus became its central doctrine; Paul held the faith to stand or fall with it. The New Testament also records resurrection miracles worked by Jesus, among them the raising of Lazarus, and by the apostles after him. Belief in a general resurrection and judgment is codified in the Apostles' Creed and Nicene Creed.
Like some forms of the Abrahamic religions, the Dharmic religions also include belief in resurrection and/or reincarnation. Hinduism and Buddhism centre on saṃsāra and rebirth rather than resurrection, though both preserve stories of the dead restored to life, such as Savitri's recovery of her husband from Yama and the vanishing of the Chan master Puhua from his coffin.
Aside from religious belief, cryonics and other speculative resurrection technologies are practiced, but the resurrection of long-dead bodies is not considered possible at the current level of scientific knowledge. Philosophers including John Hick have defended bodily resurrection through "replica" and counterpart theories, in which God recreates a body continuous with the person but not identical to the one that died. Speculative technological versions have also been proposed, among them cryonics, widely regarded as pseudoscience, digital immortality schemes advanced by Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil, and Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point cosmology; reviving the long dead remains beyond current science.
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