Much has been said about what happened to Christ when he died on the cross.  It’s one of the most thought provoking subjects in Christianity.  Where was Christ and what was he doing for the 3 days between his death and resurrection?  Was he relegated to a state of nonbeing when he died on the cross, losing any semblance of real consciousness, remaining as only a lifeless corpse in the tomb?  Was he in hell being tortured by the devil and the demons because of the sins everyone commits.  

What did the early church believe about human death?  What was the belief about what death looked like in Jesus’ day, the couple centuries before Jesus’ day, and the centuries immediately after Jesus’ day?  

First off both the scriptures and the early church believed man was both soul and body.  Material and immaterial.  

2Co 4:16  For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. 

Ecc 12:7  Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. 

The early church did not believe the soul dies with the body.  Jesus says in Matthew 10:28 And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.  Jesus tells us the body can be destroyed without the soul being killed.  

The early church believed and the earliest Christian teaching on the doctrine of the apostles, is that the soul continues to exist and remains conscious after the body dies, in an intermediate state, until the resurrection of the body.  They used ordinary Jewish-Christian anthropology: death is the separation of soul from body.  The body is laid in the tomb; the soul goes to Hades (Sheol), the realm of the dead.  The person does not cease; the soul lives on, already experiencing rest or distress according to faith in Christ; the body awaits resurrection; only then is the human being whole again.  Thats why the Church’s central hope was never “going to heaven when you die” as a finished state, but “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.”  The final hope is always the raising of the whole human being—soul and body—not a permanent disembodied existence. 

The dead “in Christ” are said to sleep.  Sleep language was understood as a metaphor for the body’s death, not the soul’s unconsciousness.  Sleep language was used because of the body being lifeless not because the soul ceases to have real consciousness.  

Irenaeus of Lyons used the account of Lazarus and the Rich man in Against Heresies, c. 180 AD): to argue that the soul retains its identity, memory, and personal consciousness after bodily death.  He viewed Jesus’ account of Lazarus and the Rich Man as teaching and not just a parable-illustration.  He emphasized that souls preserve their "form" so they can be recognized and remember their actions from earthly life.

Hippolytus of Rome in the early 200’s wrote against Plato to defend the physical resurrection.  He taught that salvation includes both body and soul reunited in resurrection, not a disembodied state.  He used Luke 16 and the account of Lazarus and the Rich Man to argue that the souls separation from the body in death is only temporary and that the souls of the righteous and unrighteous are reserved until the day of judgment and the physical resurrection when their souls and bodies are reunited.  

1 Clement (Rome, c. 95) says Peter and Paul have gone to their “appointed place of glory,” while still expecting the resurrection.  In the lifetime of John the apostle theres already an intermediate “place,” not nothingness. 

Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107), on his way to martyrdom says, he wants to “attain to God” and “reach Jesus Christ” through death.  He does not map Hades in detail, but he assumes death is a passage to Christ, not extinction. 

Polycarp and the Martyrdom of Polycarp (mid-2nd century) speak of the martyr receiving the crown of immortality and rejoicing with the apostles.  

Justin Martyr (c. 150–160) writing against those who said there is no resurrection of the flesh said the soul remains in a state of sensation after death.  The souls of the faithful are in a better place, the unjust in a worse place, awaiting the time of judgment.  He said Immortality is not an inherent property of the soul the way Plato taught; he said the soul lives because God wills it to live. Those worthy of God “never die”.  

Rev 6:9  And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:
Rev 6:10  And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
Rev 6:11  And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.

The apostle Paul speaks of departing his body and being present with Christ in Phil 1:23.  Paul say it would be better to be present with Christ.  How would it be better if he ceased to be conscious.  He uses similar language in 2 Cor 5:8 when he says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, while still looking for the resurrection of the body.  

If we’re members of Christs body then our soul/spirits go to be with him when our body dies.  

•  Acts 7:59 — Stephen: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”  Soul came from God is kept by God until the resurrection.  
Samuel is summoned to speak after his body died (1 Samuel 28).

Moses and Elijah speaking on the mount of transfiguration after their body died (Luke 9:28-31).

People came out of the grave with Jesus in Matthew 27 …. Those are people who died already and now are raised with Jesus in his own resurrection.  Their resurrection was like Lazarus’.  They didn’t die again.  The scripture says man is appointed once to die.  

Jesus promises the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).  Jesus promises the thief next to him immediate and conscious fellowship after death with Christ in Paradise.  How can Jesus and thief be in paradise that same day they died if their souls ceased to have consciousness.  

Paradise was used in 2nd Temple Judaism, as well as the pharisaical system of Jesus’ day, for the abode of the righteous dead till the resurrection.   By the first century Jews used paradise in several overlapping ways.  They called it the lost garden of the beginning.  They saw it as a hidden garden where the souls of the righteous dead wait for the resurrection.  Paul calls the third heaven paradise in 2nd Cor 12:4.  It was sometimes pictured as Abraham’s bosom in other places.  But the souls were always conscience.  The hope remains the resurrection and the new creation; paradise is the name for blessedness with God on the way there and at the end.

The oldest Israelite anthropology is that a human being is dust plus Gods breath.  They believed that God gave the soul and therefore the soul lives as long as God wills it.  

Second Temple Judaism (the world of Jesus and the apostles)

Sadducees: denied resurrection.  For them the soul does not persist.  Death ends the person. That is why they could mock resurrection with the seven-husbands riddle. 

Pharisees in the 1st century described death as the soul leaving the body and going to the realm of the dead until resurrection.  They believed in the resurrection of the body and continued existence of the soul/spirit, until the resurrection of the body.  Josephus a 1st century Jewish historian says the Pharisees held that souls persist and that the good pass “into another body.”  

When the first Christians said Christ’s soul went to Hades while his body lay in the tomb, they were not importing Plato. They were using the Pharisaic–apocalyptic Jewish grammar: So “Jewish anthropology that says death is the separation of body and soul” is true for the Judaism the apostles knew. 

Rabbinic tradition states the split more directly: at death the neshamah leaves the body, exists in an intermediate state (Gan Eden / Gehinnom / “gathered to his people”), and will be reunited with the body at the resurrection. 

Christ did not cease to be when He died.  The Person of the Word remained one and undivided.  Death was the real separation of His human soul from His human body—not the destruction of His Person or the breaking of the union of God and man. 

St. John of Damascus states the classic teaching:  Although Christ died as man and His holy soul was separated from His immaculate body, yet His divinity remained inseparable from both—from the soul and from the body—and so His one person was not divided into two.  Body and soul received their being from the beginning in the personhood of the Word; even when they were severed from one another by death, each continued to have the one subsistence/being of the Word.  The soul of Christ, still united to his divinity, descended to Hades. The body, still united to his divinity, lay in the tomb and did not see corruption.

If the Person of Christ had ceased, or if the divinity had withdrawn from either soul or body, then the body would have begun to decay like any other corpse; the descent into Hades would not have been the victory of Life Himself entering the realm of the dead;

Because the Word remained united to both his soul and his body, Hades received God and was shattered, the body remained incorrupt, and on the third day soul and body were reunited in glory.  Christs body remained in the tomb.  The human soul of Christ descends to Hades “as a soul among souls.”  There he is not a prisoner. He proclaims, breaks the hold of death, and raises the righteous dead (the prophets and patriarchs who had awaited him).  

The ancient Church sings this mystery on Holy Saturday:
“In the tomb with the body, in Hades with the soul as God, in Paradise with the thief, and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit, You were, O boundless Christ, filling all things.”

One Person is simultaneously in the tomb, in Hades, in Paradise, and on the throne. There is no moment in which the Word “stops being.” The union between God and man in the person of Christ is never dissolved.

Ignatius already speaks of the death being witnessed by those “under the earth” and of Christ raising the prophets who had hoped in him. The longer form of his letters (reflecting the same early tradition) says Christ “descended into Hades alone, but arose accompanied by a multitude.” The Lord went “into the midst of the shadow of death, where the souls of the dead were,” then rose in the body and later ascended. Therefore the souls of His disciples likewise “shall go away into the invisible place allotted to them by God, and there remain until the resurrection, awaiting that event; then receiving their bodies, and rising in their entirety, that is bodily, just as the Lord arose.  Hippolytus later states the anthropology outright: the Only-begotten entered Hades “a soul among souls, God the Word with a human soul.  For his body lay in the tomb.”  They did not think the soul of Christ was annihilated, absorbed into the Godhead, or left in torment. They thought it went where every human soul went at death, and from there he emptied death of its claim.

The earliest Christians treated Christ’s death as the real death of a complete human being: his body and his human soul were both involved. The soul did not vanish.  Christ truly died.  He did not merely appear to die, nor did He “switch off.”  He entered the condition of the dead as Life, and by dying destroyed death. That is the confession of the early church.  Christ had to experience every form of death we experienced in our humanity to be able to redeem every part of our humanity from death.  If Christ, who is the Lord from above, isn’t truly human, possessing a human mind, and soul, and will, with a real human body then he cannot heal our humanity from sin and death.  

And that tells us why Jesus was raised from the dead.   He wasnt raised from the dead because he believed on some external promise.  All the fathers and patriarchs and prophets and Moses and Abraham and David all believed and they weren’t raised from the dead.  Jesus was raised from the dead because he’s co-eternal along with the Father.  With that being said it’s not a standalone “because” that replaces the Father’s act, the completed work of the cross, or the economy of the Incarnation.  Scripture never treats the resurrection as an automatic rebound of bare divinity.  It treats it as the act of the Triune God toward the incarnate Son.

The Father raised Him (Acts 2:24, 32; Rom 6:4; Gal 1:1; Eph 1:20).
The Spirit was the agent of that raising (Rom 8:11).
The Son Himself took His life up again: “I lay down my life that I may take it up again… I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again” (John 10:17–18; cf. John 2:19–21).

Those three statements are not competing explanations.  They are one act of the one God.  The Person who died is the eternal Son.  The divine nature did not die; the Person who is Christ experienced death in the humanity He assumed, the same way every human experiences death.  But because the Person of Christ is co-eternal with the Father and has life in Himself, corruption could not keep the body the Word had taken.  So yes: if Christ was not the co-eternal Son, death would have held Him.  His deity is the reason resurrection was possible and necessary for this particular man.

Co-eternity explains why the grave could not keep Him. The Father’s will, the finished atonement, and the assumption of a real mortal body explain why there was a grave in the first place—and why the raising of this body is good news for us.

Prayer