Answers In-Depth to Questions about Christianity
The Dead ARE Conscious

QUESTION:  I grew up Catholic.  We were taught to fear the pains of purgatory and the fires of
hell.  Recently Jehovah's Witnesses came to my door and assured me that there is nothing in
the Bible to suggest such a viewpoint.  They showed me a Bible verse that says that the dead
are not aware of anything.  It looks like Catholics are promoting pagan, not biblical ideas.  What
is the biblical truth about death?  Answered by Rev. Paul L. Rothermel
Roman Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses have very little in common.  It is true that Witnesses use the same biblical words as we do, such as "death,"
"God," "Jesus," and "Spirit," but they often give them their own unique meanings.  Unlike Catholics, they claim to believe only the Bible and to reject
traditional ideas.

We Catholics agree with Jehovah's Witnesses that the Bible is God's Word, and that whatever the Bible teaches is true.  Like many other non-Catholic
groups, though, Witnesses are missing seven books from their Bible.  They use only sixty-six of the seventy-three inspired parts of the whole Bible.  They
are trying to "play the biblical game" without using the "full deck" of biblical books.  No wonder they reach so many seriously distorted conclusions.

What the biblical prophets and apostles taught through the power of God's Spirit was committed to the safekeeping of His people (Jude 3).  Down through
the centuries, God's people received more and more light from God about the state of the dead and other matters.  Jehovah's Witnesses claim that they
alone are the people of God, but they can offer no credible historical evidence to back this up.  They claim that they are God's people because they "know
and teach the truth."  While it is true that God's people will know and teach the truth, it does not follow that every group that sincerely thinks that its
interpretations of the Bible are true is the people of God.  We Catholics believe that we know and teach the truth as well, but we have some rather
impressive historical evidence to support this claim.

Although its name changed several times, the Jehovah's Witnesses organization began in the last half of the nineteenth century.  This is eighteen centuries
too short to claim any continuity with the Church that Jesus Christ established.  Their beliefs are strange and have changed quite a bit since they started,
but two of their teachings have never changed: 1) the true God is NOT "the Holy Trinity," and 2) a "soul" is NOT conscious between death and
resurrection.  Jehovah's Witnesses are stubbornly zealous in their cause and spend much time promoting cleverly-crafted "biblical" arguments for their pet
doctrines.

Whenever Witnesses bring up the topic of death with me, I like to etch into their hard heads several indisputable facts that can be discovered from the Bible
itself, and its historical and cultural context:

1. During the time of the writing of the New Testament, the Jewish historian Josephus reported that the Pharisees believed that the soul could not perish
with the body.

2. Orthodox Jews still believe in conscious survival of the self between death and the resurrection.

3. The Apostle Paul, once a zealous Pharisee (Philippians 3:5-6), teaches the possibility of consciousness outside the body (Second Corinthians 12:2-4).

4. The Bible does not call the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) a parable. Do any other parables mention the names of some of the
characters? Do any other parables feature historical figures like Abraham and Moses?

5. If this story is a parable, then it has a true-to-life setting like all the others. After all, in a time when many Jews believed in the consciousness of departed
souls in Hades, how could Jesus choose such a setting for a parable without warning his hearers that it was wrong, if it was wrong?  The true-to-life setting
fits well with Luke 16:9 too.

6. The story of the rich man end Lazarus shows that a speaker or writer does not need to use the words "soul" or "spirit" in order to express the notion of
the conscious existence of the self after death.

7. In the literal Greek of the gospels, it is written that people can kill the soul (Mark 3:4) and that they cannot kill the soul (Matthew 10:28).  Either the
Bible contradicts itself about the soul, or there is more than one meaning of the Greek word translated "soul." Lexicographers agree on the latter.

8. According to the standard Hebrew Lexicon (Brown-Driver-Briggs), there are no less than ten different meanings for the Hebrew word that is translated
"soul."

9. Some Hebrew and Greek words translated "spirit" also have several meanings.

10. There are a few hints that some later Hebrews distinguished between soul and body (Isaiah 10:18) and thought about the body apart from its person as
a "house of clay" (Job 4:19).

11. If the body and soul were not separable, one could not be killed without killing the other (Matthew 10:28).

12. A person can die when his body becomes a corpse while he continues to exist consciously in his soul because a person is neither his body nor his soul
but both together. Man as a complete, living being (often called "soul" in the Bible) is mortal (Numbers 23:10, Judges 16:30, Job 7:15, Psalm 22:29, Ezekiel
18:4,20, Revelation 16:3) while a part of him (sometimes called "soul") cannot be killed (Matthew 10:28).

13. None of the stern prohibitions of necromancy in the Old Testament make the point that the dead no longer exist for real contact to be made with them
(Deuteronomy 18:10-12, Isaiah 8:19). Why not?

14. If the apparition of Samuel to King Saul was only a medium's usual tricks, why did the medium at Endor cry out in surprise when she saw Samuel
(First Samuel 28:12)?

15. Most scholars believe that the Hebrews shared with their neighbors the idea of conscious existence after death.

16. The ancient Hebrews called the departed "rephaim" rather than "souls." According to Gesenius' Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, "raphaim" are ". . .
flaccid, feeble, weak . . . manes, shades living in Hades, according to the opinions of the ancient Hebrews, void of blood and animal life . . . but not devoid
of powers of mind, such as memory. . . ."  These rephaim are in Sheol (Job 26:5-6, Proverb 9:18, 21:16, Isaiah 14:9).

17. Since life (often called "soul") is not mere existence, and death (sometimes called "loss of soul"--Genesis 35:18, Matthew 16:26) is not non-existence,
life is a special type of existence and death is the opposite type of existence. Therefore, the deed can be really dead yet continue to exist consciously (First
Samuel 28:12-24, Ezekiel 32:31).

18. In the time before the birth of Jesus and after the hellenization of the ancient world, death was commonly understood as a separation that destroys life.
This fits the New Testament and Catholic thought.

19. A soul is destroyed in the sense that it is ruined.  (If the back half of my car is torn away from the front half in a terrible accident, my car is ruined but
has not disappeared into nothingness.)  So too when a person loses his life (Joshua 10:28-39).

20. The dead of Old Testament times "knew nothing" about what the living were doing but were conscious of their own miserable condi­tion (Job
14:21-22).  The same Hebrew phrase translated "know nothing" in Ecclesiastes 9:5 is used of the lad who fetched the arrow in First Samuel 20:39, and he
certainly was not unconscious. He was simply in the dark about Jonathan's plan and the real meaning of his own actions.  Ecclesiastes 9:5 is no doubt the
Scripture that Jehovah's Witnesses (and Seventh-Day Adventists) use most often to promote their misinterpretation of the state of the dead.

21. If the spirit no longer exists when it "goes out" of the body, then how can it be truly said to go out at all (Ecclesiastes 12:7)?

22. Some biblical writers sometimes speak of death as a sleep. But sleep is not normally a state of complete unconsciousness. If death were literally a steep,
there still could be a dream awareness, and if it is only like sleep, the "sleep of death" may merely refer to the external appearance of the corpse (Acts 7:60,
13:36).  The disciples of Jesus did not think of death as literally a sleep; they ignorantly missed a powerful figure of speech about death by mistaking it for
daily sleeping activity (John 11:11-13).

23. The Bible presents Sheol as a real place in which all the dead dwell together. It is not the graves of the dead, since the word never appears in the plural
and the place has depths in great contrast with the highest (Job 11:7, Isaiah 57:9, Amos 9:2).

24. Non-existence has no location, but Sheol is presented as a real place. Therefore, dead persons have not ceased to exist.

25. Every time God identifies Himself as the God of the patriarchs after they had died. He is telling His people that their souls have not ceased to exist
(Matthew 22:32).

26. Abraham was not buried with his fathers, but at his death God said that he would go in peace to be with them (Genesis 15:15).

27. At death one went to Sheol whether or not he was buried (Genesis 37:33-35).

28. The Old Testament Jew could not worship in Sheol because Yahweh spurned uncleanness, and the dead were unclean (Psalm 6:5, 115:17).

29. There was no wisdom in Sheol because the ancient Jews thought that death made the dead ignorant of events transpiring under the sun (Job 14:21-22,
Ecclesiastes 9:10).

30. Generally speaking, one notes that the living tend to forget the dead, and so the memory of them is lost.  Jehovah's Witnesses say that the dead will be
made all over again at their resurrections because God will not forget His ideas of them.  But if we only believe the Bible and reject traditional ideas about
God, then we would have to conclude that God forgets the dead (Psalm 88:5).

31. Death puts an end to every well-laid plan (Psalm 146:4).

32. Sheol was a place of relative silence and forgetfulness because the shades seemed to share in the weakness and decay of their corpses (Isaiah 14:10,
Ecclesiastes 9:10).

33. There was no hope or reward in Sheol, because most people during the Old Testament period did not believe that return from Sheol was either possible
or likely for them (Job 7:9-10, 14:7,10, Isaiah 26:14, 38:18).

34. Since death can be a great relief from old age, wanderings, sores, hunger, and suffering, Sheol was sometimes considered a sort of paradise. Indeed, the
trees of Paradise (representing fallen leaders) can be described as being in the underworld (Ezekiel 31:18).

35. On the very day of their deaths, Jesus and the good thief met in the Paradise of Sheol. There are several good reasons why the translation of Luke
23:43 as "Truly I say to you today" is unacceptable: 1) the well-known formula, "(Truly) Truly I say to you," in all other places has no qualifying words, 2)
since all Jesus' words are said on the day He said them, "today" would have little or no meaning, 3) a person dying of suffocation on the cross would speak
only significant words, 4) Jesus is giving a promise to a request in which time is expressed, 5) "Today" is an important theological word in Luke's gospel, 6)
the Pharisees of that day spoke of a conscious existence after death and called it Paradise, and 7) the greatest Christian scholar before the time of
Constantine, Origen, a native Greek speaker, seems to have never considered such a translation a possibility.

36. Part of Sheol can be a place of fire and torment without all of Sheol being such a place. Sheol is associated with burning fire in Deuteronomy 32:22,
and Hades (the New Testament name for Sheol) is associated with torment (not torture) in Luke 16:19-31. Sheol is not without activity (Isaiah 14:9-11).

37. In light of John 12:9-11, how do we know that Lazarus did not tell others about consciousness after death as part of the way he convinced many?

38. Unless the soul exists after death, how can there be time between death and being cast into Gehenna (Luke 12:5)?

39. The human spirit is conscious and knows reality (First Corinthians 2:11) and can be perfected after death (Hebrews 12:23).

40. Jesus existed between the time of his death and resurrection, because He surely activated His own resurrection (John 2:19-22).

41. John pictures dead souls as speaking to God in heaven (Revelation 6:9).

42. In the Apocalypse, the lake of fire may be as literal as the throne of God.  Even as Heaven and Earth are personified as fleeing from the one, so too
Death and Hades are personified as being thrown into the other (Revelation 20:11).

43. In accord with Jeremiah 7:31 and informed Catholic thought, the Catholic God does not burn unbaptized infants in hell-fire. Although we do not know
that He takes them all to heaven, we do know that they will all be in a place of happiness without pain.

44. Animals said to be souls (Genesis 1:20-21,24,30, 9:12,15,16, Numbers 31:8, Ezekiel 47:9) are also said to "have souls" (the literal Greek of Revelation
8:9). So too with man (Genesis 2:7, Luke 12:19-20, 21:19).

45. Death as a releasing from the body in order to be with Christ is very desirable (Philippians 1:23, Second Corinthians 5:1-9).

I hope that you can now see that Jehovah's Witnesses have just too much of their own Bible to explain away if they are going to continue believing their
unorthodox notion that the dead know nothing at all.  Please notice that none of the above facts have come from the seven books of the Catholic Bible that
Witnesses reject.  If we added those points, the list would be much longer.  THE END.
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