MR. BELLOC AND THE HOLY LAND [To the Editor of
Tint SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Mr. Belloc takes me to task for expressing astonishment, in my review of his book, The Battleground, at his assertion (on pages 55 and 56) that " we of the West " gave to the Orient the doctrine of personal immortality, and that it was the Gauls affecting the Greco-Roman world who " taught the Jews that the soul is imperishable."
I am, however, less astonished at this statement than at the argument by which Mr. Belloc seeks to sustain it in his letter. He talks about " the sudden spread of Gallic influence " in the period following Caesar's conquest of Gaul, that is, not earlier than 50 B.C. But the Jewish doctrine of personal survival, the resurrection and the last judgement was already highly developed in the second century n.c. as a part of the great religious revival in the time of the Maccabees. The idea of personal immortality is indeed virtually absent from what we call the Old Testament, but it is characteristic of the apocalyptic literature of the second and first centuries B.C. (including especially the Book of Enoch). The doctrine was at once theologically elaborate and rooted in the popular imagination ; it underwent important modifications in the first century, but it was fully established before 100 B.C. It lacked nothing in what Mr. Belloc calls " vividness " ; never have men been more con- cerned as to what was going to happen to themselves and their enemies after they were dead.
In view of these facts, it is quite irrelevant for Mr. Belloc to refer to " the new'vivid impression of personal immortality, spreading through the Greco-Roman world in the critical years which saw the founding both of the Roman Empire and the Church." He has stated in print that the Gauls " taught the Jews that the soul is imperishable," and it is this that I deny. Unless in Mr. Belloc's world historical causation works backward in time (which it may do for all I know), I am unable to see how the growth of an idea among the Jews in the second century B.C. can be explained by a spread of Gallic influence in the second half of the first:—
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