I agree that pagan is a term for uneducated understandings which is why I don't like but is there any reason to think that isn’t what is being described with that understanding of the afterlife or is there a better term for that understanding of the afterlife that would be more suitable? Which philosophical school was teaching this?
I agree that there is bleeding of ideas into one belief system from another but many of the ideas contradict each other and should produce clear labels. Such as the universe having a beginning, or being infinite; or in this case, if life is possible after we leave this world in another dimension, or will we have to be resurrected in this world if we wish to continue to live after we die.
There has to be some appropriate labels out there somewhere that have been used in previous works that discussed this subject.
The problem with trying to peg it down, is that the belief in an afterlife evolved rather slowly. Not to say that there weren't Judaic subsects that didn't believe in an afterlife, but for the Jewish orthodoxy of the time, Temple Judaism, it had not even been fully accepted yet at the time of Christ. It was a Greek import, primarily. The Greek religious system is much more sophisticated than is commonly believed. Though the "pagan" Greek may have believed in various gods and demi-gods, to the Greek Temple, these names such as Aphrodite, Dianna and Mars were all representative
aspects of the
one God. The Greeks had an "official" afterlife long before Judaism did. It was Alexander the Great that spread the idea through his conquests. The Pharisee picked it up, and integrated the idea into their version of Judaism by claiming secret oral knowledge handed down through their lineage exclusively. Think of the Pharisee and Sadducee as political parties...The Pharisee would have been liberals, and the Sadducee conservatives. The Sadducee rejected the claims of the Pharisee and the idea of any afterlife and insisted that the priestly lineage came through them. This started around 350BC.
So when we look at the evolution of an afterlife into Judaic thought, the Sadducee were a dead end, as they denied the existence of such all the way up to 70AD.
Now, when we come to the Pharisee, various factions split off and formed other factions. The Naasene, the Essene, and the Ophites are some examples. They were
not Torah dependent, but had their own scriptures. The later three made up the bulk of the Messianic movement, which started around 200BC, and not the Pharisee, whose writings make up the bulk of the "Old Testament". Each of the three had varying ideas of an afterlife, but except for a very few post Christ writings, we are limited in specifics. The Romans very nearly exterminated the Jewish race in 70AD, and wiped out a good 98% of the varying Jewish faiths, and hundreds of one of a kind scrolls were burned with the temple.
When we come to Christianity, we are left primarily with the gentile followers, who had very little idea of the multiple Jewish faiths, but rely even today on the few writings that survived the first Holocaust to form a probably very innacurate picture of the times. The first few centuries of Christianity from that Holocaust foward proved very syncratic, absorbing bits and pieces of what came before and combining them with the lore of other religions, including Norse and Wiccan. (I.E. Yule and Easter, respectivly) This, combined with Christianity becoming the Imperial religion has served to further obfuscate the finer details, as by imperial law, a scripture could be rewritten, the original declared to be in error, and the new copy declared original. Coupled with the pre-imperial churches fighting to become the orthodoxy, it's a pretty tangled web.
As converts came from every religion, and brought with them beliefs that they were unwilling to let go of concerning various matters, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to pin down who brought what, when and why.
When it comes to life after death, regions east of Israel not as closely watched by Rome maintained a more spiritual version, while the Western portions looked for a more physical event.
Things became confused again in the fourth century when the "prophet" Mani converted nearly all of the known world to his version of Christianity. All of these various influences are tiny, but they add up.
