I wrote a big book called "The Resurrection of the Son of God" (2003), and I have another one, smaller and more popular level, called "Surprised by Hope," coming out soon. Yes, of course I believe in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in life AFTER 'life after death' -- i.e. bodily resurrection following a period of being bodily dead. For that to happen, as all C1 Jews and Christians knew, meant that between bodily death and bodily resurrection there would be a period of 'life after death' in a disembodied state, for which e.g. Wisdom 3 uses the language of 'soul'. John Polkinghorne, that great scientist-turned-theologian, says somewhere that God will download our software onto his hardware until he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves.

All cultures, ancient as well as modern, have been more or less familiar with the fact (as I take it to be -- lots of empirical and cross-cultural evidence) that people we love who have died (sometimes when we don't even know yet that they have died) can and do appear to us.

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