life through Jesus Christ’ (GT). On the contrary, there was in antiquity, in the face of death, neither joy nor triumph nor celebration, nor any defiant challenge like ‘O death, where is your victory?’8 Instead, there was a ‘general hopelessness’.9 F. F. Bruce quotes Theocritus as writing ‘hopes are for the living; the dead are without hope’.10 And Bishop Lightfoot eloquently presented Christian and pagan attitudes in a sharp antithesis: The contrast between the gloomy despair of the heathen