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Here's an interesting piece I found at http://www.divinetruth.homestead.com/Wha...We_Die.pdf Below is an excerpt from a study booklet by Anthony F. Bussard M.A.(Oxon.)M.A.th.

The Witness of Scholars
Ancient and Modern
The Forgotten Orthodoxy of Irenaeus and Justin Martyr

It is a little-known fact that the earliest Greek theologians of
the second century protested against the unscriptural views of the
intermediate state which have become so entrenched in our
theological systems. The idea that the soul can survive death in a
disembodied form, fully conscious in the presence of God, and
representing the real man separated from his body, was rejected
by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus as a dangerous heresy. The following
excerpts speak for themselves. Both writers championed
the Biblical doctrine of resurrection against attack from Greek
philosophy.

Irenaeus: Against Heresies

“Some who are reckoned among the orthodox go beyond the
prearranged plan for the exaltation of the just, and are ignorant of
the methods by which they are disciplined beforehand for
incorruption; they thus entertain heretical opinions. For the
heretics…affirm that immediately upon their death they shall
pass above the heavens. Those persons, therefore, who reject a
resurrection affecting the whole man, and do their best to remove
it from the Christian scheme, know nothing as to the plan of
resurrection. For they do not choose to understand that, if these
things are as they say, the Lord Himself, in Whom they profess
to believe, did not rise again on the third day; but immediately
upon His expiring departed on high, leaving His body in the
earth. But the facts are that for three days, He dwelt in the place
where the dead were, as Jonah remained three days and three
nights in the whale’s belly (Matt. 12:40)…David says, when
prophesying of Him: ‘Thou hast delivered my soul from the
nethermost hell.’ And on rising the third day, He said to Mary,
‘Touch me not, for I have not yet ascended to my Father’ (John
20:17)…How then must not these men be put to confusion, who
allege…that their inner man, leaving the body here, ascends into
the supercelestial place? For as the Lord ‘went away in the midst
of the shadow of death’ (Ps. 23:4), where the souls of the dead
were, and afterwards arose in the body, and after the resurrection
was taken up into heaven, it is obvious that the souls of His
disciples also…shall go away into the invisible place…and there
remain until the resurrection, awaiting that event; then receiving
their bodies, and rising in their entirety, bodily, just as the Lord
rose, they shall come thus into the presence of God. As our
Master did not at once take flight to heaven, but awaited the time
of His resurrection…so we ought also to await the time of our
resurrection.
“Inasmuch, therefore, as the opinions of certain orthodox
persons are derived from heretical discourses, they are both
ignorant of God’s dispensations, of the mystery of the
resurrection of the just, and of the earthly kingdom which is the
beginning of incorruption; by means of this kingdom those who
shall be worthy are accustomed gradually to partake of the divine
nature” (Book 5, chs. 31, 32, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Eerdmans,
Vol. 1, pp. 560, 561).

Justin Martyr: Dialogue with Trypho

“For if you have fallen in with some who are called Christians,
but who do not admit the truth of the resurrection and venture to
blaspheme the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; who say that
there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls when
they die are taken to heaven: do not imagine that they are
Christians; just as one, if he would rightly consider it, would not
admit that the Sadducees, or similar sects of the Genistae,
Meristae, Galileans, Hellenists, Pharisees, Baptists, are Jews but
are only called Jews, worshiping God with the lips, as God
declared, but their heart was far from Him. But I and others, who
are right-minded Christians on all points, are assured that there
will be a resurrection of the dead, and a thousand years in
Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged, as the
prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah and others declare” (Dialogue with
Trypho, ch. 80, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, p. 239).

The Witness of Scholars

The words of these early spokesmen for the faith are echoed in
our own time by the remarks of Alan Richardson, D.D.:
The Bible writers, holding fast to the conviction that the created
order owes its existence to the wisdom and love of God and is
therefore essentially good, could not conceive of life after death as a
disembodied existence (“we shall not be found naked”—2 Cor. 5:3),
but as a renewal under new conditions of the intimate unity of body
and soul which was human life as they knew it. Hence death was
thought of as the death of the whole man, and such phrases as
“freedom from death,” imperishability or immortality could only
properly be used to describe what is meant by the phrase eternal or
living God “who only has immortality” (1 Tim 6:16). Man does not
possess within himself the quality of deathlessness, but must, if he is
to overcome the destructive power of death, receive it as the gift of
God “who raised Christ from the dead,” and put death aside like a
covering garment (1 Cor. 15:53, 54). It is through the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ that this possibility for man (2 Tim.
1:10) has been brought to life and the hope confirmed that the
corruption (Rom. 11:7) which is a universal feature of human life
shall be effectively overcome (A Theological Word Book of the
Bible, pp. 111, 112).

Floyd Filson warns us of the danger of Greek philosophy. He
asserts that it has infiltrated our theology, which would therefore
be condemned by the New Testament.
The primary kinship of the New Testament is not with the Gentile
environment, but rather with the Jewish heritage and
environment…We are often led by our traditional creeds and
theology to think in terms dictated by Gentile and especially Greek
concepts. We know that not later than the second century there
began the systematic effort of the Apologists to show that the
Christian faith perfected the best in Greek philosophy…A careful
study of the New Testament must block any trend to regard the New
Testament as a group of documents expressive of the Gentile mind.
This book’s kinship is primarily and overwhelmingly with Judaism
and the Old Testament...
The New Testament speaks always of disapproval and usually
with blunt denunciation of Gentile cults and philosophies. It agrees
essentially with the Jewish indictment of the pagan world (The New
Testament Against its Environment, pp. 26, 27).

The fundamental confusion about life after death which has so
permeated our thinking is well described by Dr. Paul Althaus in
his book, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1966, pp. 413, 414):
The hope of the early church centered on the resurrection of the Last
Day. It is this which first calls the dead into eternal life (1 Cor. 15;
Phil. 3:21). This resurrection happens to the man and not only to the
body. Paul speaks of the resurrection not “of the body” but “of the
dead.” This understanding of the resurrection implicitly understands
death as also affecting the whole man…Thus the original Biblical
concepts have been replaced by ideas from Hellenistic Gnostic
dualism. The New Testament idea of the resurrection which affects
the whole man has had to give way to the immortality of the soul.
The Last Day also loses its significance, for souls have received all
that is decisively important long before this. Eschatological tension
is no longer strongly directed to the day of Jesus’ Coming. The
difference between this and the hope of the New Testament is very
great”.

A variety of biblical experts confirm our findings:
The celebrated Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: “No biblical
text authorizes the statement that the soul is separated from the body
at the moment of death” (Vol. 1, p. 802).

Companion Bible by E.W. Bullinger, on 2 Corinthians 5:8: “It is
little less than a crime for anyone to pick out certain words and
frame them into a sentence, not only disregarding the scope and
context, but ignoring the other words in the verse, and quote the
words ‘absent from the body, present with the Lord’ with the view of
dispensing with the hope of the Resurrection (which is the subject of
the whole passage) as though it were unnecessary; and as though
‘present with the Lord’ is obtainable without it.”

Families at the Crossroads, by Rodney Clapp (pp. 95, 97):
“Following Greek and medieval Christian thought, we often sharply
separate the soul and body, and emphasize that the individual soul
survives death. What’s more we tend to believe the disembodied
soul has escaped to heaven, to a more pleasant and fully alive
existence. We mistakenly envision the Christian hope as an
individual affair, a matter of separate souls taking flight to heaven.
But none of this was the case for the ancient Israelites.”

Martin Luther: “I think that there is not a place in Scripture of
more force for the dead who have fallen asleep, than Ecc. 9:5 (‘the
dead know nothing at all’), understanding nothing of our state and
condition—against the invocation of saints and the fiction of
Purgatory.”

John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, Sermon on the
Parable of Lazarus: “It is, indeed, very generally supposed that the
souls of good men, as soon as they are discharged from the body, go
directly to heaven; but this opinion has not the least foundation in the
oracles of God. On the contrary our Lord says to Mary, after the
resurrection, ‘Touch me not; for I have not yet ascended to my
Father.’”

Shirley Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, p. 378: (Dr. Guthrie is
Professor of Systematic Theology, Columbia Theological Seminary.
His book from which the following is quoted is known as a “classic
text.”)
“We have to talk about a point of view that from the perspective
of Christian faith is falsely optimistic because it does not take death
seriously enough…Because the position we are about to criticize and
reject is just what many believe is the foundation of the Christian
hope for the future…we reject it not to destroy hope for eternal life,
but to defend an authentically biblical Christian hope…We refer to
belief in the immortality of the soul. This doctrine was not taught by
the biblical writers themselves, but was common in the [pagan]
Greek and oriental religions of the ancient world in which the
Christian church was born. Some of the earliest Christian
theologians were influenced by it, read the Bible in the light of it,
and introduced it into the thinking of the church. It has been with us
ever since. Calvin accepted it and so did the classical confession of
the Reformed Churches, the Westminster Confession. According to
this doctrine, my body will die but I myself will not really die…What
happens to me at death, then, is that my immortal soul escapes from
my mortal body. My body dies but I myself live on and return to the
spiritual realm from which I came and to which I really belong. If we
follow the Protestant Reformation in seeking to ground our faith on
‘Scripture alone,’ we must reject this traditional hope for the future
based on the immortality of the soul…[Death] does not mean that
the immortal divine part of us has departed to live on somewhere
else. It means that life has left us, that our lives have come to an end,
that we are ‘dead and gone.’ According to Scripture…my soul is just
as human, creaturely, finite—and mortal—as my body. It is simply
the life of my body…We have no hope at all if our hope is in our
own in-built immortality.”

Robert Capon, Parables of Judgment, Eerdmans, 1989, p. 71:
“One last theological point while we are on the subject of
resurrection and judgment. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to our seeing
the judgment of Jesus as the grand sacrament of vindication is our
unfortunate preoccupation with the notion of the immortality of the
soul. The doctrine is a piece of non-Hebraic philosophical baggage
with which we have been stuck ever since the church got out into the
wide world of Greek thought. Along with the concomitant idea of
[immediate] ‘life after death,’ it has given us almost nothing but
trouble: both concepts militate against a serious acceptance of the
resurrection of the dead that is the sole basis of judgment.”
Prof. Earle Ellis, Christ and the Future in NT History (Brill,
2000): “The Platonic view that the essential person (soul/spirit)
survives physical death has serious implications for Luke's
Christology and for his theology of salvation in history…For
eschatology it represents a Platonizing of the Christian hope, a
redemption from time and matter. Luke, on the contrary, places
individual salvation (and loss) at the resurrection in time and matter
at the last day. He underscores that Jesus was resurrected in ‘the
flesh’ and makes him ‘the first to rise from the dead,’ the model on
which all ‘entering into glory’ is to be understood.
“An anthropological dualism did enter the thought of the Patristic
church, chiefly, I suppose, with the grandiose synthesis of
Christianity and Greek philosophy made by Clement and Origen. It
brought into eclipse the early Christian hope of the return of Christ
and the resurrection of the dead [and the Kingdom of God on earth].
But it did not characterize the Christianity of the New Testament,
and can be found in Luke only if one reads the texts, as those
Christian fathers did, with lenses ground in Athens” (p. 127).
“…while death is not an individual fulfillment of salvation, during
death one remains under Christ’s Lordship and in his care...(but)
while the Christian dead remain in time, they do not count time. The
hiatus in their individual being between their death and their
resurrection at the last day of this age is, in their consciousness, a
tick of the clock. For them the great and glorious day of Christ’s
Parousia is only a moment into the future. The ‘intermediate state’ is
something that the living experience with respect to the dead, not
something the dead experience with respect to the living or to Christ.
“Those with lenses ground in Athens, numerous in Christian
tradition, see a quite different picture. They posit that a part of the
person, the soul, is not subject to a cessation of being (and thus is notan element of the natural world) but that at the death of the body it is‘separated’ to bodiless bliss or, in a variation on the theme, that there is a resurrection at death in which the physical body is exchanged for a spirit body already being formed within [this would destroy the program given in 1 Cor. 15 and many times elsewhere].
“Although they have many traditional roots and attachments, such
theologies have, I think, seriously misunderstood Paul’s salvation-inhistory eschatology. It is because Paul regards the body as the person and the person as the physical body that he insists on the resurrection of the body, placing it at the Parousia of Christ in which personal redemption is coupled to and is part of the redemption-by transfiguration of the whole physical cosmos. The transformed
physical body of the believer will be called forth from the earth by
God’s almighty creative word [at the Parousia], no less than were the
transformed physical body of Christ and the originally lifeless body
of the Genesis creation” (pp 177, 178).

An Appeal

The difference between received tradition and the teaching of
Scripture, we contend, involves the difference between truth and
falsehood, between the teaching of the apostles and the poison of
Gnosticism.19 The effects of so widespread and fundamental a
mistake must be detrimental to the faith. The authorities we have
cited, as well as countless others whose protest space does not
permit us to include, show that what is proposed by our study is
no private opinion, but one backed by responsible expositors of
Scripture. It is surely time for the doctrinal gulf which separates
contemporary religion from the New Testament to be taken
seriously.
It must be apparent that traditional theological ideas, however
long they may have enjoyed popular approval, are not
necessarily a safe guide to the teachings of the New Testament.
In some quarters a whole system of theology (including the
belief that Mary is fully active as a mediatrix in heaven) has been
erected on the false premise that the dead are alive in heaven.
Yet Scripture says that David never ascended to heaven (Acts
2:34), that no one has ascended to heaven except Jesus (John
3:13), and that the heroes of the Old Testament “died in faith
without receiving the promises” (Heb. 11:13). It is highly
significant that the first recorded lie in Scripture was precisely in
support of the innate immortality of man. It was the Serpent,
Satan, who declared “Thou shalt not surely die,” in flat
contradiction of the divine statement that “Thou [the whole
person] shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17). It is utterly impossible to
reconcile prayer to Mary and the saints with apostolic teaching,
when both she and they are, in New Testament terms, at present
unconscious, “asleep” in death, awaiting the first resurrection
(Dan. 12:2; John 5:28, 29).
If it is objected that the promise of an immediate presence in
heaven is more comforting than the assurance of resurrection at
the second coming of Jesus, we reply that it is futile to
administer comfort from the pulpit which has no sound basis in
God’s Word. Indeed there are solemn warnings in the Bible that
judgment will fall on all who do not speak according to the
oracles of God (Jer. 23:16-18, 21, 22). It is only by proclaiming
the truth that the preacher can hope to save himself or his
audience (1 Tim. 4:16). And no doubt the latter will ultimately
thank their minister for having told them what they need to hear
from the Bible as distinct from what they may want to hear.
It must be the duty of every inquirer after the truth of the
Christian faith to take to heart the uncomfortable warning of
Jesus that to worship within the framework of human tradition as
opposed to revealed truth is to worship in vain (Matt. 15:9), for
those who approach God must do so “in spirit and in truth” (John
4:24). We must give thought to the possibility that our tradition
has obscured the central Christian doctrine of resurrection and
indeed the Biblical eschatology as a whole, including the
Kingdom of God to be inaugurated following the resurrection.
We therefore appeal for a reexamination of this critically
important issue, in the interests of the restoration of Biblical
faith.
In view of the recognized facts of church history, our task is
clear: to purge our traditional teachings of the alien ideas which
were acquired soon after New Testament times and which do not
belong to the pure faith of the Bible:
Across the pages of the Old and New Testaments the clear waters
of revealed truth flow like a majestic river. It is God, who only hath
immortality, offering to men and communicating to the believer His
divine, imperishable life.
But paralleling this stream flows the muddy river of pagan
philosophy, which is that of human soul, of divine essence, eternal,
pre-existing the body and surviving it.
After the death of the apostles the two streams merged to make
unity of the troubled waters. Little by little the speculation of human
philosophy mixed with divine teaching.
Now the task of evangelical theology is to disengage the two
incompatible elements, to dissociate them, to eliminate the pagan
element which has installed itself as a usurper in the center of
traditional theology; to restore in value the Biblical element, which
only is true, which alone conforms to the nature of God and of man,
His creature.20

Endnotes
1 It is also true that man “has life” or “soul.” But “soul” here does
not mean an “immortal soul.”
2 Ascent to heaven on this saying of Jesus may alternatively refer to
participation in the divine secrets of wisdom, cp. Deut. 30:12.
3 Alternatively, Stephen is quoting Psalm 31:5 where David, who
was not about to die, says, “into Your hand I commit my spirit.”
Stephen will be made alive at the resurrection with the faithful (1 Cor.
15:22, 23).
4 Hebrews 12:23 states that the entire church is enrolled in heaven
and consists of those whose spirits are perfected. It does not say that the
dead are alive in heaven before the resurrection as disembodied spirits!
5 Further confusion was added by rendering a third word Tartaros by
“hell.” Tartaros, or rather a verbal form derived from it, occurs only in
2 Pet. 2:4 and describes a place of imprisonment for fallen angels, not
human beings.
6 The kings in sheol are poetically represented as addressing the
ruined king of Babylon who is promised maggots as a bed and worms
as a covering (Isa. 14:10, 11).
7 The “everlasting life” of Daniel 12:2 is literally “life in the coming
age” of the Messianic Kingdom on earth (Matt. 5:5; Rev. 5:10). The
equivalent in the New Testament—“eternal life,” “everlasting life”—is
a technical term which should also be rendered “life in the coming age”
(cp. note 15).
8 See the excellent discussion in The First Epistle of St. Peter, by
E.G. Selwyn, pp. 198, 199.
9 In the End God, p. 91.
10 Mainstream “orthodoxy” can learn much from the work done by
so-called “sects,” whose concern for the truths of Scripture often
exposes the ignorance and apathy of some routine churchgoers.
11 In 1 Thessalonians 4:16, 17, Paul describes how we come to be
“with the Lord”—through resurrection at the second coming.
12 Cf. 2 Tim. 2:18 for a similar attempt to transpose the
eschatological future into the present.
13 The suggestion that paradise was in hades finds no support in
Scripture. The locating of paradise in hades would mean that Jesus and
the thief were there together, but both dead, for three days only! At his
resurrection, Jesus would have left the thief in paradise, for Christ alone
has been resurrected (1 Cor. 15:23).
14 Das Neue Testament, translated by Wilhelm Michaelis, Kröner
Verlag, 1934, reads, “Jesus said to him, ‘Truly I assure you even today: you will one day be with me in Paradise.’ ‘Today’ probably belongs inthe first part of the sentence.”
15 The proper rendering of the AV “eternal life” is the “life of the
coming age.” See Barratt, Gospel According to John, p. 26, 179;
Vincent Taylor, Commentary on Mark, p. 426; Nigel Turner, Christian
Words, pp. 455ff.
16 Alternatively those who are said never to die may be the ones who
survive until the Parousia. These are clearly described by Paul in 1
Thessalonians 4:15.
17 We note with interest the remark of D.E.H. Whiteley that this can
only mean unconscious sleep (The Theology of St. Paul, p. 266). But
Daniel 12:2 is surely the locus classicus for the Biblical doctrine of
death and resurrection.
18 An extended torment “into the ages of the ages” is promised to
Satan, the beast, and the false prophet (Rev. 20:10). Jesus speaks of the
soul being destroyed in gehenna (Matt. 10:28).
19 It should be noted that a specific warning against the dangers of
gnosis falsely so-called was given by Paul in his first letter to Timothy:
“Pay attention to yourself and to your teaching…In so doing you will
save yourself and those who hear you” (1 Tim. 4:16). “Guard what has
been entrusted to you. Avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of
what is falsely called knowledge [gnosis]” (1 Tim. 6:20).
20 Alfred Vaucher, Le Problème de L’immortalité, 1957, p. 6.