But we don't want you to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those who have fallen asleep, so that you don't grieve like the rest, who have no hope.
even as others which have no hope: "Paul makes a sharp distinction between Christians and all others" (Vincent 39). The inscriptions on their tombs and contemporary literature both confirm there was an almost universal hopeless despair among the heathen. Paul notes this also in Ephesians 2:12, describing those who were "in time past Gentiles in the flesh" as "having no hope, and without God in the world." "The language Paul puts into their mouths, ’let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,’ 1 Corinthians 15:32, is abundantly corroborated by their literature" (Hogg and Vine 132). Typical of their hopelessness is the attitude expressed by Aeschylus, a Greek dramatist who lived some 500 years before Christ: "Once dead, there is no resurrection more" (Jamieson, Fausset and Brown 390).