Christianity's afterlife claim is not the immortality of the soul, though it absorbed that idea early from Greek philosophy and has never quite disentangled it. The creedal claim is that the dead get bodies back at the end, and Paul argues at length in 1 Corinthians 15 with people who found this embarrassing and preferred a purely spiritual survival. The doctrine has left physical marks: Christian burial rather than cremation across most of the tradition's history, the catacombs, the reverence for relics, and the eastern-facing orientation of graves so the dead face the returning Christ. Rome lifted the ban on cremation in 1963 and in 2016 specified that ashes must be kept in a sacred place and not scattered or divided among relatives. The Orthodox still refuse the church funeral to a body deliberately cremated in most jurisdictions. Which is why a Greek or Ethiopian family will often go to considerable expense for a burial that a Protestant family in the same city treats as an option.