"... Interestingly, the paradox that (real) life is gained by being “dead” also occurs in several sources of different provenance. A tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud: “What should one do to live? ... Mortify himself ... What should one do to die? ... Keep himself alive.” Another tradition, in Avot de-Rabbi Nathan Version B states: “If you wish not to die, die before you die. If you wish to live, do not live before you live (i.e., are resurrected)”; a similar paradox is discernible in Philo’s assertion (based on Greek and Hellenistic thought) that “in order to live, they die.” Jews made use of both paradoxes of death: (a) spiritual death, before becoming a believer and (b) death to the world as describing the real life of the believer, are not unknown to Jewish sages. The two distinctive, and somewhat conflicting, figures of death occur elsewhere in Pauline (and deutero-Pauline) writings. Looking at the Pauline passage through this lens, one may conclude that in this case Paul merged two well-known metaphors concerning paradoxical conceptions of death and life that had existed in the Judaism of his time to function in a new context: for Paul, salvation is not merely the coming from death to life, nor is it merely dying to the world, but rather dying with Christ and participating in His resurrection. The tension in Paul’s phraseology is intelligible when considered not in isolation but as a result of weaving together two distinct paradoxical figures ..."