NEW BOOK—— BY BART D. EHRMAN
HEAVEN AND HELL - A History
of the Afterlife [published 2020]
A New York Times bestselling
historian of early Christianity takes
on two of the most gripping questions
of human existence: Where did
the ideas of heaven and hell come
from? Why do they endure?
INSIDE COVER:
What happens when we die? Most Americans believe a literal heaven and hell to be the age-old teachings of the Bible. But eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament, and they are not what Jesus and his earliest disciples taught.
So where did these ideas come from?
In clear and compelling prose, religion scholar Bart D. Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from the epic of Gilgamesh to the writings of Saint Augustine and focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. He investigates ancient guided tours of heaven and hell, in which living persons observe the sublime blessings of heaven for those who are saved and the horrifying torments of hell for the damned. Some of these accounts describe near-death experiences, the oldest on record, with intriguing similarities to those reported today.
One of Ehrman's startling conclusions is that there never was a single Greek, Jewish, or Christian understanding of the afterlife, but rather numerous competing views. Moreover, these views did not come from nowhere: they were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. Only later, in the early Christian centuries, did they develop into the notions of eternal bliss or damnation widely accepted today……
INTO THE BOOK
....Here then are four visions [That Ehrman has related - Keith Hunt] of the afterlife, each unique but all tending toward the same end of guiding people's lives in the here and now by confronting them with what awaits them in the hereafter. Eternal glory or torment hangs in the balance. Christian readers at the time would not I have taken these tales to be pure fictions but would have accepted that they were rooted in the realities of the world to come.
None of these visions can be found in the Bible, because they do not, in fact, represent the earliest Christian views of the afterlife. The ideas of a glorious hereafter for some souls and torment for others, to come at the point of death, cannot be found either in the Old Testament or in the teachings of the historical Jesus. To put it succinctly: the founder of Christianity did not believe that the soul of a person who died would go to heaven or hell.
[Ehrman is right on—— the immortality of the soul cannot be found in the Bible; and Jesus indeed did not teach it - Keith Hunt]
But this became the standard Christian view over time, and it will be helpful to see where it ultimately came from, when it started to be adopted, and why it seemed so attractive. These are important questions, because belief in a literal heaven and hell continues to be held by most Christians in the world today—that is by millions, even billions of people. To see where this belief originated, we will need to begin our explorations many years before Christianity—before even the most ancient writings of the oldest parts of the Bible…..
Throughout history, for many people it has been the fear of torment: that when we die the justice of the Almighty will wreak vengeance on our poor souls—and possibly on new physical embodiments of our souls, created for the purpose—as we are punished for sins, disbelief, and ingratitude for the divine mercies available to us…….
Many others believe that at death our life is extinguished and we cease to exist in every way. The idea of nonexistence itself—of not waking up, of a personal identity permanently lost, world without end—inspires not relief but horror. How can we even imagine it? At all times of our lives, since we have been able to think, we have existed. How can we think of not existing?
[Well guess we could think of two hundred years ago; say a thousand; well say three thousand years ago—— we did not exist; we have no memory of it; it is a blank. I once had a minor operation. I was talking to the guy administering the stuff to put me out——boom, I was out, off like a light bulb. I had no dreams, just blackness and silence, until the nurse woke me up. Like going to sleep at night when you have no dreams; you just wake up. That experience I said to myself, was death to life again. I had no idea of time, no idea of how long I was under - Keith Hunt]
And so it is no surprise that death is often lamented in the great literature of the world, including the Bible. As the psalmist says, praising God for saving him for the time being from death, imaged as the realm of Sheol……..
Or, again:
I will give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my
whole heart.... For great is your steadfast love toward me; you have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol.
(Psalm 86:12-13)
In no small part the Bible's authors praise God for saving them from untimely death because they realize all too clearly that life is short and death certain. And so the psalmist laments that people "like smoke ... vanish away" (Psalm 37:20); elsewhere we hear that "our days on earth are like a shadow" (1 Chronicles 29:15); or, as the New Testament book of James says, "[we] are a mist that appears for a while, and after which it disappears" (James 4:14) That is our life. Short and temporary like smoke, a shadow, or the morning mist……
The obsession with death and fear of what comes next extends beyond even the most ancient biblical records to the beginning of recorded history. It can be found in the ancient Mesopotamian epic known as Gilgamesh……..
Death After Death in the Hebrew Bible
It is often said, and widely believed, that views of the afterlife in ancient Israel were quite different from those found in the surrounding pagan world. After all, the Israelites had a fundamentally different religion, a monotheistic faith in the one Creator God who had called Israel to be his people. And there are indeed many distinctive features of Israelite understandings of the afterlife. But there are also numerous similarities with Greco-Roman views.
One thing they held in common was the deeply rooted sense of the inevitability and finality of death, a view that can be found in a number of passages of the Hebrew Bible. Thus, in the book of 2 Samuel, which records events that would have occurred in the early tenth century BCE, an anonymous woman is depicted as urging the great king David to forgive the heinous transgression of his son Absalom by reminding him that death is the end of the story: "We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up" (2 Samuel 14:14)…….
The Nature of Death
Even if death is inevitable for the ancient Israelites, what is it? For most of the Hebrew Bible, death is what happens when life leaves a person. And so we have the prayer of the psalmist, lamenting to God what is certain to come: "When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust" (Psalm 104:29). Here the person does not "go someplace"—other than back to the dust they came from. Humans were originally made from dust (Genesis 2:7) and that is where they return.
This is one key difference from the Greek thought represented best by Plato. Ancient Israelites did not subscribe to the view of the immortality of the soul. Souls are not inherently deathless, destined for an eternal existence. In ancient Hebrew thought, there was no "soul" in the Greek sense. This can be seen by the different terms used. The closest equivalent to the Greek psyche is the Hebrew nephesh. The nephesh, though, is not a soul, set in contrast to the body. Hebrew anthropology was not dualistic (body and soul) but unitary. Nephesh means something like "life force" or "life" or even "breath." It is not a substance that can leave a person and exist independently of the body. It is the thing that makes bodies live. When the body stops breathing, it becomes dead matter. In modern terms, when you stop breathing, your breath doesn’t go somewhere. It just stops. So too with the Hebrew nephesh. The person is then dead……..
Locations of Death in the Hebrew Bible
The Jewish scriptures contain a variety of views about what happens to a person at death. Most commonly, a person who dies is simply said to have gone to "death"—a term used some thousand times in the Bible. Better known but far less frequent, a persons ultimate destination is sometimes called "Sheol," a term whose meaning and etymology are debated. It occurs over sixty times in the Hebrew Bible, and there is unanimity among critical scholars that in no case does Sheol mean "hell" in the sense people mean today. There is no place of eternal punishment in any passage of the entire Old Testament. In fact—and this comes as a surprise to many people—nowhere in the entire Hebrew Bible is there any discussion at all of heaven and hell as places of rewards and punishments for those who have died.
Probably most people who read the Bible think of Sheol as a Jewish kind of Hades, a shadowy place where everyone goes and all are treated the same, a banal and uninteresting netherworld where nothing really happens and people are, in effect, bored for all eternity. But in fact, in most passages of the Bible where Sheol is mentioned, it may well simply be an alternative technical term for the place where an individual is buried—that is, their grave or a pit.
This can be seen throughout the poetic books of the Hebrew Bible, such as the Psalms, where most of the references to Sheol can be found…….
Dead Bodies That Return to Life: The Resurrection in Ancient Israel
After the period of the classical prophets, Jewish thinkers came to imagine that in fact there would be life for the individual who had died. For them, there was a possibility of life beyond the grave— real, full, and abundant life. But in this original Jewish conception, unlike widespread Christian views today, the afterlife was not a glorious eternity lived in the soul in heaven or a tormented existence in hell, attained immediately at the point of death. It was something else altogether. It was the idea that at the end of time God would vindicate himself and his people. When history and all its evil and suffering had run its course, God would reassert his sovereignty over this world and destroy everything and everyone who was opposed to him, bringing in the perfect, Utopian world he had originally planned. Inhabiting this world would be the righteous who had lived and suffered throughout all of history. God would miraculously bring them back into their bodies, and they would live, bodily, without any pain, misery, or suffering, for all time, in his most glorious kingdom……
In the later Jewish doctrine of the resurrection, God reverses death by bringing the breath of life back into the body, ensuring it will never die again. Unlike in the Greek tradition, here the person is made immortal….. [born with an immortal soul - Keith Hunt]
Immortality is an act of God, not an innate nature of the real essence of the human. Moreover, in these Jewish texts, the idea is not that people cannot die but precisely that they do die. God needs to raise them from the dead because they really are dead……
That is not to deny the unique importance of the doctrine of resurrection as it developed in Judaism in the years leading up to the life of Jesus. Indeed, it is fair to say that by the time of Christianity, most Jews held to some version of this doctrine, believing in a future restoration return to life but an entrance into life eternal, not lived as a disembodied soul but as a unified person, body and soul.
That, as we will see, was also the view of Jesus and his followers, who, as a consequence, did not maintain that when a person died their soul separated from their body and went to heaven or hell. On the contrary, they were Jewish apocalypticists. They believed it was the body that would be raised on the Day of Judgment, when the righteous would be given eternal life and the wicked would be annihilated for all time……
Why did the final shift occur, from a belief in the bodily resurrection at the end of time to the view that rewards and punishments come immediately at the point of death? I would suggest two factors, one internal to Jewish thought and the other external.
It is easy to imagine that a simple shift in thinking played a significant role. For the doctrine of a future resurrection to work as an explanation for how God can be just, given all the pain and misery his people are suffering, it was not enough that he would later vindicate those who suffered for his sake—that he would later raise them from the dead and give them an eternal reward. Apocalypticists thought the suffering had gone on long enough—that it had gotten just as bad as it possibly could. And that led them to think that the future resurrection would happen soon. Very soon……
But what happens when it doesn't come? What happens when things just keep getting worse? And the wicked thrive more than ever? And the sufferings of the righteous only increase? Where is God? Why doesn't he act?
These questions led to a shift in thinking about the afterlife: justice occurs not in some vague, distant future but immediately after death. It comes right away. A person who dies faces judgment. Those who are wicked will face punishment for the crimes they have committed. Those who have lived lives of love, caring for others, doing what is right, trying to serve God, will be rewarded. Neither the punishment nor the reward will be short-term, for, say, the period of a lifetime. God is eternal, and so are his rewards and punishments. Eternal life or eternal torment is the choice set before all people. This shift in thinking obviously became key to the Christian formation of the doctrines of heaven and hell…….
BART EHRMAN’S BOOK “HEAVEN AND HELL” SHOULD GIVE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS FOOD FOR THOUGHT; A RE-LOOKING AT THE TOPIC OF DEATH, AND WHAT REALLY TRANSPIRES WHEN WE DIE.
THIS SUBJECT I HAVE COVERED IN DETAIL ON MY WEBSITE —— keithhunt.com
FOR REASONS UNKNOW MY SERVER IS PRESENTLY DOWN. THEY HAVE LEFT NO WAY TO CONTACT THEM, I HAVE TO TRUST THEY WILL BE BACK UP AT SOME POINT IN THE FUTURE.
Keith Hunt
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