if we were to scour the first century for people who were hoping that their “souls” would leave the present material world behind and “go to heaven,” we would discover Platonists like Plutarch, not Christians like Paul. It never dawned on us that the “heaven and hell” framework we took for granted was a construct of the High Middle Ages, to which the sixteenth-century Reformers were providing important new twists but which was at best a distortion of the first-century perspective. For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not “saved souls” being rescued from the world and
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