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The book discusses views of the afterlife in the ancient Near East, Greece and Rome, the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, the New Testament, and Early Christianity.
My scholarship led me to realize that the Bible was a very human book, with human mistakes and biases and culturally conditioned views in it.
Seeing your enemies horribly tortured for eternity is apparently considered one of the greatest joys possible.
The author is not interested in providing an objective statement about what actually happens in heaven and hell. He has a set purpose in mind. He wants people to behave in certain ways and he is using his graphic descriptions of eternal torment as a way of convincing them. He is not so much scaring the hell out of people as scaring people out of hell.
In the New Testament, the large serpent-dragon who attacks God’s chosen ones is the devil himself (see Revelation 12:3, 9; 20:2).
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–80 CE) maligned Christians who insisted on dying out of obstinacy (Meditations 11.3).
Another chasm was filled with souls wallowing in mud and worms. These were women who had left their husbands to commit adultery. Yet another contained people hanging by various body parts: women who had gone into public without head coverings, possibly to show off their beauty, were hanging by their hair; thieves who reveled in their wealth and didn’t give to the poor were hanging by their hands; those who walked in the ways of wickedness were hanging by their feet.
Shall I die too? Am I not like Enkidu? Grief has entered my innermost being, I am afraid of Death, and so I roam open country (Gilgamesh, Tablet IX, i)
In the centuries between Homer and Virgil, more than any other thinker and writer, it was Plato who developed the notion of postmortem justice for both the virtuous and the wicked.
So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not present, and when
death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist. (Diogenes Laertius, Book 10, 125)
The abbreviation is “n.f. f. n.s. n.c.” Translated, it provides a most trenchant summary of the materialist views endorsed and promoted by Epicurus, Lucretius, and their followers: non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—“I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.”
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.
If there is only one God, and he is in control of the world, why do the people who try to follow him suffer for it? The problem of suffering is not very difficult to solve for polytheists. Anyone who believes in many gods can easily say that some of them are wicked and these are the ones who create such misery in this world. But if there is only one God, and he is both thoroughly good and ultimately sovereign, why do his chosen ones suffer?
The idea of a future bodily resurrection of the dead first occurs in a book that was not included in the Bible but was nonetheless one of the most popular Jewish writings in the final two centuries BCE, a book known today as 1 Enoch.
One of my theses is that a close reading of Jesus’s words shows that in fact he had no idea of torment for sinners after death. Death, for them, is irreversible, the end of the story. Their punishment is that they will be annihilated, never allowed to exist again, unlike the saved, who will live forever in God’s glorious kingdom.
One good reason for thinking some such words were actually spoken by Jesus involves the very point of the passage. People will enter the glorious Kingdom of God, or be painfully excluded from it, because of their ethical activities and for nothing else. Living a good life by helping those in need will earn a person salvation.
If a later Christian storyteller were to make up a saying and place it on Jesus’s lips about how one could be saved at the resurrection, would he indicate that salvation had nothing actually to do with believing in Jesus but instead would involve doing all sorts of good things?
it is the fire that is eternal, not the sinner in the fire. The fires never go out.
For them, there is no resurrection of the dead, because life in the body forever is an absurd, even repulsive idea. The body is the problem. What lives on is the soul. If this view is correct, then Paul writes to correct them. Just as Jesus was bodily raised from the dead, so too will his followers be raised, at the end of time, in the climactic moment of all of history.
“How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (1 Corinthians 15:35).
The ultimate point of these books is almost always to show that, despite the vast mysteries of the cosmic realms and the puzzling events that are transpiring on earth, God ultimately is sovereign. Evil may be manifest in unfathomable ways, but in the end there is only one Lord Almighty, and he is in control.
For what sort of body, after being entirely corrupted, could return to its original nature and that same condition which it had before it was dissolved? . . . For the soul, [God] might be able to provide an everlasting life; but as Heraclitus says, “Corpses ought to be thrown away as worse than dung.” As for the flesh, which is full of things it
is not even nice to mention, God would neither desire nor be able to make it everlasting contrary to reason. (Against Celsus 5, 14)
Luke does not provide any specifics about the nature of the (future) resurrection of believers. That needs to be inferred from his account. Paul, however, is explicit. On one hand, the resurrection would be incontrovertibly physical. The body will return to life. On the other hand, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50). So even though the body will be raised, flesh and blood will not be.
The nuances of Paul’s position were completely lost on later generations of Christian thinkers, who latched onto some of his ideas to the exclusion of others. And so one stream of thought, claiming Paul’s support, argued that, since “flesh and blood” were not able to inherit the kingdom, the future resurrection of Christians was not to be bodily but purely spiritual. That was just the opposite of what Paul thought.
second- and third-century orthodox authors insisted that there would be a resurrection of the flesh. Anyone who believed otherwise could not be a Christian, whatever they might say.
I and every other completely orthodox Christian feel certain that there will be a resurrection of the flesh, followed by a thousand years in the rebuilt, embellished, and enlarged city of Jerusalem . .
Such views of the afterlife came to be refined and accepted as orthodox by writers of the third and fourth Christian centuries, even though they differed from anything found in the teachings of Jesus, Paul, or Revelation.
all will burn, but it will hurt some more than others. Small comfort, once might suppose, but it does serve Augustine’s purpose of showing that God is ultimately just and not completely unreasonable.
Origen of Alexandria (circa 185–circa 254 CE). Origen was massively learned and extraordinarily prolific, a one-man publishing industry who produced a fantastic number of treatises, commentaries, and homilies. Because the theology
of the church had not been tackled yet by serious intellectuals, the philosophically trained and theologically adept Origen took on the task, going down paths others had not yet trod, cognizant that even though most church leaders agreed on many of the basics of the faith, they were surrounded by numerous gray areas. In the end, Origen fleshed out the rudiments of the faith in ways that would be abundantly fruitful for decades and even centuries to come—even if some of the theological paths he took did lead to dead ends.
Most of it is preserved only in a later Latin translation produced at the end of the fourth century by a scholar named Tyrannius Rufinus, who frankly admits to having changed what Origen wrote in places in order to make his views fall into line with later orthodox theology.
God created an enormous number of souls, whose purpose was to contemplate and adore him forever. True adoration, of course, requires freedom of the will: beings need to choose to adore God if their worship is a true honor. That means all souls must also have had the capacity to choose not to worship God—that is, to do evil. None of these created souls were inherently evil, however, and none—not even the soul that was to become the devil—“was incapable of good” (On First Principles 1.8.1–3).
Origen says in one place: “We believe that the goodness of God through Christ will restore his entire creation to one end, even his enemies being conquered and subdued” (On First Principles 1.6.1).
We also find it in the Roman tradition, as when Virgil’s Aeneas visits the underworld and sees innumerable souls gathered around the river Lethe (Forgetfulness) before being sent back to earth in a “second body.”
It is sometimes said today that reincarnation was a widespread teaching in early Christianity as well. In fact, the evidence for it is sparse.
Jesus passes by a man who was born blind, and his disciples ask him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this person or his parents, that he should be born blind?” (John 9:2). It’s a revealing question: if the man was born blind because of his own sin, obviously he had to have committed the sin before his birth. Voila. Reincarnation.
Even though I have an instinctual fear of torment after death—as the view drilled into me from the time I could think about such things—I simply don’t believe it. Is it truly rational to think, as in the age-old Christian doctrine, that there is a divine being who created this world, loves all who are in it, and wants the very best for them, yet who has designed reality in such a way that if people make mistakes in life or do not believe the right things, they will die and be subjected to indescribable torments, not for the length of the time they committed their “offenses,” but for trillions
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