Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

by Bart D. Ehrman

Possibly eternal joy is not as satisfying to describe as everlasting torture.

Seeing your enemies horribly tortured for eternity is apparently considered one of the greatest joys possible.

For Homer, the “real person” was the embodied flesh; the departed soul was simply a shade, the shadow of a person. For Plato it is the soul that is the real person; the body is the gross material that is to be sloughed off and left behind.

The wheat stalks do not produce grain but full loaves of bread at their tops, making them look like giant mushrooms.

Lit

Instead, Epicurus argued for the simple pleasures: moderate food and drink, good friends, intelligent discussions on important and compelling topics.

Epicurus not actually a rager

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.

Epicurus

“Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead.”

Lucretius

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.”

Inscription on tombstone

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.

Here the synonyms for Sheol are “death” and “the grave.”

the terms used to describe Sheol are bleak, not because there is any pain involved, but because there is nothing involved.

Alan Segal, the late scholar of Judaism, unequivocally stated: “There are not any notions of hell and heaven that we can identify in the Hebrew Bible, no obvious judgment and punishment for sinners nor beatific reward for the virtuous.”5

much of the discussion of “afterlife” in the Hebrew Bible focuses not on the fate of the individual at death but instead on the ultimate fate of the entire nation.

the idea of a suffering messiah is not found in any Jewish texts prior to Christianity.

In short, Isaiah 53 is not originally about a future messiah; it is about the nation of Israel taken into captivity.

The pseudonymous authorship, then, is a literary ploy used by authors to convince their readers they know what was soon to happen,

Paul argues that the human body that goes into the ground is like a “bare kernel” of some kind of grain that grows into a plant.

Shutup paul u narc

Paul actually revels in the fact of his pain, because his current miserable existence replicates the life of a crucified messiah.

Emo

so he would prefer to die and to be naked with Christ than to continue on in this wretched mortal body.

Kinky

Jewish apocalyptic thought is essentially dualistic, stressing not only that there are two fundamental components of reality—good and evil, God and the devil—but also that all of history can be divided into two ages, the current evil age that will be destroyed and the future age in which God will rule supreme.

This is a kind of “horizontal” dualism in that you can map it out on a time line across the page from left to right.

When Christians de-apocalypticized the teachings of Jesu...

dualistic understanding of the future but they flipped the temporal, horizontal dualism on its axis so that it became a vertical conception, not moving f...

Paul believed Jesus’s body was completely glorified and transformed, turned from a “flesh-and-blood” being to a “spiritual one.” That is why “flesh and blood cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Not so Luke. For him, Jesus’s resurrected body is his revivified corpse.

That's metal

It is surely no accident that if you spell “Caesar Neron” in Hebrew letters, they add up to 666.

Even more striking, there is an alternative spelling of the name: “Nero” instead of “Neron.” Without

that final n, the name adds...

In many respects, Christian hell is Hellenistic.

One wonders what would have happened to views of the afterlife if Christians had chiefly imagined God not as the all-powerful Monarch but as, say, the all-doting Mother.

Paternal discipline and divine justice...gendered symbolism

This passion for violent death may seem more than a little pathological to modern readers, but there is a theological logic to it. Ignatius worships a Lord who was tortured to death. He wants to imitate him. That is how he will earn an eternal reward. To that end, the gorier the better.

ur crazy lmao....carry on

when Christianity had grown into a massive movement populated by all sorts of people, some of them of dubious ethics and theology, the stress is on what it means to be a true Christian.

The term “Purgatory” itself was not coined until the twelfth century and the idea was not institutionalized as an official part of church teaching until the Second Council of Lyons in 1274.

By contrast, Dinocrates is a hopelessly miserable soul granted relief and ending up with a happy existence, going off to play like the deceased child he is.

The “fall” into lower life forms occurs because of the temptations of the flesh. If you can’t restrain yourself now, you’ll become a toadstool later.

Sex turns u into a mushroom