Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

by Bart D. Ehrman

my brother Radd Ehrman, a longtime professor of classics at Kent State,

I chose to pursue the study of the New Testament more seriously, and went for various reasons to the decidedly non-fundamentalist Princeton Theological Seminary. It was there I started having doubts about my faith.

Knowing where ideas of the afterlife came from, how they developed, and how they changed can tell us, historically, a lot about how Christianity came to be what it is today:

In this book I will not be urging you either to believe or disbelieve in the existence of heaven and hell. I am interested, instead, in seeing where these ideas came from

None of the punishments is reformatory: they are not meant to teach sinners a lesson so they will do better next time. On the contrary, they are all retributive and vindictive. And they will never, ever end.

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

once deciphered, they were recognized as preserving a “flood narrative” from centuries before the biblical accounts of Noah.

Socrates’s deliberations in this context reflect a constant theme of his recorded words: many people who think they are wise in fact know almost nothing.

with respect to the question of how to live in the face of death, one must not cower in fear at what will eventually happen to us all.

Odysseus pulls a sword to keep the shades away from the blood. The narrative seems internally incoherent at this point: it is not clear why, if the shades are in fact immaterial vapors, they would be afraid of a sword.

Unlike everyone else, for these three, death is not death. They are being forced to make never-ending atonement in the afterlife for what they had done while living. These three will become the prototypes of hell as it develops later in Western traditions.

it was Plato who developed the notion of postmortem justice for both the virtuous and the wicked.

Descartes passed on to Western posterity the dualistic idea that body is made up of matter but the soul is inherently immaterial.

believers in postmortem rewards and punishments therefore have to come up with additional explanations for how, in the afterlife, God allows or forces people to feel bodily pleasure or pain without a body.

pederasty itself was widely approved of, but the elder partner needed to take care of the youth),

Lucian describes the city where these greats dwell. Anyone familiar with the biblical description of the New Jerusalem in the world to come in Revelation 21 cannot help but be struck by the similarities:

There was a strong minority position that maintained that tales of the afterlife, and the beliefs based on them, were damaging to a person’s well-being, since they corresponded to no reality.

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

Epicurus insists there is nothing to fear. You won’t feel a thing and will not even know that you do not feel a thing. This is the long, deep, dreamless sleep of Socrates.

So far as we know, humans have always imagined there must be life beyond. Possibly, in part, that is because individual humans have always—as long as they have been able to think—known nothing other than existence, making it very difficult indeed to imagine a never-experienced state of nonexistence.

non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—“I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.”

The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead at the end of time originated about two centuries before the life of Jesus, and by his day it had become a common feature of Jewish thought. Later, at the hands of Christians, it came to be transformed into a teaching of postmortem rewards and punishments, the ideas of heaven and hell.

Do we really want to say that birth defects, the death of a child, Alzheimer’s, or any of the other mind-numbing forms of suffering in extremis are punishments from God for something we did wrong?

“paradise” (a Persian word for garden).

The idea that the messiah had to suffer and die for others was first espoused by Christians on the basis of two facts that they “knew” about Jesus: he was the messiah and he had been crucified. Their conclusion: the messiah had to suffer and die.

pseudonymously. A book of this sort is known as an “apocalypse,” a literary genre used set to forth an apocalyptic view that explains the cosmic reasons for the horrible state of earthly affairs and/or reveals how God will eventually make right

Daniel is the first and in fact only book of the entire Hebrew Bible to predict that a resurrection of the dead would come at the end of time.

The idea is rooted in the notion that the stars in heaven are in fact angels (see, e.g., Job 38:6–7)

Women who circumcised their infants died with their children hanged around their necks.

The righteous will be rewarded but the wicked will not be raised to new life. The choice is life after death or death after death.

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.

What explains this shift? The obvious answer is: the increased Hellenization of the ancient Mediterranean.

One reason we know that even the New Testament Gospels contain altered or even invented words of Jesus is that we can compare Jesus’s words from one Gospel to the next.

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.

Like other apocalypticists of his day, Jesus believed this day of reckoning was coming very soon. It was right around the corner. It would happen in his generation:

Paul knew full well that their belief in Jesus seemed absurd to other Jews, since Jesus had not done any of the things expected of the messiah: destroy the enemies of God’s people and set up a kingdom on earth.

Jesus too thought that a cosmic judge, the Son of Man, was coming in judgment on the earth. But now it is Jesus himself who is to be coming on the clouds.

Possibly Jesus never spoke about what would happen in the meantime because he thought there would not be much of a meantime:

One might suppose that he came to think of it as time dragged on. Jesus never did return, and Paul realized that he too might die. As he reflected on the possibility, he came to think that maybe that would not be such a bad thing.

throughout the ages most Christians have believed in a hell that did not exist for either of the founders of Christianity.

We have seen that neither Jesus nor Paul appears to have taught anything about eternal punishment for the wicked. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke is the first time we find such a notion suggested anywhere in the Bible. In fact, it is the only place we find it.

Whoever the John was who wrote the book of Revelation, it was not someone highly literate or trained in ancient Greek, its original language.

One historical irony is that even though this view was roundly denounced by orthodox Christians as absolute heresy, it appears to be the view held widely by Christians today.

Even though readers of the Bible know about 1 and 2 Corinthians, few realize there is a 3 Corinthians as well, one that did not make it into the canon of Scripture.

Oppressed outliers often think with joy on the justice to be inflicted on their enemies. This may not be consistent with the Sermon on the Mount, but it certainly has a venerable history elsewhere in the Christian tradition.

postmortem rewards and punishments, to be followed eventually with a resurrection, came to be the standard view of the Christian church by the third century, just as it is still for many Christians today.

it is interesting that punishment after death is not a part of the ancient Jewish Scriptures, the Christian Old Testament.

Marcus Aurelius mentions it in his autobiographical reflections, The Meditations, in a brief remark that mocks the Christians for being willing to die out of sheer obstinacy.

We should also reflect carefully on what is going to happen in the future, including our possible existence after this life. It is better to have a thoughtful view of such things than a thoughtless one.

It is interesting that these views—dominant especially in Christianity and Islam—cannot be found in the Old Testament or in the teachings of the historical Jesus. They are later developments.