Heaven and Hell Quotes

“non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—“ I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“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.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“short, the ideas of the afterlife that so many billions of people in our world have inherited emerged over a long period of time as people struggled with how this world can be fair and how God or the gods can be just. Death itself cannot be the end of the story. Surely all people will receive what they deserve. But this is not what people always thought. It was a view that Jews and Christians came up with over a long period of time as they tried to explain the injustice of this world and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“It is impossible to overrate the importance of Homer on the culture and religion of ancient Greece. It is not that the Iliad and the Odyssey were “the Bible” the way the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament were for later Jews and Christians. No one thought these epics were “the inspired and infallible Word of God.” But they were thoroughly known and deeply influential for people in the Greek and Roman worlds as they thought about their lives and the nature of the divine realm. In particular, the views of the afterlife propounded by Homer were massively influential for centuries to come.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“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.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“The Sibyl informs him that it is, in fact, quite simple to get to the world of the dead. The problem is getting back:”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“The problem with material remains is that they are silent: they don't provide their own interpretations. And that means various interpretations are possible.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“The Old Testament says no word about either eternal bliss for the righteous dead or everlasting punishment for the wicked. The poets praise God, instead, for allowing them to stay alive for a while longer, making it possible for them still to praise him.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“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 post-mortem rewards and punishments, the ideas of heaven and hell.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“In spite of having no body they stand and move, think and talk; in short, it’s as if their naked souls were walking about clad in the semblance of their bodies.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“The right path leads to Elysium, the place of eternal happiness, but “the left-hand path torments / the wicked, leading down to Tartarus, path to doom” (Aeneid, Book 6, lines 631–32).”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“How awful is it to be dead? It would be better to be the lowest, most impoverished, slave-driven nobody on earth than to be the king of the dead in gloomy Hades. And there is no turning back and no way to improve one’s lot. That is the fate of virtually all who die.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“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.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“Jesus compares the coming judgment to a fisherman who brings in his haul of fish and separates the good fish from the bad (Matthew 13:47–50). What does he do with the bad ones he doesn't want? He throws them away. He obviously doesn't torture them. They simply die. So too, Jesus says, at the final judgment angels will separate the righteous from the wicked and toss the latter into the furnace. They will go up in flames. For first-century listeners, this "destruction by fire" would not conjure up images of eternal hellfire but rather a house fire—or the execution of criminals by burning. Someone burned at the stake weeps and screams in anguish while dying. But they don't weep and scream for ten days or ten millennia or ten billion years. They die.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“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.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“Hebrew anthropology was not dualistic (body and soul) but unitary. Nephesh means something like "life force" 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.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“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.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“The fear of death in antiquity differed from the terrors of torment or horrors of actual nonexistence experienced by so many in the West today. It was instead the dread of losing out on everything a full life has to offer, everything that makes living pleasant.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“Socrates, or rather, his ventriloquist, Plato, actually thought. He believed death was the end of the story. But this was not a source of anxiety for him, and it doesn’t need to be for us either. It is instead a motivation to love this life as much as we can for as long as we can, to enjoy it to its utmost as far as possible, and to help others do the same. If all of us do that, we will live on after death—not in a personal consciousness once our brains have died, but in the lives of those we have touched.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“This is the only verse in the entire Old Testament that uses the term “everlasting life.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“The great prince Michael is the chief archangel, head of God’s heavenly armies and divinely appointed protector of the nation of Israel”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“Making these “predictions” of the future was relatively easy when the real author was living after the events he “predicted.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“The other advantage of making the author a famous religious figure of the past is that such books often purport to tell the future.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“Instead, God has cosmic enemies. They are the ones doing it.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“Their view was held by each and every one of the prophets: Jeremiah, Hosea, Joel—take your pick. It is that the people of God have sinned and God is punishing them for it. Suffering comes from God, to penalize his people for not living as they should. This is sometimes called the “prophetic” or the “classical” view of suffering.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“Ezekiel 37, a passage frequently misread by people who think the prophet is discussing the future resurrection of individuals at the end of time. He is not. He is explicitly referring to the restoration of the nation of Judah after its destruction.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“Whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“The soul is made up of that kind of material. It may be rarified “stuff” but it is still stuff.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“the Sadducees, even though in Jesus’s day they were the real power players in Judea.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife