Journeys to Heaven and Hell Quotes

“Suicides take their own lives expecting to end their troubles, but after they perform the deed, they desperately regret what they have done and long to return to earth even under the most miserable of circumstances rather than suffer forever with their grief below.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“R. G. Austin argued that Aeneas had no choice about the gate: he could not go through the exit for true shades because in fact he was not a shade.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Clearly, anyone who embarks on the path of full-time commitment should consider the cost of failure. It may be better to remain unnoticed on the back pew.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“The idea of divine beings coming from heaven to have sex with beautiful women recurs throughout antiquity, but in the Greek and Roman traditions such entanglements were not considered a fatal violation of the divinely ordained fabric of existence.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“The pathos does not nullify the grandeur, but the grandeur does not redeem the pathos.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Rome may be the climax of human eschatological destiny, but it too is a dream. Any sense that it involves eternal bliss is simply false.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Elysian bliss is not for everyone, but for the few (pauci).”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Who then is required to experience this thousand-year purgation through wind, water, or fire? That is the very bad news indeed: it is everyone whose soul has been seriously tainted by the body.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Souls do have to pay for their sins with torments and punishments (poenis . . . supplicia; 6.739–40), but the torments also cleanse the soul of its material taints.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Here we have the view of body and soul best known from Plato, but heavily Stoicized.58 The divine spirit is trapped in the dark prison of the body, which hinders and damages it. After death, the spiritual evils and plagues generated by the body do not disappear. On the contrary, necessarily (emphatically: “it is deeply necessary,” penitusque necesse est) the evils have become solidly ingrained in the soul because of its long association with the body (multa diu concreta modis inolescere miris; 6.736–38). They can be removed only through painful purging in the afterlife.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“The inhabitants of this realm are not basically good and well-meaning hoi polloi; they are the crème de la crème among the social and cultural elites. This will become an important issue as we proceed.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“The soul is the “real” person; the body is a prison.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Achilles was the greatest mortal ever to have lived and is now the greatest among those who have died:”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Death shows that the summum bonum of life is to continue living it.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“That is, by showing what happens after death, the texts emphasize what matters in life, providing insight into the purpose, meaning, and goals of human existence so as to encourage certain ways of being and living in the world: attitudes, dispositions, priorities, commitments, life choices, beliefs, practices, public activities, relationships—in fact, almost everything involved with being a sentient and conscious human being.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Christ’s descent to hell in the Gospel of Nicodemus, one of the most theologically influential narratives from outside the biblical canon.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“dreams and reality, the former corporeal and the latter spiritual;”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Aeneas comes to the Lugentes Campi, the Mourning Fields. Here are hidden those who had died of broken hearts from unrequited love. Among these pathetic souls Aeneas grieves to find his beloved Dido.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Scholars have come to doubt the claim of Servius that Virgil had been commissioned by Augustus to produce an epic of the founding of Rome to rival the greatest epics of Greece.38 But at the very least Virgil did so on his own initiative. The Aeneid was neither conceived nor designed as a disinterested history of the Roman past. It was unapologetically an encomium on the glories of the world’s greatest city and, in particular, a tribute to its greatest ruler.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“Nostos triumphs over kleos.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“turn aside her sorrow with the sword” (ferroque averte dolorem;”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“dread three-headed hound of hell, Cerberus.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“cycle of reincarnations”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“disquisitions”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“(ψύχη)”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“the rivers Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus flow into the Acheron.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“an analysis of texts deriving from Jewish and Christian traditions. For the latter, my interests lie with the Apocalypse of Peter, the Acts of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Paul, and the Gospel of Nicodemus.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“work of supererogation”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition

“virtual katabasis.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition