Exploring Early Christian Narratives of Heaven & Hell w/ Dr. Bart Ehrman

uh dr ehrman i want to thank you so much for writing a helpful resource to help us better understand the concepts of heaven and hell and how those ideas uh developed in ancient cultures and then how those concepts were influential in in christian thinking and i'm curious about what led to you to write this book i've long been interested in the afterlife as i suppose most people are in one way or another uh and for the for the usual reasons in my case uh having grown up a conservative christian i was interested in the questions of heaven and hell as a scholar i got interested in a kind of genre that people don't know very much about which is a it's a kind of writing from the ancient world that describes people who are given guided tours of heaven and hell they actually go down to see what the realms of the dead are like and we we get a number of these in uh in greek and roman traditions you have one a description a full book of the odyssey of homer and virgil's aeneid has one there there are a whole bunch of ones in greek and roman sources and in jewish sources but i got interested in the christian ones in particular because these early christian ones are forerunners of dante's divine comedy uh and it's interesting to see how they how they worked uh in the earlier times and so my book deals with uh my deal my book deals with the ones in the early century starting with one that's called the apocalypse of peter that almost made it into the new testament it was it was there were people who thought it belonged in the new testament for several centuries and uh on up then through the fifth uh fifth christian century these various accounts of uh christians being shown what the realms of the dead were like yeah i remember uh in school i was an english lit major and i remember studying odyssey and virgil and then dante's inferno and there seemed to be this theme about the hero descending into the underworld for a certain period of time and then coming back yeah um i'm curious about the apocalypse of peter what is that i've never read that i don't know anything about it what what did you learn by reading that story well it's a great it's a really it's a great book and it's um you know the technical term what's when scholars talk about this phenomenon of course scholars use terms that young people don't normally use but the term for this phenomenon of going down coming back is called is catabasis and so this is a catalysis tradition catabolisms literally just mean in greek it means going down um and the apocalypse of peter is the first one we have this in the surviving christian tradition it's a book that we knew about for centuries and centuries because as i said it almost made it into the new testament but we didn't have a copy of it when it didn't get included nobody bothered to copy it and so it got lost and it wasn't discovered until the 1880s there was a french archaeological team in 1886 that was digging in a uh cemetery in akhmeem egypt and they uncovered a tomb with a person buried there with a 66 page book and included in this book is this apocalypse of peter and it's fascinating because it's an account of peter peter and the disciples it begins with them talking to jesus and jesus described what's going to happen at the end of the world and peter wants to know well you know what's it like after death and jesus shows him what it's like and he takes him to both the realms of the dead the realms of the damned and the realms of the blessed and it's a fascinating account because the um the realms of the damned are described in uh gory detail and there are there are different compartments of hell and peter visits these and sees how people are being punished depending on what their sin was their characteristic sin and so it starts out by describing sinners who were who were blasphemers against god and they're punished by being hanged by their tongues over eternal flames because they blasphemed with their tongue and then then then he sees these women who had plated their hair braided their hair to make themselves attractive so they could seduce men they're hanged by their hair over eternal flames wow wow the men they seduced are hanged by a different body part and it kind of goes on like that for a long time but then he finally gets to the realms of the blast and he doesn't say much about it it's like yeah what can you say they're eternally happy it smells good it's nice weather and it's great you know but he focuses on hell the whole point of this is look if you want to go to one place not the other you better behave yeah that is that is super interesting do they know anything about the writer of this text um so the um of course the text claims to be written by peter the disciple peter which is not right we can date the text it's usually dated to the 130s or so or sometimes around there and so it would have been you know 60 or 70 years after peter had died and their debate their debates about the text and in my book i have to talk about what we can say about the text and the various manuscripts that we now have because we found other forms of it uh and then first and um we don't know who actually wrote the book um all we can say is some kind of rough things about him he was obviously he was a greek speaking christian who was uh you know outside of israel and he was uh you know he's been influenced by various kinds of greek and roman traditions about this going down going up thing and he's he's trying to try to portray a vision of heaven and hell that in fact is quite different from what you get in the new testament and the irony is that most people today would agree with the portrayal in the apocalypse of peter even though it's not part of their bible because people think that you die and your soul goes to be rewarded or to be tortured and the gospel the apocalypse of peter is the first place we actually get that you don't get that in in the earlier christian literature so as you started to like look at these ancient texts um how did you just how did you kind of like uh i guess your process for reading them because i i know like me you know being a modern reader when i look at something when i read like the words heaven and hell i go to my own fuzzy thinking on those on those subjects but i'm not thinking the way that the writer of these ancient texts are thinking about heaven and hell so as you're kind of like reading these older texts how are you making sense of what they're saying about these places the main thing that the difficult thing for uh i think most readers today is to realize that that our assumptions and our views of the world and and even the words we use are not what people used in other times and places and so what the historian has to do is understand uh terms and concepts uh and ideas and beliefs in light of their own context which means someone like like me we spend a lot of our time studying ancient texts to understand the ancient world better so that when we take any particular text we can put it in its context because if you take it out of its own context if you change the context of something you change what it means and so it's interesting that just to use the word hell for example the word hell never actually our our concept of hell never occurs uh in the old testament and it's it's never anything that jesus himself ever talked about in the in english translations of the new testament you'll get the word hell and that's become a traditional way of translating some of the things jesus said but jesus himself never uses they they didn't have a word for that that well they did and called tartarus in greek tartarus as a place of torment but even in greek most people didn't go to tartarus most people went to hades which was not a place of torment but jesus doesn't use either word jesus uses the word gehenna and it turns out that's not even in the it's in the greek new testament but he wasn't speaking greek and it's not a greek word again refers to a valley outside of jerusalem that was thought to be a completely god forsaken desecrated place and jesus threatens people that if they if they if they sin against god and don't repent they're going to be thrown into gehenna well english trance into this pit outside of jerusalem this is like they're not going to get a decent burial they're going to desecrate a place it's going to be like oh god you don't want that to happen to your corpse but when english translators you know they they weren't going to use the word gehenna because nobody knows what that means and so they thought well okay this means hell and so they translate it as hell but then when an english reader reads that there jesus is saying you're gonna be cast into hell and you oh my god you know because you're going to be tortured forever and he's not talking about being tortured forever but you only know that if you you know if you put it in its own context instead of thinking that it's like in our modern context that's so helpful and i think that's the struggle that a lot of us have when we read the bible is that there are these terms these concepts that they're they're foreign to us and especially if you're reading an english translation and like i would when you read the word hell that's the imagery we get um that's our understanding of it so what advice do you have for us for those of us who take the bible seriously that want to study it critically um when we approach these concepts well you know there are a lot of there are a lot of scholars in the world who uh who spend their lives doing this they committed their lives to understanding the bible and understanding it in its own context and a number of these people try to write books for for general audiences and so i write the book i've just written on the journeys to heaven and hell is it's an academic book non-scholars would be able to handle most of it and it'd be but but it's really written more for scholars i have another book on just called heaven and hell which is written for lay people that explains all of this kind of stuff and so i suggest that they read uh read writings by people who are bona fide scholars um you know there are lots and lots of books written about jesus and about the bible by evangelists and pastors and and theologians and i i've got i don't have a problem with that at all but if you want to understand the historical what's really going on historically you need to read what a historian says and another thing i'll point out for people who don't don't know me in my work i have a blog that deals with this kind of thing all the time i post five times a week every every week for the last 10 years and my i've got the archives for the whole thing it deals with everything having to do the historical study of especially the new testament and jesus and early christianity but also the old testament and related topics as you were studying how the ancient world understood heaven and hell and how those ideas evolved and then you're looking at the hebrew bible and the new testament can you talk about some of the similarities you've seen from these ancient ideas being incorporated into these biblical texts it's a complicated story um and it's pretty much what my book my my book for a general audience it's heaven and hell a history of the afterlife that i actually sketched that whole relationship between the biblical views and non non-biblical views the bible is pretty interesting because the old testament virtually the entire old testament teaches that when a person dies that's the end of the story there's no there's no afterlife you don't go somewhere um and it's because in jewish thinking uh traditional jewish thinking did not understand that you have a soul within you that can be separated from your body the body dies but the soul lives on that's a view that developed principally in our culture in greek settings in greek philosophical circles and greek that's what you know pagans thought uh but jews thought that the body and the soul were an integrated whole and the um they can't exist independently of one another and so it's not just that your body dies your spirit doesn't do and it goes away too and so the way to think of it is that it ancient hebrews thought about the uh your spirit or your soul as your breath the same word in in many of these ancient languages hebrew and greek breath and spirit are the same word and the idea is that when god created adam adam and eve he creates adam in genesis chapter two he just makes his lump of dirt on the ground it's in a human shape but it's just a lump of dirt but he breathes into it when he breathes into it it becomes a living being and so if we think about it like that that a be a human is the integration of of spirit and body then it makes sense because when you when you stop breathing you know you don't think your breath goes anywhere you just stop breathing you're dead now and that's what ancient hebrews thought you died and your soul you know and so you your soul didn't exist it just you know it's like you did your breath it went away what ended up happening is that in jewish circles there started they started thinking that there's got to be something more than this in this life you know because you get people who are really righteous and god-fearing people who die they have a crummy life horrible life they die and that's the end of the story doesn't god like help them out when they're dead and you have these schmucks over here who are famous and powerful and they die and they get away with it like that can't be right and so jews ended up developing this idea that there is a life after death but since they're reduced and thought that the body and soul were an integrated whole the way a person is uh has an afterlife is if when the soul comes back into the body at the end of time and there's a resurrection of the dead the dead are brought back to life their body and they live forever in their bodies then and so they so there were jews who came to think that at the end of time god would uh there'd be a judgment day and everybody would be raised up and the sinners would be destroyed and the righteous will be given eternal life here on earth paradise here on earth and so that's that's that's what jesus thought and that's what that's what paul thought and then later christians then just quickly later christians who were not raised in jewish circles but mainly came from gentile circles had greek philosophical ideas in mind from like plato and things like that where where the body and the soul separate and the soul is wherever the body dies they brought that into christianity and they combined it with jesus teaching of the resurrection of the dead and they came up with the idea of heaven that you you die and your soul goes to heaven and to be rewarded so it's a combination of plato and jesus oddly enough i'm curious about like some of the contradictions or discrepancies you found in the bible in relation to these ideas of heaven and hell because i'm thinking about um that part where jesus is on the cross and he tells the thief you know today you'll be with me in paradise and you have jesus saying in one of the gospel accounts that he gives his spirit up to god and then you have other stories of jesus descending into the underworld uh similar to these odysseus stories of the hero going to the underworld and coming back and so we're left with this weird discrepancy of where does he go and i'm kind of curious about as you kind of explored uh the bible and looking for discrepancies i'm curious about the ones specifically around heaven and hell yeah and really interesting yeah well that you know um i i had to deal with that in my in my popular book on heaven and hell because as i said in the old testament there's no there's no life after death at all even even this place called sheol people tend to think of that as kind of like a greek hades that you like all the souls go down there and live for a while and i argue in my book it probably doesn't mean that it probably sheol is always the synonym for sheol in the old testament the synonyms are death and grave and tomb and it looks like sheila's just a way of talking about the tomb you end up in when you get to the new testament when you get to jesus it's not that it's that that there's going to be an afterlife your body spirit's going to come back in your body and you're going to live forever in the later in later writings of the new testament including the gospel of luke the one you're referring to luke is living later luke is not a jew luke luke seems to think that there's a separation of the body and the soul and soul lives on and so he reports jesus saying to the thief on the cross uh today you will be with me in paradise uh and that that pretty clearly says that the they're gonna die and their souls are gonna go up there which is con so that's that's what jesus says in luke but luke is writing you know 50 years after jesus himself and he's incorporating a view that jesus didn't have which happens a lot in the gospels uh and so so you you get that in the new testament you get hints of this idea that at jesus death he went down to hades to the place of the dead you get hints of that in a couple places especially in the book of first peter chapters three and four eventually that led to this whole question of this whole doctrine some of your listeners may have heard of called the harrowing of hell harrowing of hell was this medieval tradition that that tried to explain what happened between jesus death and his resurrection but he dies he comes back to life on sunday he dies on friday comes back what's he doing in the meantime like he did not exist or did he what what happened and the idea was well if his death brought about salvation he probably went down to preach to those who died already about his salvation because you know it wouldn't be fair if they died before salvation was available and surely he made it available to them too and so the idea is that he went down then and preached to them so those who would believe in him could be saved and that developed into this entire tradition and their stories that started circulating and so in in this book this book that i've just written that came out the the journeys to heaven and hell book i have an entire chapter devoted to this whole uh idea and how it developed over time from these hints in the new testament to full-fledged narratives in a later gospel nobody's heard of called the gospel of nicodemus where jesus actually it describes him going down to hell and getting everyone out of there really really interesting uh but and in part it's interesting because uh parts of that tradition suggests that jesus jesus was so powerful that death could not prevent him from doing what he wanted to do hell could not prevent it from doing what he wanted to do the devil nobody could defend him so he took everybody out even the sinners and so like you know why not so it's universal salvation in some of these some of these texts it's great can you talk about the idea uh that's uh also popular around annihilation that uh that we see also in christian thinking yeah um so annihilation is the idea that there's not punishment after death but that some people or all people are simply annihilated they no longer exist um i um i came after intense study for several years i came came to realize that this is what jesus himself thought um jesus uh uh and other jews of his day did not believe in uh that god would torture people after death or have them torture or allow them to be tortured the punishment was death and it's interesting you actually you can see this in the gospels of the new testament um when jesus talks about those who will not enter into the kingdom of heaven so there'll be it's called the kingdom of heaven not because you're living with god up above but it's because heaven has come to earth you have a kingdom here on earth that's like a heavenly kingdom because it's likely to live it's a paradise so um it's here on earth just just like god made the paradise adam and eve were put in the garden of eden we're getting back there and it's going to be down here on earth what about the people who aren't worthy to go there who are sinners or who are the schmucks who got away with it jesus jesus teaches that they will be destroyed his term is destruction uh he never talks about them being tormented he talks about them being destroyed in offense by being being destroyed by throat being thrown into fire and so they're like they're burned but you know when when something is thrown into a fire jesus likens it to weeds they get thrown into the fire that's what it'll be at the end of time people will be raised and be thrown into the fire well what happens to the weeds they're they're not in there still a thousand years later the fire burns them up they're dead and that's what happens to the people too it's an unpleasant death but it's it's annihilation and then they just don't exist and i think paul paul also thought that i think this is the teach and the book of revelation teaches this i think it's all i think this is the biblical view that people get annihilated and so which is kind of a good thing because otherwise you'd have to say that that the god of the new testament believes in torturing people for trillions of years with that being just the beginning for sins they committed for 20. really uh sound sounds pretty bad sound right yeah yeah absolutely absolutely are there any early christian theologians that uh did talk about this because i feel like this idea of annihilation is not really taught in a lot of churches um yeah there there there are i mean there are there's there's a very wide range of belief about the afterlife in the church fathers after uh after the new testament some of course continue to think that you know you die and that's the end of the story what ends up happening principally is that there there's a great utility in thinking that if you uh if if your option is eternal bliss or eternal torture that you're more likely to go for the bliss and so church fathers began in the second and third centuries began to emphasize very much that there's a conscious torment in hell forever and they use this as an evangelistic tool um some of the some of these accounts that i talk about in my book on the journeys to heaven and hell describe how uh you you have these accounts in early christianity second third centuries and following of people who go to hell and come back and tell the story and they do this in these accounts in order to convince people to convert and once people hear that man they convert in droves and so this became a standard trope within the christian theological tradition that um the conscious torment will last forever unless you repent so you better repent um the the main exceptions to that in early christianity were not a nihilists they were universalists they were the ones who said that the god is so sovereign he's he is lord of all and nothing can resist him even evil and so in the long run even even the evil will repent one way or another and so universalism became the the it was still on the margins but it was it was a bigger margin than the uh annihilationists yeah you mentioned these like frightening and scary stories of what it's like in hell which then helps people like convert over to christianity um and and earlier you mentioned the apocalypse of peter document are there other like documents like that that you've studied yeah my book journeys to heaven to hell is all about those kinds of documents and so i uh so there's the so there's the apocalypse of peter so the apocalypse of peter ended up as i said not getting into the new testament and it fell into disfavor because it looks like the earliest version of it so these these things they go through many versions as people copy them and add stories to them take away stories because they're you know they're storytelling and so they're expanding the earliest version indicates that everybody gets saved and in the fourth century christians were like coming out way against that and they didn't they and so so they didn't cut they didn't like the gospel the apocalypse of peter anymore which is why i got lost but it served as a as a source for a book called the apocalypse of paul the apocalypse of paul is is a much it's much expanded and there's lots of differences in it from the apocalypse of peter but it's a similar conceit that paul is taken to the realms of the blessed in the realms of the damned and he contrasts the two this was very popular through the middle ages the apocalypse of paul and it was known to dante where this was one of dante's sources for his idea for the comedy is that he would you know that of course he has purgatory which didn't come into the christian tradition until much later than uh these apocryphal texts that i studied so so i talk about things like the apocalypse of peter the apocalypse of paul the acts of thomas the uh uh you know so there's the gospel of nicodemus as i've said i've got a range of texts that many people haven't heard of but they're fascinating texts and some of them were quite uh influential on christian theology throughout the centuries when did you when do you start seeing concepts of purgatory so one of the things i explained in my my general book on heaven and hell for the for the broad audience is where purgatory came from um the standard uh explanation in scholarly circles is that it's very late development that the word purgatory itself doesn't actually show up until the 1100s and it doesn't become a doctrine until about a century after that the idea of purgatory some a lot of people have mistaken understandings about what it is including a number of my catholic friends i've never really understood what it is so what it is officially is purgatory is a place for temporary punishment for those who are eventually going to go to heaven they're not righteous enough yet they still have to have some of their sins burned away and so they um so they have to go through this step so it's not for people who are going to hell people going to hell or just go to hell but people who are on route to heaven if they're not already saints they've got to have some punishment and you know if they're not you know more punishment depending on how many bad things you've done and so uh so that's incentive you know so so that that becomes the doctrine in the 12th century um the uh what i show in my book is that there are earlier antecedents for that you actually get antecedents for that in pagan literature because like uh virgil for example in the aeneid has uh shows that people go through this kind of process of having their clean their sins cleansed for a thousand years and plato has something like that you start finding it in christianity already at the end of the second century where you have instances of you have stories these are all stories of course there's stories of people who are very saintly who can pray for somebody who's being punished to be removed from their punishment and so it ends up being a temporary punishment and in some senses that's the beginning of the idea of purgatory that um some people will be punished initially but then will end up being being saved is that i might be totally wrong on this um that parable about abraham's bosom i get this is the place where maybe jesus descends into is that would be that like a purgatory is that not right no so yeah so that's a complicated that's another luke thing in in in the god in the gospel of luke the gospel of luke talks about um there's this parable the rich man and lazarus and there's this rich guy who's like filthy rich like eats sumptuous meals dressed he's like a king he's got all these slaves all these servants and all these wives and stuff going on he's like this and there's a guy outside and his gate starving to death named lazarus who's so like just starving to death and he's so sick he's got wounds all over his body and the dogs come up and lick his wounds he's like oh guys they both die and lazarus goes to abraham's bosom that's up above so that's a good place abraham is the forefather of the chosen people the jews and so being in his bosom means that he's eating at a banquet up there and the rich man is sent down to be punished in the fires fire fires of torment and so that's where the and so uh yeah so i have to talk about that in my book because you know when i said that you don't have hell in the new testament this is a place that looks like you got hell because this man's down there in the flame and so i have to explain why this is it certainly is in luke but it's not something that jesus taught this is a later addition to jesus teachings i show why scholars think that when you look at like uh the ancient world and i'm curious like are there like drawings of like how they perceive like a flat earth with like a heaven over the earth and like a hell under the earth are those i'm just kind of curious like how they perceive like where these places were yeah it's interesting because you know there are different perceptions in the ancient world the the idea that most people have that everybody thought the world was flat you know until like modern times uh that's a complete myth it's not true uh in the ancient world they knew many many people knew it was round people like aristotle calculated how what what it was and they knew it was an orb but there were people who had other ideas and in traditional jewish thinking as in the old testament it's more like you're describing you've got the you've got where we are here yeah you've got a world above and you've got a kind of a world below and you get this actually in the book of genesis when god creates the heavens and the earth in genesis it says that he creates the heavens and the earth and it doesn't say that he created water the water's there god what god does is he puts a firmament in the water a firm spot in the water that separates the water above from the waters below and so there's this firm place and in that understanding the re the rain is what seeps down from the firmament above and the rivers in the springs and the oceans come from the water down below because you've got water above the water below and so that's and so um and then the idea is that god is god is up there above the waters and below the water below is the realm of the dead uh if for for people who have a three-story universe and so the dead go down you bury them they go you know they're in the grave so they're down below god's up above and so that's the that's why people think of you know people going to heaven means like you go up you know which the idea of going up to heaven makes sense if you've got that kind of three-dimensional universe it doesn't make any sense in our universe because there's no up up is you know wherever you are and there's not you know you can't but in the bible you could actually get there i mean you could you could you know you can build a tower of babel and get pretty close to where god is and so you know god can't have you getting up there and when elijah goes up to heaven and jesus ascends up to heaven right right yeah oh yeah so the tower of babel story uh they're trying to build a a building to get up into heaven looks like it yeah because god god has to confuse their languages because uh you know and so uh yeah yeah you can't get a lot of genesis is about genesis is about the separation of the divine realm from the human realm and part of the problem with adam and eve eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is it made them like god because they now they know right and wrong inherently uh and so that's like god and so that's why they get punished tower of babel they're getting close that's why they get punished and uh yeah so you you got you got to mind your place in the universe yeah it's so interesting yeah um well dr melvin thank you so much for your time uh before we go uh any advice for those of us who want to be better critical readers of our bible um well a couple of things um you know i think the i think the biggest discovery that scholars have made uh since the enlightenment about the bible with the enlightenment there came changes in every field of study of course including biblical studies and the biggest the biggest discovery was actually not discovery of manuscripts or disc archaeological discoveries the biggest discovery of scholars in the last two 300 years has been that the bible is not a single book we think of it as a book written by an author you buy it it's between two covers it's like you got different chapters but it's like it's it's a book and what scholars have realized it's not a book it's it's there are 66 books in the protestant new testament and uh many different authors living at many different times in many different contexts different circumstances different historical situations and if you want to read what an author says you really need to put that author in his or her own context because if somebody's writing in the 12th century they mean something different by using the same terms we might use today in the 21st century uh and so um and so let alone you know 2000 years ago or 4 000 years ago so you really have to know their context so you have to treat each book separately and not pretend for example when you're reading the gospels you should not pretend that mark is saying the same thing as john is yeah they're both gospels but these are two different authors living in different times and places and they've got different points of view and if you don't if you don't just let mark be mark if you read mark and say oh he means this something that john is saying then you're interpreting mark by somebody else he didn't even know and like if you don't people you don't want to do that i mean if you write a book you don't want somebody to read your book and say oh oh she must mean what you know this other person meant right that's necessarily the case you got to read what this person said so that's the biggest thing i think is to recognize these are all different books by different authors and you need to you need to read them not pretending they're all saying the same thing um so and the other thing as i said i think it really helps to guide you in that to listen to what you know professional scholars have said who devoted their lives to this kind of thing i've got many friends who've who spent 50 years of their lives since i mean who've learned greek and hebrew and latin and aramaic and coptic and they know all these ancient languages and they they study is what they do for a living and so it's not they're always right sometimes they're wrong but at least you know there are people who are experts uh and it is helpful to listen to what experts have to say whether you want to believe them or not for those of us with limited time and limited budgets um because some of these resources are very expensive to get great commentaries academic commentaries do you have recommendations on like uh kind of a way to go that's not super expensive to help us like like critically read and get accurate commentaries yeah i think the best thing to do is to start by getting a really good annotated bible um and there's two that i would recommend there are all sorts of study bibles out there most of them i do not recommend because most of them are they're fine for what they are for what they are but if you want to know historical information by experts then you need a really good solid study bible and the two that i like the best are the harper collins study bible which has uh before each book it has a little introduction to what the book's about explains when it was written by whom and what its main themes are and then it has little comments at the bottom of each page explaining difficult difficult verses uh the other so that's the harper collins study bible and the other is the oxford annotated bible the oxford the new oxford annotated bible these are both done by serious serious scholars uh who have devoted their lives to this kind of thing and they just provide such helpful information and charts and maps and things and it's it's the best way to start i think when you're looking at other commentaries are there any like red flags like okay that's probably not a commentary i probably want to get into from an academic standpoint um well i would say most commentaries are like that for example um i think the thing that one has to do is is pay attention to who's writing it um and so um the the the two commentary series the scholars tend to use the mo's would be the anchor bible series and the hermeneau series but some lay people might find those a little bit uh difficult and so i think what you want is one that is not just talking about the religious relevance of the material that for most people of course is very important but but if you want to understand these doctrines really understand them you need to approach them from a historical and a literary perspective and for that you need scholars who are trained in history and literature and so there's not a particular series per se that i would recommend there are several one-volume bible commentaries though that are helpful including a harper collins uh bible commentary or a jerome bible commentary there there are some one volume commentaries that can be very helpful i think uh that's super helpful well um dr ehrman i wanna thank you so much for for being on the podcast for sharing your insights on heaven and hell and the way ancient thinkers thought about these concepts and how those ideas came into christian tradition so thank you so much well thank you and i just want i want to say to everyone again that if they're interested in this kind of material my my blog's just called the bart ehrman blog and uh so just check it out but thanks i really enjoy this is a very great questions i've enjoyed talking about all of this hey thank you so much for watching this video clip from the delgado podcast to get more videos just like this simply subscribe here on youtube take care

Channel: delgado podcast

Views: 29,332

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Id: ZU9enCbE7SM

Length: 39min 6sec (2346 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 24 2022