James Tabor - What is an Afterlife?

James we've been friends since our early 20s uh getting near 40 years now and back then we talked about the purpose and meaning of life and what we are as human beings and is there an afterlife and and in this four decades or so you've built a wonderful career become one of the world's leading experts and in the early church history and judeo Christian history while I've done all sorts of other strange things so but I've still continued to thinking about it continue all the time and so I really comti was an old friend and to tell me what have you learn during these decades when I've been off wandering in some other worlds I think I'm going to have to give you a history lesson lots of times historians clarify but they don't always answer but we'll try to get close to the truth if we can just by looking at history of ideas with my students I like to begin with the Bible you know it's the document of of the West and what they assume is that eternal life is all over the place in the Bible you're going to open it up it's it's basically about eternal life and most of my students are coming from Christian backgrounds but the surprising thing about the Bible is the first story we've got the Garden of Eden as we understand it historically at least it's a story about how humans are not going to get eternal life remember Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden there's a Angelic guard at the gate lest they should eat and live forever now that's tantalizing because you think well maybe they will later but as you read on the story Noah Abraham Isaac Jacob Moses these people die nothing said in the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament about them going to heaven about them being raised from the dead and what we're finding now historically is fascinating that all over the ancient near East and the Mediterranean World other cultures have the same view this is not just something the Hebrews had that you die you go into the Underworld the Hebrews called it shio the Greeks called it Hades but if you go to Homer the most ancient Hebrew tradition uh odesus is grieving over his lost friend Achilles who's died and he wants to visit him and so he calls him up like a through a seance and achilles exists he has a sort of after life but it's a shadowy existence if you remember the story has to give him a little blood to kind of pump him up because blood is life blood is this world and then Achilles gives him the bad news he said I would rather be a servant in the world above than a king down here in the world below now he's not in hell it's not that he's getting tortured it's that these ancient peoples the Hebrews the Greeks the ancient Babylonians you remember the gilgames Epic um many people say that that is the real story of The Bible and the Bible took from Gil you know it it's possible the Bible uh did draw from it but it it in a sense tells the same story it's this great adventure story where gilgas the hero is grieved over the death of a friend and he goes on a search for immortality he's traveling and so forth he's told along the way uh by this barid where he's stopping for a drink uh your quest is vain you're never going to find it basically humans die they go down to the world below and that's it he finds finally this plant uh and he's told if he Dives down in the water and gets it and eats it he will live forever very similar to Genesis but guess what happens he's so tired from the dive he falls asleep and a snake comes along and eats the plant he wakes up and it's gone so we're getting these stories throughout the Bible ancient NES Greeks about you're not going to get it there's no eternal life sort of amazing to think about so in most of the Old Testament in the Hebrew Bible uh the concept of an afterlife is it's shocking it's not there you know and people just assume all these good folks that serve God must have lived forever and do you realize in the Torah that Moses was given there's not one word five books of you will have eternal life or you'll go to heaven when you die the earliest example I can find very interesting archaeologically little gold uh foil in Greek tombs by the ear of the deceased of and it's a little prayer for the dead and what they say is that the soul when it goes into the underworld has hope of going to heaven uh but that's about the Earth earliest in in Greek thought now in the Hebrew Bible I think of one passage in the entire Hebrew Bible Old Testament and that's the Book of Daniel right that says in the future many of those who sleep in the dust will arise some to everlasting life and that just pops out of nowhere but really not out of nowhere there's a great persecution going on and we can reconstruct I think uh what's happening where people are beginning to ask a different question is life fair and if individuals die for their faith as Martyrs as they did during this period we call it the maban period it's about 200 years before the time of uh Jesus they die as good people and the people that apostasis and curse God and so forth do fine how can that be and so Daniel says no um those people will come back during the the time of Jesus it's still a controversy remember the Pharisees and Sadducees he he apparently believed in Resurrection of the Dead which is a version of this that the dead will come back at some point but a whole group of rabbis at that time we call them sagues said no no no that's that's that new idea that the Greeks have brought in uh we don't accept that so they're disputing it and uh yet you come to the New Testament and particularly Paul it's absolutely built on the notion of immortality and eternal life and yet that book we call the Bible with the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament is put together and it could be seen as a development so is what we're dealing with a a a development where we have a growth in understanding or is it some artificial amalgamation of radically different concepts I think it's the letter I don't see development implies that it was a meant to go in a certain way kind of a revelation I think it's actually an intrusion the Hebrew view uh from start to finish of the Old Testament has a consistency to it it might not be satisfying to someone who believes in Paul and his message but it was to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses they didn't complain about it and I think what happens is Greek thinking begins to um I'll use the word infiltrate and I don't necessarily mean that negative but just to come into Hebrew thought Socrates is a great example he's 4th Century BC and before any Jews are thinking of immortality eternal life he's already saying Heaven is our home I drink the him loock and I'm better off than You Weep For yourselves don't weep for me I'm going to where I belong and I think that becomes such a seductive View for the Western World there maybe we could explain it by by a sort of historical sense of tired of being tired with the tragedy the Injustice what we call theodicy you know does the world make sense does history with all of its convolutions make any sense so you see this as something that's coming in after most of the Hebrew Bible is occurred in the maban or the inter testamental period and then flourishing in the New Testament and coming into its full regalia with Paul in terms of after I would call it ization now where did the Greeks get some there are some things in the Old Testament like the Ezekiel with the the bones rising up there are some other hints of it Enoch uh going not being taken away I mean there are some things in the Old Testament that hint at an afterlife I think you'd have to say that well the they're very minimal like the idea of Enoch going away and not dying is is an exception the gilgames has that too you have this Noah character that's off somewhere on the aisles of the blessed but it's not the Fate so the concept it's not the fate of everyone the concept is there but I I really don't think that that it's a systematic understanding of uh of the Hebrew view U is this an issue we're dealing with the concept of an afterlife but there are two radically different kinds of afterlives one is the is that we are an immortal soul that we have an inherent immortality in us and so when we die we get to go home like Socrates the other is this concept of a resurrection whether a bodily Resurrection or some kind of something in the future but when you're dead you're dead and that God at some time in some unknown future can resurrect now both are an afterlife but they have radically different characteristics right does that help us understand the the Hebrew Bible it does because that that Resurrection idea was uh ridiculous to the Greeks why would you want to resurrect the the shell the prison Socrates called it and bring that back you've escaped and gone to heaven now the Hebrews are sticking more with their Heritage death is death death is not life if you die you go to this underworld shio so the question comes could God raise the dead could God bring back the dead and certain Jews in the first century and 100 years or so before Jesus began to say yes he could then they've got to have a huge debate over well how would that happen and what kind of a body would they come and what would it look like and of course the Greeks are at the sideline making fun of that right why do you need any of that yeah are they still going to go to the toilet are they going to you know fly around and have wings and so forth and Paul gives a kind of definitive answer for Christians at least he says that's a foolish question God will give them a body as appropriate to them and that's sort of been what Christians have St stayed with uh for centuries now well well but Christians sort of have both at least in the tradition they have the immortality of the soul and they have a resurrection so that that in the Christian religion at least traditionally you have both yeah see I I'm an early historian so I st with Paul he's clearly Resurrection what happens is as centuries go on people go back to the idea of an immediate afterlife you know you bury a loved one it's fine to talk about someday at the great day Grandma will come forth from the grave but I think the preachers also begin to say things like no grandma has gone right now to be in heaven with feel better makes you feel better but it's a huge philosophical problem if she her Essence is in heaven then why do you even need to worry about Resurrection resurrecting a body so I think Resurrection as a original Hebrew Christian concept is is completely lost with most people who are even Christians or Jews today they don't really mean what ancient Christians meant by resurrection and that's the Reviving somehow of the complete self Body Soul and Spirit almost like a DNA replication with the Consciousness coming back and maybe in some Immortal form that won't die but still the whole self not a soul often another realm because if you have a soul why then do you need a resurrection why do you need a resurrection right I think what you get basically in this 2,000 year spread from Abraham to Jesus let's put it that way is in the ancient Hebrew ancient Greek even no afterlife at all just an acceptance that the dead go down to sh to Hades and they never come back and then by the time of Jesus you've got this intense debate that maybe humans are Immortal and they actually dwell in heaven the Hebrews are holding back on that I think they're saying now wait they're down in the Underworld but could God perhaps bring them back in some form and that's not really settled in the time of Jesus or Paul early Christianity I think those options are on the table and the church has a long way to go to try to work that out and and I would say they they never really do adequately uh it just remains a problem

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 26,890

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, afterlife, life after death, death, james tabor, consciousness, eternal life, closer to truth consciousness

Id: u08ulOiOClo

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023