Malaprop's presents Bart D. Ehrman, author of Heaven and Hell

okay before I start is that if you like if you do like the book or you like you like the talk or you're interested in the kind of material I'm dealing with about the New Testament or early Christianity please check out my blog with the Bart Ehrman blog we have free memberships available now during the crisis normally there's a small membership fee and all of the fee goes to two charities dealing with hunger and homelessness so there's no operating expenses I don't just it raises money for charity so I hope you look at look it up for the bar my blog you get five posts a week and all sorts of stuff like this I'm going to spend about 30 minutes I think reading and then if you can hit that chat button if you drink during my reading and send in your questions I'm happy to answer enter your questions and so the book as you know it's called heaven and hell a history of the afterlife and I'm going to start reading with the preface when I thought about God as a child I thought about the afterlife I obviously had no clear understanding of death but I did believe that after I died I would go to heaven her help and I was bound and determined to make it one and not the other looking back the afterlife later helped motivate me to become more deeply involved in my Episcopal Church participating in worship saying prayers singing hymns confessing my sins learning the Creed's and becoming an altar boy naturally I worshipped God and tried to live the way I thought he wanted because I thought it was the right and good thing to do but also at least in part it was because I knew full well what would happen to me if I didn't I'm also sure that hope for heaven and fear in hell played a large role when later as a mid teenager I have an even deeper spiritual experience some of my high school friends were committed Christian kids who believed it was necessary to make an active and specific commitment to God by asking Jesus into my heart they convinced me and as a 15 year old I became a born-again Christian from that point on I had no doubt I was going to heaven I was equally convinced that those who had not made this commitment namely most of the billions of other people in the world were going to hell I tried not to think I was being arrogant he was not as if I had done something better than anyone else and deserved to go to heaven I had simply accepted a gift but what about those who hadn't even heard about the gift or who had never been urged to consider it seriously I felt sorry for them they were lost and so it was my obligation to convert them believing this made me a Christian on a mission it's not at all unlikely that I was more than a little obnoxious about it I go on to talk about how I went on to Moody Bible Institute of fundamentalist college right on high school and then to Wheaton College and evangelical liberal arts school I decided to go on my education to study Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and so I went to Princeton Theological Seminary and while they are studying the Bible intensely the New Testament in Greek and the Old Testament in Hebrew I started having my doubts about the infallibility of the Bible these doubts disturbed me not only because I wanted very much to know the truth but also because I was afraid of the possible eternal consequences of getting it wrong what if I started doubting or even denying that the Bible was the inspired Word of God where the Christ was the unique son of God or even the God existed what if I ended up no longer believing and then realized too late that my unfaithful change of heart had all been a huge blunder wouldn't my eternal soul be in very serious trouble there was a particular moment when these breweries hit me with special poignancy it involved a late-night sauna in order to pay for my graduate school I worked a part-time job at the Hamilton Tennis Club outside of Princeton most days of the week I was on the late shift members of the club with busy lives would schedule their tennis matches deep into the night and I worked the desk taking reservations and sweeping the courts afterwards one of the benefits of the job was that I could take advantage of the facilities including the sauna where the when the place was shut up the evening in question I had been sweeping the courts and thinking about everything I had been hearing and resisting in my biblical studies and theology classes at Princeton seminary pondering just how different my professors perspectives were from what I had been taught to believe as a conservative conservative evangelical Christian in my high school and college years Princeton summer isn't nowhere near fundamental school these new views were very liberal from my former point of view I was hearing and starting to think that the Bible was not a consistent revelation whose very words came from God that the traditional Christian doctrines I had always held is obviously true for example the Trinity were not handed down from heaven but were formulations made by very fallible human beings and that there were lots of other views out there even Christian views that did not jibe with what I had long believed I was doing my best to figure it all out whatever I decided to believe and think I wanted it to be right I was willing to change my views if necessary but I didn't want to leave a faith I loved especially if it turned out that I had been right in the first place and had simply begun to back slide down the slippery slope that leads to perdition after sweeping the courts I decided to have a sauna and so I cranked up the heat as high as it would go stripped down and went in for a good after work sweat as I sat on the upper wooden bench all alone late at night perspiring profusely I returned to my doubts and the questions I had about my faith and the fears I had for the possible outcomes of pursuing them here is not just for my life but even more for my afterlife then I started realizing wow it sure is hot in here oh man is it hot in here it is really really hot in here and then naturally the thought struck me do I really want to be trapped in a massively overheated sauna for all eternity and what if the sauna is many many times hotter than this do I want to be in fire forever is it worth it for me at that moment that meant do I really want to change my beliefs and risk eternal torment I don't need to discuss my long transition here suffice it to say that I eventually did begin to change and over a number of years I moved into a liberal form of Christianity that cherished questions and thinking more than belief based simply and what others told me finally I left the faith altogether as a friend of mine a Methodist minister sometimes jokes I went from being born again to being dead again and yet I continued to be fascinated by the questions of the afterlife not so much because I fear it anymore but because it plays such a crucial role in the thinking and literature of the earliest Christians which is my particular field of academic interest knowing where ideas of the afterlife came from how they developed and how they change can tell us historically a lot about how Christianity came to be what it is today the most historically significant and culturally influential religion in the world but these are ideas are even more important for non-academic reasons traditional Christian beliefs in the afterlife continue to be widely held in our society a recent Pew Research poll showed that 72% of all Americans agree that there is a literal literal heaven where people go when they die 58 percent believe in an actual literal hell these numbers are of course down seriously from previous periods but they're still impressive and for the historian it's important to realize that in the Christian West prior to the modern period think for example the Middle Ages will that matter the 1950s virtually everyone believed that when they died their soul would go to one place or the other or to purgatory in painful preparation for ultimate glory one of the surprising feces of this book is that these views do not go back to the earliest stages of Christianity they cannot be found in the Old Testament and they are not what Jesus himself taught then where did they come from I've called this book heaven in Hell a history of the afterlife when I've told people the title they've often been puzzled or even slightly offended but let me be clear I am NOT saying that a literal heaven and hell have experienced historical changes I'm saying that the ideas of heaven and hell were invented and have been altered over the years and I think that can be proved there was a time in human history when no one on the planet believed that there would be a judgement day at the end of time at another time people did believe it it eventually became a standard Christian teaching and is accepted as Orthodox truth by many millions of people today between the time no one believed it and many people did someone came up with the idea that is it was invented so too with every idea of the afterlife but that doesn't make the ideas wrong it just means that they were ideas that once did not exist and then later did that of course is true of all ideas views theories perspectives rules laws formulae proofs everything thought up by human agents some of them are right some are wrong and some are not susceptible to the categories of right and wrong but whether right wrong or neither all of them came into someone's mind at some point in time a physicist came up with the theory of gravity a mathematician with a formula for determining the area of a rectangle a political thinker with the idea of democracy and on and on we evaluate these formulations and their claims to the truth independently of the fact that for most of human history no one subscribed to them so too with the understandings of the afterlife in this book I will not be urging you either to believe or disbelieve in the existence of heaven and hell I'm interested instead and seeing where these ideas came from within the dominant culture of the West Christianity especially as the emerged out of the pagan religions of its world and out of Judaism in particular I want to see how use of the afterlife came about and how they were then modified transformed believed doubted and disbelieved over time game i skiped now - i'm gonna skip a lot of stuff to get to a very brief section on the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament the Jewish Scriptures contain a variety of views about what happens to a person at death most commonly a person who dies is simply said to have gone to death a term used some thousand times in the Bible better known but far less frequent a person's ultimate destination is sometimes called Sheol a term whose meaning and etymology are debated it occurs over 60 times in the Hebrew Bible and there's unanimity among critical critical scholars that in no case does she all mean hell in the sense that people mean today there is no place of eternal torment eternal punishment in any passage of the entire Old Testament in fact this comes as a surprise to many people nowhere in the entire Hebrew Bible is there any discussion at all of Heaven and Hell as places of rewards and punishments for those who died probably most people who think of the Bible think of Sheol as a Jewish kind of the Greek Hades its 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 she all is mentioned it may well simply be an alternative term for the place where an individual is buried that is their grave or pit or pit and then I go on and try and demonstrate that by looking looking at the instances in the Hebrew Bible but I'm going to skip that part and move to a section on the difference between Jewish views and views elsewhere in the ancient world it is often said that the key difference between ancient pagan and Jewish views of the afterlife is that Greeks developed the notion of the immortality of the soul but Jews came to believe in the resurrection of the body even though there's an element of truth in this characterization that there's differing immortality of soul resurrection of the body even though there's an element of truth it's far too simple and is somewhat problematic but in broad terms it's an important distinction in the Greek view that you find most pronounced in the writings of Plato the Greek philosopher Plato the soul is a part of the human being that is immortal it's inherently immortal they can't die it simply always will exist because it's in its nature always to exist unlike the body the soul cannot die this entails a kind of dualistic anthropology humans are made up of two competing entities the mortal body and the immortal soul which at death separate from one another that is indeed different from what most ancient Israelite and then Jewish texts maintain these assumed a unitary understanding of the human being for these Jewish texts and for Jewish people in antiquity the vast majority the soul is not a separate essence or substance that can exist independently of the body the person is a body that could be alive but when the breath of life leaves it the body is dead at that point neither the body nor the breath of life the soul is living the body disintegrates and disappears and there's no soul to live on any more than we think that when you stop breathing like your breath goes anywhere well the stool doesn't go to work for ancient Jews either breath in later Jewish doctrine of the resurrection God reverses death by bringing the breath of life back into the body ensuring that it will never die again the body won't die again because the breath is back in it unlike in the Greek tradition here the person is made immortal immortality is an act of God not an innate nature of the real essence of the humor of the human moreover in these Jewish texts the idea is not that people cannot die but precisely that they that they do die God needs to raise them from the dead because they are dead body and soul that certainly is not the doctrine of immortality but it was the view of Jesus Jesus did not believe in the immortal soul and he did not teach about the coming of people the soul going to heaven or hell Jesus does talk about the kingdom of God but when you talk to me if you I have to explain all this in the book and it takes a while to explain it but when Jesus talks about the kingdom of God he's not talking about the place you go when you die he's talking about a kingdom here on earth that God is going to rule and people will be brought into it in their bodies people who are alive when it arrives will enter if they've been on God's side those who have died already will be raised from the dead those who have been on God's side we raised from the dead the bodies will come back to life they'll enter into this earthly Kingdom this paradise here on earth and those who were against God will be a race from the dead to be shown the errors of their ways and they'll be destroyed one of my major thesis in this book theses in this book is that Jesus did not believe in eternal punishment period so I want to say something about that reading a little different section in the book one of my phases is that a close reading of Jesus words shows that in fact he had no idea of torment for sinners after death death for sinners was the end of the story their punishment is that they will be annihilated never allowed to exist again unlike the saved who will live forever in God's glorious kingdom for example earlier in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says there are two gates through which a person can pass one gate is narrow and leads to a difficult path that's the way of life and there are few people who take it the other gate is broad leading to an easy path most people take that route but it's the road that leads quote to destruction Matthew chapter 7 verses 13 and 14 Jesus was not Saint leads to eternal torment those who take it will be destroyed annihilated even so you don't want to go that way Jesus teachings in this line are very much like the teachings of John the Baptist who said that the end is coming soon the ax is laid at the root of the tree every tree that does not bear fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire well when trees are cast into the fire what happens do they live forever in the fire no let me get burned up they're destroyed and that's when it's going to be like for people at the end of time in another image in the Gospel of Matthew later in Matthew Jesus compares the coming judgment to a to a fisherman who brings in the haul of his fish and separates the good fish from the bad this is in Matthew chapter 13 what does this fisherman who separates the good fish do that's like the kingdom of God what does he do the bad ones he throws them away he obviously doesn't torture them they simply die so - Jesus says at the final judgment angels will separate the right is from the wicked and tossed the ladder into the furnace they'll go up in flames for first century listeners this destruction of fire would not conjure up images of eternal Hellfire but rather a house fire or the execution of criminals by burning anyone burned at the stake weeps and screams in anguish while dying but they don't weep and scream for ten days or 10 millennia or 10 billion years they die often Jesus expresses this image of destruction in even more repugnant terms indicating that sinners who are excluded from God's kingdom will not only be killed but they will be refused decent burial and earlier in the book I show that that's the worst fate anyone could have in the ancient world not having a decent burial even worse than that Jesus indicates that sinners will be cast unburied into the most unholy repulsive God for second place that anyone in Israel could imagine the valley known as Gehenna thus for example Jesus says that anyone who calls someone a fool will be liable to be cast and to get enough Matthew 5 later he says that it's better to gouge out your eye or to amputate your hand if it sins and enter the kingdom main than to be tossed and to get enough with eye and hand intact Gehenna is obviously serious business but what is it it's highly unfortunate that sometimes English translations of the New Testament render the Greek word Gehenna as hell web conjures up precisely the wrong image for Bible readers today making them think Jesus is referring to the underworld of fiery torment where people go for eternal punishment for their sins that's not what geta referred to it at all on the contrary it was a place well-known among Jews in Jesus day it was a desecrated Valley outside of Jerusalem a place literally forsaken by God and then I thought I'd give the history of the term Guyana through the Old Testament into Jesus day that is this place where it is the desig most desecrate place on earth and you don't want your remains tossed there okay so I'm not gonna say more about Jesus I will say something briefly about the Apostle Paul because he's significant Paul was not one of Jesus disciples during his life he became a follower of Jesus he got converted several years after Jesus death probably three or four years after Jesus death Paul began with thinking about that Jesus view was right that then at the end time there'll be a resurrection and the kingdom of God will come here on earth people brought into Audley all expected that was going to happen in his own lifetime as he says in a couple passages he expects to be alive when it happens it didn't happen time went on his death his Paul's ministry went on mission went on for a couple two or three decades and at the end he started realizing you know it might not happen and he began to wonder well so if it doesn't come soon what's gonna happen you know I might die first and then what happens to me you know I have this close communion with Christ now you mean I'm gonna die I'm gonna have to wait however long for a resurrection and Paul started thinking you know if I'm this close with Christ now when I die I'm still going to be close with Christ somehow I'm going to be in his presence and that started the idea that when you die you would be in the presence of God most appalls converts were Gentile non they weren't Jews there with the idea of a resurrection there were Gentiles with the idea of the immortality of the soul once Paul started talking about you being in the presence of Christ immediately Christians latched on to that because that's what they were raised with that your soul would live on and they started saying your soul is going to live on it's going to be rewarded or punished itself and that then eventually later becomes the Christian view I'm going to describe one text that has that view that's after the New Testament because it's not a view that most most the authors in chess perhaps you don't have that view right there is a book that was once known to have exist known to have existed it was called the apocalypse of Peter the book called the apocalypse of Peter was mentioned by Church Fathers from the second century later and in some circles it was considered to be part of the Canon of Scripture some people some church leaders thought it should be in the New Testament instead of the revelation of John the apocalypse of John some but they should both be and there's some thought neither would you get in there John got in revelation of John about a and apocalypse fear not the apocalypse of Peter is really interesting because it is our first account of a guided tour of Heaven and Hell pulled by a Christian Peter is given a guided tour of having to Hell by Jesus and so I don't have time to read about about just say it's fascinating account it's the earliest Christian forerunner of Dante there are Greek and Roman versions before the apocalypse Peter talks with Peters the first one and was influential then on text that became known to Dante and used by Dante himself Peter Peter goes to hell and he sees all of these torments going on and people are being tormented according to their characteristic sense and so if somebody is a liar they've lied and slandered and blaspheme God they're hanging by their tongues for eternal flames women who have braided their hair to make themselves attractive to seduce men into adultery are hanged by their hair over eternal flames the men they seduced are hanging by their genitals over eternal flames and the man perhaps we didn't know it would come to this it goes on like it lists all these sins and all these punishments and then there's a very strangely a very only a very brief discussion of of heaven which is glorious but apparently there's not much you can say about him because it's blissful and glorious and there was having a great time so I want just instead of Riga I want to just get to my my conclusion in my afterward after I trace the development of heaven in hell throughout the book where I show that originally people just thought everybody died and ended up either in the same place you were just dead to thinking that there must be some justice and so there'll be some kind of rewards and punishments that crept into the Jewish view that the resurrection of the Dead eventually Christians adopted the Greek view that the soul will go to heaven will be rewarded or punished and the body will cease and so I raced the whole history up through about the fifth century of Christianity so I wanted to just give my final words on the matter at the end of the book everyone who has ever lived has had to die then other people have had their chance I hope it will go on like that for a very long time well it does for me I will continue to reflect on life death and whether there is an afterlife after reading many hundreds of authors dealing with these issues over the years at the end of the day I continue to throw in my lot with the great philosopher Socrates the teacher of Plato Socrates in my opinion said it best in his view death was one of two things either it was a deep dreamless sleep far deeper than anything we experienced normally none of us is afraid of getting a fantastic night's sleep and none of us regrets it death would be even better even if there is no activity or even consciousness a restful cessation of existence there is nothing to fear in it in modern terms this is like a general anaesthetic when you're put out and don't have if you if you don't have a dreams the alternative for Socrates after death would come a great reunion where he would meet and converse with all those who went before for the Athenian philosopher that meant having a chance to speak with the Great's of his Greek culture Orpheus Hesiod and Homer for him that would be paradise forever for me I suppose it would mean speaking with those greats of my culture Dickens Shakespeare and Jesus for him even though it's debated in my mind it's relatively clear which of these two choices Socrates or rather his ventriloquist Plato actually thought Socrates believed my opinion that 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's 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 Adele 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 thank you thank you thank you so much for for that reading and discussion we have a couple questions I know it reads a couple questions for me as well and I will start asking we've got so let's go ahead and go to one that we have from from David it was actually kind of a two-parter I'm gonna start with the more specific question that he asks what were the conditions that led to the writing of the apocalypse of Peter what crisis and the early church led to this book should be written down yeah it's a great question the the apocalypse of Peter was probably written in the early part of the second century and so probably we don't know the exact day for maybe 50 years maybe 40 or 50 years after most of the New Testament had been arisen it was a time when Christianity was growing and the church was growing it wasn't growing by huge leaps and bounds but it was getting bigger more people were getting in and problems had developed in the church one problem was the Christians were sometimes being persecuted by by non pagans and so some of the people being tortured in the apocalypse of Peter are the idolaters and the people who worship the idols the the pagans were people who turn over Christians for martyrdom other people are being who are being tormented we're not told if these are just like non-christians or they might be Christians as well it may be that there are problems in the churches where people are engaged in ethical impropriety we know of course the Christians were always engaged in ethical and Fridays as people are because they're people and in the New Testament and all sorts of ethical in proprieties and the letters Paul and here what appears to be going on this author is telling people that they've got a choice they can either have the blessings of heaven or the torments of Hell and the choice is you need to believe in Christ and you need to stop sinning otherwise you could be in big trouble thank you we've got a couple more questions that have come up I'm going to go back to an earlier one here where someone was asking for kind of a little more of a comparison oh you gave a gave one in part but they were curious about comparing the afterlife ideas between Christianity and Judaism specifically yes yep so one of the things I try to argue in the book is that you know there's not a one Christian idea and there's not one Jewish idea there in the Old Testament there there are different kinds of ideas in the days of Jesus different different Jewish groups had different ideas and he afterlife and Christians had different views of the afterlife that might seem weird but it's true they did and so it's a little bit hard to compare but the the two main views in Judaism at the time of Jesus the two main views were the view that a person died and that was the end of the story that's that's the view throughout most of the Old Testament that death is the amp and so there's no more no more existence after that the other view that develops at the end of the Old Testament period that is is a prominent view still in Jesus day is the resurrection of the body that that the body dies because the soul disappears doesn't the soul doesn't exist the body's dead and then at the end of time God breathes life back into the body brings his soul back into the body so live forever and so existence then will be bodily here on the earth forever and so that was a distinctively Jewish view there it's hard there were not very many non-jews or had that idea most non-jews thought that living forever in the body was a horrible idea I mean the body's the problem but the bodies why we have all our problems it's how we get sick and it's how we get injured and it's how we feel pain and it's why we dies because we have a body and so the idea is get rid of the body for both pagan circles including the Greek circles so Greeks develop this idea as in Plato that there's a soul that is separate from the body that lives on forever and so your body guys but the soul lives on and so Plato has the idea that the soul be rewarded or punished after death which is very interesting because it means that the Christian view that emerged it started out having two Jewish view that there be a resurrection of the body that was Jesus view and view called view that most people new Testament but eventually the people who convert to Christianity are not Jews they're people who've been trained in great circles who believed in the immortality of the soul and so Christianity ends up lighting the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Plato and the teaching the Christian teachings of abdomen hell are this amalgam of Plato and Jesus to put in very rough terms everybody asked that question i misstated it when I read she was saying specifically about the difference between jesus is teaching in judaism as opposed his Christianity but I believe that you've touched on Jesus Jesus listen that many Jews had that there's a resurrection of body at the end of time that was a very common Jewish view and it's one Jesus had so how let's see we had a question about the fact that you've just passed Easter and asking to share your insight into the resurrection stories yeah this is going to sound kind of strange but to understand the early Christian belief in the resurrection you have to understand what Jews thought the resurrection met um how do I play this if if today so suppose like you've got you've got suppose we're talking bout somebody doesn't have just a near-death experience it's simply suppose somebody really dies you know like in a year later they come back to life what would we ourselves we would think that their soul has come back from heaven or someplace and come back into the body right ancient Jews would not see it that way ancient Jews thought that the body is dead and the stayed dead and the soul didn't live on but at the end of time God was going to breathe life back into the bodies so that they could live in the kingdom of God that he was going to bring and so eternal life would be lived in the body when God got fed up of how much evil there is in the world there's too much pain and misery and suffering and God comes in and gets rid of it all and gets rid of all the evil powers in the world and sets up a new kingdom where there's no more pain suffering death and people are raised from the dead to enter in that king of the Resurrection that would happen at the end of history when Christian the father's Jesus thought he got raised from the dead their first thought was we are living at the end of history the resurrection has started so they didn't think that his soul had gone somewhere to come back they thought that he that God had started the resurrection that's why Paul calls Jesus the firstfruits of the resurrection it's an agricultural image the farmer goes out first day the harvest collects the harvest they come home they have a party that night when it gets dark they can't harms me they have a party to celebrate the firstfruits when does the farmer go out and get the rest of the harvest he doesn't wait twenty years he goes the next day so if Jesus has started it it's going to happen right away and so these Christians thought it's going to happen right away so the celebration of Easter is the original celebration is the end is near in the kingdom of God is almost upon us and so we need to prepare for it as time went on it didn't come and then went on and on and on and so the teaching got changed away from the idea that that it means the end of time has come to the idea of Jesus soul lived on and came back in his body our soul will live on and will be in heaven with him and so he's starting heaven annulment this is this was about purgatory which comes which comes later the question is saying purgatory comes later like a little bit 12th century what was the motivation and there's a Dante group involved my Dante group is tormented my Dante group is tormented yes so the word purgatory the word was invented in the 12th century it became an official Catholic doctrine in the 13th century in my book I traced the history of it back to the early period where I show that even in the 2nd century there are Christians who think that there are some people who were tormented for a while before being allowed into heaven so purgatory is this Catholic doctrine that there's this place of where people's sins are cleansed if they're not perfectly holy and can't go directly to heaven their sins are cleansed in purgatory so they are punished for a while before going to before going to before going to have it um and so this is only for people were bound for heaven eventually it's where those who aren't perfectly safe perfect Saints and the the logic driving it is the same logic that drove the idea of the heaven and hell the first place which was it didn't seem fair that people could die and there is no justice and so people who are really good suffer and have miserable lives and they die that's the end of the story and you have these people who are utter riches they're do scoundrels and there's mucks and they die there they live a happy life they die and nothing happens - that can't be right and so they ended up developing this idea that there must be rewards and punishments after death but what did but once you start thinking that soul can't die then these punishments and rewards are eternal let's find for rewards but eternal punishments you mean like I'm a schmuck for 30 years and my punishment is that I'm tortured for 30 trillion and that's only the beginning that's not right and so just as demanded that there be some kind of thing idea that you can pay for your sins later if you if you're not good so that's what purgatory comes so we've got a question again asking about our comparison of Jesus's views how did she how did Jesus express views how did Jesus's having to expressed views of the afterlife differ from those of other contemporary apocalyptic movements so apocalyptic movements are this Jewish movement that held to the idea there's going to be a future resurrection that that the world is divided into good and evil and that evil is God's enemy God's on the side of good he's going to destroy the evil at the end of history and bringing this good kingdom that the resurrected people will enter into this is a view that started out a couple hundred years before Jesus ministry it was a prominent view in his day to view that John the Baptist held is view that that the Apostle Paul held before he was a Christian is the view that the Pharisees have is view that the Essenes had the people of the Dead since is a widespread view and in basic terms Jesus understanding the kingdom of God wasn't or the apocalyptic view the resurrection wasn't very different from other Jews view he had some differences including one that was fairly important which was that being like being out really religious ain't gonna cut it it's it's it's not a matter of what you actually do it's a matter of what your heart is and what your motivation is and are you really righteous or do you just you just go through the motions so that and so he bought many Jewish leaders like you know the pastor of your church he's one of ones is going to be destroyed and so that's one of the reason may Jewish leaders didn't like him is because he's saying you know you're not you know actually gonna make so the is a question about the Hebrew concept of the their resurrection someone just asking what the roots are for the Hebrew concept of the resurrection of the body at the end of history if you yeah so where did this idea come from so as I said most of the most of the Hebrew Bible thinks that you die and that's the end of the story eventually it didn't make sense to people that they would do what God wanted them to do and the forces in the world would punish them for it and they'd get no reward ever and they died and that would be it that didn't make sense so the first book that we have that expresses this view is a book called first Enoch it's not in the Bible but it was is probably written in the third century BCE so you know so the first book in the Bible then endorses this he used the Book of Daniel Daniel is a bit confusing for most people because it claims to be written about 500 years before Jesus but in fact he's probably written about 160 or 180 years before Jesus and he claims to be a vision by this fellow Daniel who allegedly lived all those hundred years earlier where Daniel the first the first passage the only passage in the whole Hebrew Bible that talks about a future resurrection of the Dead that the good will be raised and the for-ward the he will be raised for punishment is Daniel chapter 12 verses 1 to 3 and after that it became a became a very prominent view thank you for that background we're back to another question about Christianity did the medieval Christian mystics contribute anything new or different to the understanding of this life in the afterlife I don't deal with medieval the medieval period in my book I go up to about about the fifth century one of the one of the things that happens typically in mysticism that happens in my period and happens later is that people sometimes were transported and visions to the heavenly realm and reported what they saw and this would have the authority of a first-hand witness and so it's a so mystical visions become very very popular and the visions of course include as well visions of people who are coming back from the heavenly realms to describe to describe them and so you you do you do get that and what I would say is that that those visions and the mystical experiences never so much affected official Church doctrine in the Middle Ages although it often did affect a popular piety the way general you know people would hear these these claims of mystics about their experiences and then would obviously affect how they themselves have used the divine realm thank you thanks for adding on to what you put in the book so it's it's seven o'clock I'm gonna go ahead and put out a last call for questions if you'd like to submit a question in chat and I just have a question while we're waiting to see if we have any other questions which you you obviously have been reading and writing about religion for a long time and have written so many books have been so much research and I wonder if there was anything that you found when researching these concepts of the afterlife in particular that was surprising to you yeah yeah well several things what's gonna be surprising in my book is not are not things that were so surprising to me because I knew them already and they're not you know they're not it's actually not debated very much but Hebrew Bible scholars you know did the Old Testament it's cause they did Bible offensive the Old Testament thing but there are places of torment and and reward no but Bible scholars have known for a long time know that that's not there and people are scholars for over a hundred years I've known that Jesus taught there's a kingdom of God coming here to earth and that's not that your soul dies and but they're always scholarship there but the thing that surprised me actually was about the book of Revelation which is would you what my next book is about my next book is about how the book of Revelation that a misinterpretation of the book of Revelation is what led in the nineteenth and twentieth now the 21st centuries to this idea that the world is going to end soon and that the book of Revelation is predicting what's going to happen in our future that's a complete misinterpretation and the eye and all and it's crept into popular culture with all the end times you know the apocalyptic movies and novels and things I'm going to show in this book how this all goes back to a misinterpretation of the book revelation started at the end of the nineteenth century so hey but so I'm really interested revelation but one thing I had never realized about the book of Revelation is that it does not say that the wicked people are going to be thrown into the lake of fire and be tortured forever and so the lake of fire in Revelation is how people imagine he'll usually the lake of fire shows up first in Revelation chapter 19 and there are several sentient beings who are thrown into the lake of fire there's the Beast which is sometimes called the Antichrist and his prophet and Satan but people are not destined eternally to the lake of fire people are destroyed so the book of Revelation actually has the same a similar view to the view of Jesus then it's annihilation for people but these superhuman enemies of God are they're thrown into the lake of fire so that was to surprise me because I just always assumed the revelation 500 people are going to tormented forever nope it doesn't say that so so where where do you think that came from good notion yeah of the people gonna be tormented forever well it came from there so what happened was once once it came to be thought that the reason you your soul goes to heaven or hell is because the soul is immortal then it meant that if the the rewards are eternal then the punishment has to be eternal because the soul can't die God's not gonna send these souls to heaven because they're wicked and so they're punished forever sorry but you know you had your chance and stuff like it's prayer it's its eternal torment now and it's eventually one of the things I deal with my book is a very interesting idea that people have near the end of my book is two ideas one is reincarnation which there are Christian versions of reincarnation many people say that this was a big view in early Christianity that's completely wrong it was not a big view in early Christianity even though people say it was but it was a marginal view and it was promoted by one very serious theologian in the third century Origen and it came to be condemned as a heresy but it but it was it was there that there you're gonna have another chance and in fact you're gonna thousands of chances until you get it right and so Origen have that view and then I traced the history of reincarnation a little bit the other view that gets that talk about is the view that ultimately everybody will be saved this is a view that Origen himself had the reason you keep getting reincarnate is because you got to get it right eventually everybody's gonna get it it doesn't matter how thick you are you're going to get it eventually and then everybody will be saved but that view of universalism became has always been a marginal view within Christianity and it's interesting to see that it's growing in Christian circles including in some evangelical Christian circles Bible believing Christians were evangelical who come to Glee many are moving away from the idea of Hell as eternal torment and some are moving to the idea that in fact you know salvation might be might be for everyone eventually sweet and we have got know a couple more questions and it's it's just a few minutes after 7 how do you feel about okay so there is a question about going back to Jesus again Jesus says he'll sit at the right hand of God and angels come down sometimes angels came down does this not give the idea of heaven yes yes the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament do have a view of heaven heaven is where God lives with his angels and archangels and whoever's all the super human beings heaven is not the place where humans live that's what I mean when they don't believe in heaven in hell what I mean is they don't believe in heaven in hell as a place your soul goes when it dies because ancient Jews as a rule didn't believe in the soul going somewhere after you died because the soul was just your breath dissipates when you die and so there definitely is a heaven God is there and anyone who's there is more of a divine being than a human being Christ is taken to heaven which means he's made a divine being and if the Christians thought he started their thought he started out as a divine being came down and went that so he's definitely there it's a place regardless and here's a here's a question that I think is an interesting one I mean interesting how did the Egyptian idea of the afterlife affect Christianity oh yeah yeah that's a good question then I I debated whether to include a chapter on Egyptian views of the afterlife in my book they are the kind of complicated views when you sort of dig digging down into the weeds I think complicated maybe for a lot of Westerners because the deities are not deities we're familiar with you know it's not just like the Christian God you know we know but like it's not even like Zeus and you know Apollo and you know Aphrodite and it's like easy gypsy gods you've never heard of have shapes you know animal shapes you're partly animal shaded and so if that gets confusing but the entire concepts are very foreign Western so I I thought about including a chapter on it in the book but then I you know I came to the conclusion in fact I don't think it affected early Christianity the Christian views are not dependent on Egyptian views they're just not there depending on Greek views and on Roman views but it's because the vast majority people who convert Christianity or for Greek and Roman backgrounds even the people in Egypt who early on converted before before what do you say before Christianity became the dominant religion in the world the people who converted from Egypt were people who were influenced by Greek culture rather than traditional Egyptian culture and so traditional Egyptian culture of course is very ancient and they had very distinct views but I ended up thinking it didn't affect Judaism and it didn't affect Christianity and since my book is really about where the dominant Christian view today came from I decided not so something here that isn't technically a question but I'll just kind of throw it out there is one someone just put angels in quotes and so do you have anything to say about the kinds of jinn so in the Bible in the New Testament the word for angel is on glass it looked like angels ang Els but it's the word for messenger it means somebody who has a message if if I send an envoy it's just somebody representing me if God sends an on loss it's you know a divine being up there who comes down to earth to deliver a message or to do something god wants the angel to do and so angel takes on the idea of the supernatural being who is conveying either God's message or doing God's will coming from heaven for a special purpose and so that's so that that's what angels are in the Bible they they appear on earth typically in human form they are various kinds there are different kinds of supernatural agents of God up in heaven that aren't all they're angels but they're also Seraphim and cherubim and there are these other principalities and powers and things up there but angels are specifically ones that come down to earth to do God's will so I don't have any more questions in the chat I'm gonna asked one last one and it's it's a little bit light-hearted but it's actually also a serious question if you have any any anything additional to say two-parter one have you watched the good place and if so how do you think all that fits in so I alright personal confession I never watch TV almost never i watch sports and that's about it I stop watching news because it's too depressing so I basically I watch sports I do watch series on TV but usually they're kind of highbrow things right my publicist and Cyrus user said you gotta watch the good place so okay I'm gonna do it oh my god it's fantastic and in fact I just you know I just you know watch the fourth season and just finish it like three days ago I love it I think it's great and I mean it's it's witty obviously in clever and it's not like doing the same thing for four seasons you know like different like a sitcom where it's basically the same thing with different subplots it's like it's very creative how it changes in ways that you never expect all the way to the end and I thought the ending was spectacular which I won't I won't give a spoiler here but it it resonated with what so many people think about the good place and a really really good ending it's in there's all sorts of things I'm I can you know you can write a book about the big place from from from my point of view you know from a early Christian understanding development heaven have a point of view because it's very interesting you get you get serious torment and you get you get rewards without religion right it's it's good behavior it's not it's not religiously driven the way Christian heaven the hell tend to be so there and but there all sorts of nuances and interesting things that one could say about the people the people who were very smart they knew a lot about the new lot about moral philosophy they understood there's still a lot of things so thank you for that I am glad you got around to watching it and not not that NBC needs our help or anything but if you're interested in the topic of the afterlife recommend watching the show it's also it's also generally uplifting in so many ways I think it's a great is a great thing to watch right now yeah so on that note we will end for the evening I want to thank all of you who have come tonight again for coming we appreciate you and we hope that everyone stays safe and well and heartfelt thanks to Bart Ehrman thank you so much for joining us on scene tonight we really appreciate you love it and we look forward to seeing you all again another event check our website we've got some more things coming up and be well everyone thank you so much thanks so much you

Channel: Malaprop's Bookstore & Cafe

Views: 25,264

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Id: PHIRXUE07nU

Length: 61min 15sec (3675 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020