Smith-Pettit Lecture - The History of Heaven and Hell

all right hello and welcome to our first ever sunstone 2020 digital symposium i'm lindsay hansen park executive director of sunstone and it's my job to welcome you here today so thanks for joining us on this opening smith pettit lecture we want to recognize that during this time there are many systems of oppression that are impacting many people in different ways in our community there's a worldwide pandemic the continual occupation of indigenous lands particularly along the u.s mexico border and the widespread racial injustice black americans and those around the world who are suffering as a result of injustice oppression greed and poverty our work is not done so we'd like to acknowledge that intersection of those things that uniquely impacts each of us in different ways and we'd like to ask you to take a moment of silence today maybe say a prayer for or donate money and energy to organizations and efforts that reduce the suffering of others put your optimistic faith in human inhumanity into action and make a commitment we want to thank our conference organizers uh grace poole she is our director of events and she has done a phenomenal job organizing the event our publications directions editor stephen carter and of course our volunteer trace rogers who has helped to make this possible thank you for all our board members donors volunteers and supporters we absolutely could not do this without you you were in part you were part of an important movement to help heal the wounds of our past and bring forth a new way to talk about heart issues of faith the sunset education foundation started in 1974 as a magazine that published in mormon experience scholarship issues and art then in 1978 it branched out into symposia and regional conferences today more than 45 years later sunstone salt lake symposium draws together sometimes hundreds and even thousands of people to talk about mormon identity history theology politics culture and more the attendees hail from all over the restoration spectrum we also recognize that we have many non-mormons attending today as well and we appreciate you being able to interact with us peculiar mormons um because the symposium hosts such a diversity of thought and belief it can be a challenge for attendees to interact with each other constructively especially when people have strongly deeply held opposing views but this is exciting to me this challenge is an opportunity for us it's an opportunity to expand our minds and empathize with each other as joseph smith put it by proving contraries truth is made manifest to participate in sunstone you only need to have an interest in mormonism and a willingness to engage respectfully thoughtfully and intelligently and sometimes that can be challenging historian steve shields has estimated that there are at least 480 extant expressions of mormon tradition or groups that came out of the original church that joseph smith restored and that includes the most well-known group the lds group which is the branch that i was born and raised in known as the mainstream mormon church or the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints so i recognize that that this audience is diverse and individuals come from many different expressions of the restoration but i hope you'll permit me to use a quote from one of the leaders in the lds tradition in which i was brought up in our late president thomas s monson said let us have courage to defy the consensus the courage to stand for principle courage courage not compromise brings a smile of god's approval courage becomes a living and an attractive virtue when it is regarded not only as a willingness to die manfully but as a determination to live decently a moral coward is one who is afraid to do what he thinks is right because others will disapprove or laugh remember that all men have their fears but those who face their fears with dignity have courage as well as we kick off this conference tonight i want you to engage these three full days of different topics discussions and themes starting tomorrow with courage i ask that we approach the conference with the courage that monson suggested the courage to open your hearts and minds to new relationships the courage to practice curiosity that one can be so difficult not by virtue of itself but as an act of radical empathy and one that disrupts the foundation over and over and over again that we might have of old harmful ideas that need to crumble away to make way for new ones to be built up may we have the courage to overcome the preconceived judgments and stereotypes we learn that we've learned and inherited over the years that keep us separated from the understanding of ourselves and from others the courage to resist the lessons and narratives that keep us small that keep our god small and keep our love and heart from growth and expansion i hope that we have the courage to claim space in this tradition that made and shaped you without fear of rejection or dogma there are so many boundaries and limits in mormonism we're so practice that that we like to tell people who belongs and who doesn't who is in who is out who believes this and who doesn't and at the sunstone symposium it's an invitation to belong we want you to be part of something where you don't need to do anything but just show up as you are and meet people as they are where they're at in that moment in time whether you are ex-mormon atheists believing latter-day saint community of christ mormon fundamentalist independent or anything in between we claim you at sunstone as legitimate heirs to this tradition with legitimate claims to its legacy its direction and its community as we begin this conference may we each have the courage to claim ourselves and to claim others thank you and now it's my great honor to turn the time over to our board member karen peter karen franklin peter is the president of the fifth quarter of the 70 for community of christ which is a tradition that stayed in nauvoo and most mostly known as the rlds tradition or emma's church and karen serves on the council of presidents of 70 and she'll be introducing our smith pettit lecturer today so thank you thank you lindsay and thank you for attending this 2020 sunstone digital symposium this is session 91 titled bart airman the audio from this session is streaming live and will be available on sunstone's facebook page you can also purchase audio from any session in the forthcoming conference by registering for this conference at sunstone.org and i recommend that you register for the conference tonight if you haven't already done so registration helps support sunstone and you will have access to over 120 sessions of our conference which will stay available for the next three months the video recording of this session will be available in the hoover app for approximately three months beginning at the end of august 2020. so a couple of instructions about the question and answer time at the end of our session please type your questions into the hoova app all the questions that you would like dr airman to address after his lecture sunstone we are making it a goal to build a community that allows many ways for people to express their faith our tagline is there's more than one way to mormon and we invite you to help us build a community where all paths are given space to be better understood please support us in our mission by making a donation and subscribing at sunstone.org now about tonight's presentation each year the smith pettit foundation offers sunstone a grant to open our symposium with a lecture from a non-mormon guest the idea is to bring new ideas and voices into our faith community this session is sponsored by the smith pettit foundation and is free and open to the public and is being broadcast on facebook as well as through our digital event app again to enter a question you must be registered for the symposium and submit your question through the hoova app a recent pew research poll showed that 72 percent of americans believe in a literal heaven and 58 percent in a literal hell most people who hold these beliefs are christian and assume that they are age-old teachings of the bible but eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the old testament and are not what jesus or his disciples taught let's join bart airmen as he unfolds the history of postmortality drawing from his latest book heaven and hell a history of the afterlife and then we'll participate together in a question and answer session following his lecture let me take a second to introduce you to our speaker before we begin bart d ehrman has written or edited 30 books including five new york times bestsellers how jesus became god misquoting jesus god's problem jesus interrupted and forged airmen is a james a gray distinguished professor of religious studies at the university of north carolina chapel hill and is a leading authority on the new testament and the history of early christianity his work has been featured in time the new yorker the washington post and other print media and he has made appearances on nbc's dateline the daily show with john stewart cnn the history channel national geographic the discovery channel bbc and major npr shows as well as other media outlets so with that let's give the floor to professor airman welcome professor can you hear me i can hear you okay you're on we've lost your screen we've lost your screen share though i think uh well i've lost uh i lost all of you and uh so let me try the screen share screen share again we can we can see there we go we can there we go we can see you and we can see your slide yeah apologies thank you kicked off for a while i thought i was uh entering into heaven but i made a brief trip to hell so uh right uh thank you all for uh for having me i really appreciate it this sounds like a unusually impressive conference you have and i'm honored to be asked to start uh with this uh with this uh this lecture of mine on the history of heaven and hell uh i should begin by saying that this is a topic that has been uh very important to me on a personal level for a uh a very long time um starting from when i was uh very young i believed in heaven and hell i was raised in the protestant tradition and i spent most of my young life as a episcopalian eventually i had a born-again experience in high school and became a committed evangelical uh christian and then i really believed in heaven and hell and was pretty sure i wanted to go to heaven and thought i was and thought most people were not and we're going to hell i i eventually for a number of reasons ended up uh moving away from my evangelical faith and then leaving uh christianity uh all together so that now i consider myself an atheist but i'm still uh a scholar of the bible and extremely interested in everything having to do with the bible and with early christianity um this talk then is uh is going to be focusing on one of the most important issues within every stream of christianity the history of heaven and hell a history that most people even those who are uh devote devout christians uh don't don't uh really know very much about uh in my experience uh so i've got i'm going to do a powerpoint here i've got slides i'm starting off appropriately with uh dante and uh and virgil uh and as you can see they are in uh they are not in paradisial here they are in the inferno uh so uh i will not be going up as far as dante my my focus of interest is on the first four christian centuries when uh christians developed the views that became traditional throughout christianity down through the middle ages into modernity about the idea that when a person dies their soul goes to either heaven or hell and now technical difficulty number two there it is okay here i start i'm going to begin with a book that uh is uh well known among scholars but not so well known among those who are not scholars it's a book that almost made it into the new testament but eventually did not up until the 4th century there were christians who thought this should be in the bible it's a book that claims to be written by the apostle peter and it's an apocalypse a revelation of what is going to happen this book was discovered uh by serendipity in 1887 by a french archaeological team that was digging in a cemetery in egypt and uncovered a tomb that happened to have a uh a uh the remains of a human being in it but also a book a 66-page book that was a small anthology of texts there were four uh different texts in this and in this book uh one of which is the one we're going to focus on here the apocalypse of peter this is now our earliest surviving account of a guided tour of heaven and hell we are familiar with the idea of a guided tour of heaven and hell from the writings of dante whom we just saw but dante didn't invent the idea uh dante in fact was picking up an old tradition that had been around in christianity for a long time that sometimes people have been given tours of uh the realms of the blessed and the damned and that's certainly what we get with the apocalypse of peter this book was probably written in the second century of the common era so say a hundred years after jesus had died in it jesus allegedly gives peter a tour of the heavenly realm and the realms of hell the it's an interesting account in part because the vision of heaven is rather brief and frankly somewhat uninteresting in part because i think there's only so many ways you can describe eternal bliss the saints are happy in heaven they are completely blessed and joyful forever and ever and in ecstasy but what do you say i mean it's you know there they are on the other hand when peter describes the torments of hell the allegedly peter describes when the author describes it claiming to be peter he can let loose all of his creative juices and he does so if you have any imagination at all you can come up with some amazing tortures for people and that's exactly what this author does it turns out that in hell in this vision people are punished according to their characteristic sin and sometimes the punishment meets the crime so for example people who have blasphemed against god lied against god with their tongue are hanged by their tongues over eternal flames women who have braided their hair to make themselves attractive so they can seduce men are hanged by their hair over eternal flames the men they seduced are hanged by a different body part over eternal flames and the men cry out we didn't know it would come to this which sure is true uh peter sees a a large number of sinners and they're all being punished according to their characteristic sin uh and he also then of course sees the uh the realms of heaven where the saints the believers in jesus who have done good deeds reside forever this is not a an overly long book it makes for very interesting reading you can still read it today in english translation since it's been since it's been published since the 19th century it is not overly subtle with respect to its overarching point the point is if you want the blessings of heaven and you want to avoid the torments of hell don't sin um and their very specific ways that it tells you uh tells you not to sin this idea that when somebody dies their soul goes to heaven and hell became the dominant view within christianity and i want to trace where those ideas came from of heaven and hell your body dies your soul gets rewarded or punished i want to talk about views now and views back in antiquity now and then now uh as karen just pointed out there uh there is a widespread view still in america that when a person dies they go to heaven seven out of ten people uh continue to think that today uh most of them christian because mainly it's a christian country but uh variety if you even throw in the atheists and agnostics seven out of ten whereas six out of ten continue to believe in a literal hell as a place of punishment for your soul if you uh if you are not among the righteous the striking thing as karen pointed out is that these views of heaven and hell are found nowhere in the old testament the old testament says nothing about a person dying and their soul going off to be rewarded or punished even more striking the historical jesus also does not teach the idea of heaven and hell the idea that your soul when you die your your body dies it ceases to exist your soul goes to one place or the other for reward or punishment forever if that's the case if it's not the teaching of jesus and it's not what was found in the old testament where do these ideas come from i've recently written a book uh that is called uh heaven and hell a history of the afterlife got published just a few months ago and it is dealing with just this question at some length it's written for a general audience it's not one of these books it's just for scholars it's for a broad uh reading audience and it tries to explain where the ideas of heaven and hell came from and i'm going to be summarizing many of the main points of this book now in my talk with you i'm going to begin with the oldest account in the western tradition of any kind of somebody being given a living person going to see what it's like in the afterlife as it turns out this account is found in our oldest writing of the western tradition the oldest story uh the writings of homer especially his odyssey uh this by the way is uh this is a illustration of an event that's happening in book 11 of the odyssey the one i'm going to talk about for a few minutes this is odysseus here who is just slaying a an animal in order to conjure up spirits of the dead who are here including a prophet named tiresias odysseus is on the in the midst of a 10 year journey uh home from the trojan war they've won the greeks have won the trojan war uh he is heading home and he is told that he needs to go visit this prophet tyresius who has died and which means he has to go down to hades in order to visit him to learn how he is going to return home and so odysseus follows his instructions and he goes there he gets his instructions about what it's going to be like going home but in addition to that he meets a bunch of people there and in his meetings we learn a good deal about what homer and probably lots of other people in homer's day in greece thought life was like in the afterlife the background is that odysseus is going to meet these people and what he finds there is what is called the joyless kingdom of the dead the people who dwell in hades as it's called are labeled shades which is another word for shadow they have all the strength and vigor and life and intelligence of your shadow when you when you stand in the sun and you see your shadow that's what it's going to be like when you die this is true for everybody um according to the odyssey everyone whether they are righteous or unrighteous whether they are whether they are good people or bad people whether they are courageous or cowardly uh whether they are rich or poor whether they are famous or unknown it doesn't matter everybody ends up in the same place this life is the only thing that matters because this life is the only time we're alive when we die we're dead and so it's not really that there's life after death in this great ancient greek view of homer uh there's not life after death there's really just death after death homer was probably writing around the 8th century bce so the time of the earliest writings of the hebrew bible as well and so far as we know this was the common view in greece at his time that uh that everyone dies and they're simply dead odysseus finds this out in some rather remarkable ways including when he meets his own mother whom he had not known had died and she had died actually because she was heart sick for him and they have a conversation and out of his um his desperate grief he goes up to his mother to hug her he tries three times to hug her and his arms slip right through her because she has no substance these shades have no substance no strength no power and in fact no memory uh this is uh so the lesson here is pretty it's pretty clear too you don't want to die stay along live as long as you can because after this for all of us it's just the existence of a shade in hades that of course raises a problem uh that many thinkers had in ancient greece and elsewhere what about justice i mean if there are gods in the world and uh i mean really like i can be a good person and uh maybe even suffer for it and die and then like i don't get rewarded and my next-door neighbor who's a real schmuck uh he's he's awful and like he's gonna get the same treatment that doesn't seem right eventually greeks started thinking otherwise they started believing in a system of justice after death there became became to be thought an idea of rewards and punishments after death virgil was a roman author who was writing uh centuries later he's writing in the first century bce so he's writing 700 years 700 years after homer virgil has been uh highly influenced by greek thought because the romans were highly influenced by uh greek thought especially in virgil's case the thinking of plato plato in his dialogues talks about in the afterlife people being rewarded or punished depending on how they live in virgil's great epic the aeneid which is modeled on homer his hero aeneas also goes to the underworld to see what the afterlife is like and so aeneas is on a long trip after the war at troy after he's trojan he's lost the trojan war and he's so he's cast out of troy and he's wandering off to found the people that will later become the romans any uh virgil is writing an account of the um of the uh uh the founding of the roman people and so he's modeling his account on homer and so aeneas also goes to the underworld and it's very similar in some ways he he's led by divine advice he goes down there he sees a bunch of people and for including a parent he tries to hug his parent three times and makes no his arm pass right through him and uh and so this is a very similar account but with a key difference in virgil's account there are rewards and punishments everybody is not a shade a shadow people have some kind of physical existence some people are sent off to tartarus which is a place of horrible torment forever other people who are righteous go to elysium the elysian fields where they are rewarded forever here we have a system of rewards and punishments depending on how one lives one's life this is picked up by from plato and the greeks and i'm going to be arguing it eventually is what made it into christianity christianity of course did not arise out of homer and virgil directly it arose out of the israelite tradition in particular it arose out of the hebrew bible the hebrew bible there are debates about whether it's been influenced by greek thought or not they're debates for our purposes here it doesn't matter very much it is interesting though to see that in the hebrew bible there is a view of death that is similar to homer's these accounts the hebrew bible account started being written about the same time as homer and in the oldest versions of the oldest parts of the hebrew bible when a person dies they are dead there is nothing after death for most of the hebrew bible when you're dead that's the end of the story you have no body any longer you don't have a soul any longer you don't exist any longer you are simply dead you have no memory and in fact you can't even worship god and god doesn't remember you this is it is not a happy portrait i painted in most of the hebrew bible about what happens when you die again it's not life after death it's death after death hebrews had a very different understanding of the human person from the greeks before plato but especially in the works of plato the idea was that a human being is made up of two substances a body and a soul when a person's body dies the soul lives on according to plato the soul is immortal even though the body dies that's the greek tradition the hebrew tradition is very different in the hebrew tradition a person is not made up of two things body and soul a person is one thing a living body when god creates adam in the book of genesis he makes a a shape of a human being out of the dirt and that's all adam is the first he's the dirt he's a model but then god breathes into him and when god breathes into him adam comes to life life is brought by the breath the breath in hebrew thought is very much like what we think of as the soul when the breath leaves the body the person dies they're dead the body's dead but the breath doesn't continue to exist this we agree with this this is our view too when when you stop breathing when you die your breath doesn't go anywhere well that's what the soul is for ancient hebrews when there's no soul that exists after death the soul is simply the thing that makes the body alive while it's alive and so when you die your breath stops your soul there's no soul you're dead what about this place in the hebrew bible sometimes called sheol the word sheol is it's hard to know what the word itself actually means there are various theories about that the word shows up mainly in poetic books like in the psalms where authors are very relieved when they are delivered from sheol which in psalms means they haven't died yet and god has kept them from dying people don't want to go to sheol because in sheol there is only death uh again there's no worship of god god doesn't remember a person in sheol there's nothing to do there geoloa is probably though not a place where people gather together to be like hades in the greek tradition lots of shades getting together with nothing to do but being bored for eternity sheol in the hebrew bible appears to be a synonym for the grave or the pit in fact it's used synonymously with grave pit and death sheol is simply where your remains are tossed when you die you don't exist any longer again this raises a very big question about justice uh if god is in charge of this world god created this world as is the case in the hebrew bible if god created this world and he called us to be his people as as jews thought and then i follow god's dictates found in the law and i'm a righteous person and but i have a horrible life anyway i'm miserable i'm sick all the time and i am oppressed and then i die and that's the end of the story no that can't be true and on the other hand this person over here is the most wicked person he's this tyrant who murders people and makes himself fabulously rich and doesn't care about about rights and about poverty or he just cares about himself and you mean he's going to die and get away with that no that's that can't be well in the virtually all the hebrew bible that is the case it doesn't start changing until the very end of the hebrew bible with the final book of the hebrew bible to be written which is the book of daniel the book of daniel doesn't come last in the bible boo is the last of the hebrew bible books be written and it starts embracing a new way of jewish thought that scholars have called apocalypticism apocalypticism is based on the word apocalypse which means a revealing a revealing or an unveiling jewish apocalyptis thought that god had revealed to them the secrets that could make sense of this miserable existence we have to live out here on earth apocalyptic thinkers starting with daniel had several points of view that came to be extremely important for the development of christianity later for one thing they were dissatisfied with the sheol idea that you you die and that's the end of the story and there's no justice well that that can't be right these apocalyptic thinkers were especially impressed by the fact that the people who were good were suffering in the world i mean it would make sense that if god was in control and you're on god's side and you knew what god wants then god would reward you but in fact when you look around it doesn't seem to be that way the people who are righteous seem to be the ones who are suffering and the people who are evil are the ones who are in power i mean who who has the wealth and the power are they are they the good people who are out to help everybody generally not uh so what is that well what it is according to apocalyptic thinkers uh starting with daniel so about we're talking about 200 years before jesus ministry here about 200 years before jesus ministry they started thinking that there are forces of evil in the world that are controlling this world and making life miserable for everyone forces of evil have been unleashed on this world they are opposed to god and they're opposed to god's people and that's why the righteous suffer the devil is invented at this time the idea that god has a personal enemy the devil has demons there are other evil forces they've been unleashed and they're making life miserable and it's only going to get worse but god is ultimately in charge of this world and god is going to intervene to redeem this world god is going to intervene in history and destroy the forces of evil and he's going to bring in a good kingdom the kingdom we live in now is wretched and miserable it's run by corrupt people who are making god's people suffer but god has had enough and he's going to intervene and he's going to ultimately solve the problem god is going to bring a savior from heaven or possibly a messiah here on earth who will solve this problem of the forces of evil there is a day of judgment coming on the day of judgment god will destroy everything that is opposed to him and he will set up a good kingdom on earth a kingdom of god when god does that god it's not that we're going to like make the world a better place we are not going to make the world a better place these forces of evil are more powerful than us uh we can't control it only god can solve the problem he's going to solve it by a cataclysmic act in which he destroys everything against him and that is going to apply not only to those who are alive when it arrives it's going to apply to those who have already died there is going to be a future resurrection of the body according to jewish apocalypticists it's important to understand what this teaching is these are jews who do not believe there's a distinction between body and soul they do not believe the soul lives on after death well then how can there be an afterlife the afterlife for these people is that the body comes back the life the breath returns to the body everyone who has died is going to be raised from the dead when the day of judgment arrives those who have sided with god will be brought into this eternal kingdom here on earth it will be here on earth this is not that your soul goes up to heaven there is no living up in heaven nobody goes up to heaven to live forever heaven is where god lives people live here god created this world for he created a paradise here on earth and he's going to bring the paradise back and people who have sided with them are going to enter into that paradise they're going to live in the body forever the bodies will be perfect bodies they will never die they'll never get sick they'll never get hurt they'll never suffer and it'll be utopian existence here on earth for everybody what about those who are opposed to god they're going to be raised from the dead as well but they ain't getting into the kingdom god is going to show them the error of their ways and judge them by wiping them out there will be a total annihilation of sinners at the end of time and that end of time is coming very soon it is right around the corner these apocalyptic thinkers were trying to encourage those who are suffering from being righteous by telling them just hold on for a while because soon god is going to intervene and you will be vindicated and god's paradise will arrive and so it's going to happen very soon that's jewish apocalyptic thought scholars for over a century now have recognized that jesus of nazareth was an apocalypticist this has been the view of scholars widely throughout europe and north america since at least the days of albert schweitzer uh albert schweitzer in 1906 wrote a very important book the quest of the historical jesus where he argued that up to his time after the enlightenment up to his time most uh scholars about jesus didn't understand who he really was he was in fact an apocalypticist who thought that god's kingdom was soon to arrive and that people needed to repent and prepare for it and if they did not they would be judged did jesus believe in heaven and hell it is very difficult to know in fact what jesus himself actually taught this is a complicated topic um many people think that of course to know what jesus taught you just read matthew mark luke and john you've got four gospels and so you read them and they tell you what he taught scholars since the enlightenment have realized that it's not that simple these gospels that we have matthew mark luke and john actually don't claim to be written by people named matthew mark luke and john the idea that matthew and john were two of jesus own disciples and that mark was the companion of peter the disciple and that luke was the companion of the apostle paul those ideas don't start appearing in christianity till about a hundred years after these books were written that these books we have were written by matthew mark luke and john scholars almost universally date these books to six to 45 to 60 years after jesus death 40 to 40 to 60 years after jesus death the first gospel was mark it was probably written around the year 70. that's 40 years later it's written in greek jesus and his followers spoke aramaic it's not written by somebody living in the jewish homeland israel it's somebody living outside of israel somebody who appears not even to be a jew who's writing in a different language from jesus who certainly didn't know jesus who's writing what he's heard about jesus from stories that have been oral circulation for decades this is a big problem and you know you have a problem when you actually look at the gospels and you take a story in one gospel and then compare it carefully with the story in another gospel and you start realizing whoa those are different and in a lot of the stories they're different in ways that cannot be reconciled this is a big problem and so scholar there are scholars who spend their entire lives trying to re-establish the teachings of the historical jesus so i'm not going to go into all that obviously i'm not going to go into the details of all that i am going to say though one of the clearest teachings on jesus lips ones that virtually all scholars agree for because of their their critical evaluation of our sources that jesus taught which is that the kingdom of god is coming this is the dominant teaching of jesus in our three earliest gospels matthew mark and luke matthew mark and luke agree on a lot of things about jesus they disagree on a lot of things too but they they agree a lot with one another and john is very different the gospel of john is written much later uh it is it's a very different gospel a lot of ways it's many people's favorite gospel um but it's so so much later with so many differences that people the scholars wonder whether you it's actually very accurate or not when it comes to the teachings of jesus matthew mark and luke are pretty consistent that jesus taught about the coming kingdom of god the earliest recorded saying of jesus as in mark early's gospel mark chapter 1 verse 16 where jesus says the time has been fulfilled the kingdom of god is at hand repent and believe the good news what does this mean this is an apocalyptic image the time has been fulfilled this world is on a timeline it's like a horizontal timeline where you've got so much time and then there's going to come a cataclysmic break when god intervenes this world we live in now this age now in this timeline this world is uh evil controlled by the forces of evil but there'll be an intervention the timeline will continue and all will be good that will be the kingdom of god the kingdom that god brings when jesus talks about the kingdom of god he is not talking about the place that your soul goes when you die jesus was a jew he didn't believe that souls lived after the body died this uh the idea of the kingdom of god is that it's a real kingdom it's a kingdom here on earth and god will be in charge of it it will be a kingdom that will be a utopian existence where there's no more misery suffering or evil of any kind those who have sided with god will enter into that kingdom most of jesus teaching is about how to enter into that kingdom you are to live for others god's law says you should love your neighbor as yourself and jesus thinks god means it if you do that if you really love others taking care of others as much as you take care of yourself you will enter the kingdom you feed yourself you should feed others you clothe yourself you should clothe others you take care of all of your needs you should take care of the needs of others you should care about the homeless and the hungry and the foreigner and anyone who is suffering this is the core of jesus teaching that there's this kingdom of god coming and you need to prepare for it those who do not enter the kingdom of god well okay good luck to them well they're not going to have any good luck jesus taught they're going to be tossed into gehenna what's ghana one problem with understanding jesus teachings about both the kingdom of god and gehenna is that english bible translations can confuse you the word gehenna is it actually derives from the hebrew it's not a greek word even though the new testament is written in greek but it's a it's a hebrew word because the genna is a place and it's first mentioned in the hebrew bible the problem with english bible translations is that a number of bible translations translate the word in on jesus lips with the word hell that is so wrong when we think of hell we think of the place that your soul goes when your body dies it lives up in heaven lives in heaven or it goes down to hell down place of suffering gehenna is not the place of eternal torment on jesus lips gahanna in the old testament is a valley outside of jerusalem that was understood to be the most god forsaken place on the earth because gehenna was this valley where some israelites practiced child sacrifice the most heinous sin against god and humanity possible it was cursed in the old testament it was cursed in jesus day and jesus tells people that if they uh if they disobey god if they do things god doesn't want they are in danger of being tossed into gehenna what he means is they will not get proper burial rights and their corpses will be dishonored and shamed and thrown into the most despicable place on earth ancient people almost universally desperately wanted proper burial rites this is true in greek circles and in roman circles and in jewish circles and all just every circle we know jesus is saying that if you get cast out of the kingdom of god you will in fact be in danger of being thrown into this despicable place gehenna that's where your corpse will remain you will not enter into the kingdom of god because you won't be resurrected for eternal life and so what does jesus teach about heaven and hell in particular of course heaven for jesus is not the place your soul goes it's the kingdom of god and hell jesus did not teach that there was a place of eternal torment there is no hell for jesus what there is is destruction jesus taught that those who did not enter into the kingdom of god would be destroyed they'd be raised from the dead they'd realize oh my god i really missed out on that one and then they would be annihilated this is the consistent teaching of jesus throughout the gospels at least in the sayings that we're pretty sure jesus said let me give you a couple of examples people don't notice this because they just assume jesus is talking about hell as a place of torment but when you actually look at what he's saying he didn't saying that matthew 7 enter through the narrow gate for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction and there are many who go through it how narrow is the gate and how hard the path that leads to life there are few that find it you can have eternal life what's the option of eternal life it is not eternal torment it's destruction or the parable of the weed six chapters later um so uh jesus tells this parable that uh this fellow uh plants is filled with grass with all these reeds weeds grow up and they uh they end up gathering the weeds and this is what happens uh they take the weeds and they throw them into the furnace to burn them and then jesus draws draws the uh lesson just as the weeds are gathered and consumed with fire so it will be at the close of the age the son of man will send his angels they will gather out of his kingdom all those who urge people to sin and who act lawlessly and they will cast them into the furnace of fire what happens to sinners at the end of time they're destroyed by fire when you throw a weed into the fire it doesn't exist forever it's it's burned it's destroyed it doesn't it doesn't exist that's what's going to happen to sinners they will be destroyed jesus teachings of uh of what happens at the judgment is found most clearly in his uh parable of the sheep and the goats which is in uh in uh in matthew uh in matthew matthew's gospel chapter 25. um the uh it's the last judgment scene everybody is in front of the judge of the earth he's come to judge the earth uh to destroy the forces of evil and all the nations of earth are gathered in front of him and uh this this one that jesus calls the son of man this judge uh uh has uh one group of people on his right these are not just jews by the to all the nations of earth some are on his right some are on his left the ones on the right he calls the sheep and the ones on the left he calls the goats so this king who is judging um uh welcomes those who are on his right the sheep and he says to them welcome you are to come into the kingdom of my father because i was hungry and you fed me i was thirsty and you gave me to drink i was naked and you clothed me i was i was in prison and you visited me and so come you are blessed by my father inherit the kingdom that was prepared for you from the beginning of the world these people enter the kingdom of god and they're confused because they say uh but how did we do these things we you say we fed you when you were hungry and gave you water when you're there we've never even met you we don't know who you are and he says inasmuch as you've done it to the least of these my brothers and sisters you've done it to me if you help those in need you are on god's side whether you're a jew or not and you'll enter into the kingdom then he turns to the people on his left the goats and he says uh be off you who are cursed go away to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels because i was hungry and you didn't feed me i was thirsty you didn't give me anything to drink i was naked you didn't clothe me i was in prison you didn't visit me and so off with you to the eternal fire uh and uh they say but what do you mean we didn't feed you we we we've never seen you before jesus you didn't do those who are in need you didn't do it to me and then he concludes by saying these will go off to eternal punishment but the righteous to eternal life now this is one of those passages that you read and it sure sounds like he's talking about heaven and hell i mean some go and be rewarded in the heavenly realm of the kingdom and others are sent off to the eternal fire and so that means heaven and hell right now look carefully at his final words some go to eternal punishment the others go to eternal life so you've got the wicked eternal punishment righteous eternal life these are corresponding statements you have wicked the goats on one hand you have the sheep on the other hand both go to an eternal punishment or reward but what is the reward the reward is life well if these are to be opposites sinners versus wicked what is the opposite of life it's not torture the opposite of life is death these people are sent off to the fires to be burned and destroyed jesus never talks about eternal torment he talks about eternal fire but the fire is eternal yes the fire is eternal but people don't live in the fire eternally when you burn somebody at the stake the fire continues on after the person's death but the person is not still in agony three weeks later or three hours later after they're dead for jesus it is eternal punishment it's an eternal punishment because it's the ultimate punishment it's the death penalty and it's eternal because it never ends it will never be reversed and so jesus taught that there will be a kingdom of god here on earth for those who are raised in the body who will enter in a utopian existence and there will be destruction for those who are not on god's side jesus did not teach that your soul would go to heaven or hell so where did heaven and hell come from jesus like other apocalyptic apocalypticists thought that the end was coming soon jesus told his followers some of you standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of god has come in power this kingdom this paradise that's coming is going to happen before the disciples all die that's mark chapter 9 verse 1 mark chapter 13 verse 30 jesus says truly i tell you this generation will not pass away before all these things take place his disciples have asked him when the end of the world is going to come he describes the day of judgment and then he says this generation won't pass away before these heat happen it didn't come jesus died his disciples died uh years past decades past the end didn't come and people ended up having to reinterpret jesus teachings jesus had agreed with apocalypticists about this horizontal dualism a dualism between this evil age and the age to come a dualism of course two fundamental components of reality and it's horizontal everything is on a kind of a timeline this age the age to come this age is going to end with this cataclysmic judgment it's going to happen very soon what ends up happening is that it doesn't come soon and people started reinterpreting the dualism what they end up doing is flipping the dualism on its axis so that it's no longer a horizontal dualism it's a vertical dualism it is no longer about time now this age then the age to come the kingdom of god it's about space it's about up and down no longer is it the kingdom of heaven here on earth it's the kingdom of heaven in heaven where god dwells no longer is a destruction here on earth it is eternal destruction below one thing that facilitated this shift from a horizontal dualism of the body being raised from the dead for eternal life in the kingdom to a vertical dualism of the soul living to heaven hell is that most of the people that the early christians converted to believe in jesus were not themselves jewish starting with the apostle paul the vast number of people who converted were gentiles they came from pagan backgrounds they came from greek ways of thinking greek ways of thinking were dominant throughout the entire roman empire greek ways of thinking going back at least to plato who taught that the soul is immortal the body dies but the soul lives on these people who converted to christianity naturally brought their ideas with them into christianity they weren't jews they thought that there's a difference between body and soul and so they started thinking not like jewish apocalypticists but more like plato where you die and your soul goes one place or the other but now it's different from plato because your soul goes to one place or another depending on whether you have faith in jesus and are a good person do good deeds if you are you will go up if you're not you'll go down but the thing about the soul is plato taught it was immortal it couldn't die that meant that if you your soul goes up it's going to be there forever because it can't die but the soul of the wicked is also eternal which means it also cannot be destroyed it can't die and so now the idea is it will be punished forever and that's where you start getting eternal format uh with a uh a little picture here to benefit your imagination about uh what that might entail and so we get the birth of heaven and hell the birth of heaven and hell as a place that your soul god goes uh after you die this is a rather uncomfortable amalgam between the teachings of jesus and the teachings of plato jesus who taught that god in the end was going to do justice and plato who taught that the soul is immortal and will survive the body you combine those two and you get heaven and hell this change happened some decades after jesus death it happened some decades after jesus death as people in that period were telling their stories about jesus and remembering the things he said and remembering the things that he taught they um uh they naturally told what they thought jesus taught based on what they understood about jesus by this time what they understood about jesus is that he thought there was a heaven in hell and so some of jesus teachings in our later gospels from this later period seem to embrace the idea of the heaven and hell but it's because these are not the things that jesus actually taught these are things that are put on its lips by later storytellers the task of scholarship is figuring out which things jesus really taught and which things have been put on his lips later and so some of you are while i've been giving this talk you're you're you're going through your uh your little file in your head your rolodex file which we never have rolodex files anymore but many of you will know what i mean and you're coming up with these verses in the bible that seem to support the idea of a heaven and hell and there are there are a couple uh such as uh uh the parable of lazarus and the rich man where it appears like this rich man dies and goes to hell and it's burning the poor man goes to heaven and and look yes and it's almost certainly something jesus didn't teach himself um i don't have time to prove that although somebody has a question about it i'm happy to talk about explain why but i do talk about this in my book and try to explain why it's almost certain that jesus held the traditional jewish view of the kingdom of heaven and the destruction of sinners at the end of time this teaching of jesus is very different from the teaching that came down in christianity that will come as a surprise to many christians today but in fact it's part of a larger picture much of the new testament uh records of jesus in fact are later elaborations of the things that jesus taught sometimes exaggeration sometimes things put on his lips sometimes things that he didn't actually do that are described in these texts the teaching of heaven and hell is one of those things original christianity did not have life in heaven and lie and torment and hell but it had was a kingdom of god that was coming soon that would be a paradise here on earth and for those who failed to meet god's demands destruction nowhere in the teachings of jesus or in the old testament is there any teaching of eternal torment thank you very much thank you professor very much for that we have as you can imagine several questions so i did want to give you a chance to first though answer this this was our first question that came in at the beginning of your lecture and natalie carden asked as a layperson what book would you recommend she read first of those that you have written uh no it's a good question so um the uh my my most popular book the one that sold the most that people uh talk to me the most about is the one called misquoting jesus um it's a book that uh it deals with how christian scribes were copying their new testament changed it in places so there are places where we don't know what the original writers actually said um my probably my favorite book to write for a general audience was this heaven and hell book that just came out it was uh is really just for me just endlessly fascinating uh to write about i i most of the times when i write a book for a general audience this is true most scholars you know when you like if you if you have somebody who's like a physicist who writes a book for a general audience he's not like learning anything when he's writing the book because he's a physicist this is what he does for a living and so it's kind of like that when you're right but but this having a hell book i actually learned something i i i came to different views about things that i hadn't had before which is my most um sophisticated popular book the one that i think that i'm most proud of as a piece of like really uh is is the triumph of christianity so those are yeah so they asked for one and i gave you three so there you go natalie you can take your pick of those three jordan uh rude asks this question and it's about revelation about the passage in revelation regarding a quote war in heaven unquote i believe most christians interpret it as an origin story of satan and the fallen angels mormon theology goes further with it stating that this war was a pre-mortal battle between jesus and satan over agency and that everyone born on earth was there as a spirit can you explain to us what does this passage mean to bible scholars and how an evolving view of heaven and hell led to the modern christian and possibly mormon reinterpretation of this passage so i'm not able to speak to the justification for the mormon view because i'm not familiar with with mormon understandings of the book of revelation i will say that the book of revelation um has a really important uh verse early on when the uh when jesus appears to john and he instructs him toward the end of chapter one that he is to write the things that have been the things that are and the things that are to come chapter one describes what has hap already happened the vision that the person has john has had of jesus chapters two and three describe the things that are he writes the author writes seven letters to the seven churches of asia minor and he's describing the situation in the churches now starting with chapter four the rest of the book is about things that are about to happen and so they're descriptions of the future um and so uh you know i'm not you know you know i'm not gonna say anything about the particular mormon interpretation but we'll say the bible scholars generally understand this to be a kind of a cosmic battle that's kind of like what i was describing uh the book of revelation the word apocalypse actually comes to us from the book of revelation that revelation is a latin word that means a revealing and it's the latin translation of the word apocalypse and so sometimes this book is called the apocalypse of john and it's normally understood by biblical scholars to be a a kind of a vision of the triumph of god or the forces of evil and this battle in heaven is usually understood as one of the elements of this uh this eventual uh defeat of the powers of evil in the world thank you thank you so you um mentioned luke 16 in the passage there in about the rich man and lazarus and we did indeed have a question about that so how do scholars or how do you interpret jesus parable of the rich man in lazarus in luke 16 and that's from spencer parker okay i'm going to assume that people do not necessarily know the details of this and so i'm going to this is going to take this is going to take a minute because i've got to explain how this parable works jesus in luke 16 uh this is found by the way only in luke 16 this is the only place in the new the other gospels don't have the don't have the story jesus talks about this um uh there is a very very wealthy man who lives in this mansion and he eats sumptuous meals all day long every day and he's dressed in his gorgeous clothes and like he's just he's just as rich as they can get and outside of his gates is a man whose name the rich man's number name named lazarus lazarus is dirt poor he's starving to death he's begging by the gates and just hoping to get some scraps from this rich man's food and he's sick and he's got he's got sores all over his body he's so bad off the dogs are coming up and licking his swords so i mean real contrast they both die the uh the rich man is taken down into uh down below the earth and is tormented in fire lazarus is taken up to the heavenly realm to be in abraham's bosom abraham the father the jews so he's feasting with the patriarchs of israel in heaven the rich man looks up and he's down there he's dying down he's he's in bad shape he can't die he's there forever and he he sees abraham and he says abraham send lazarus down at least he could stick his finger in some water and cool my tongue and everyone says no i can't do it there's this huge gap between us there's this chasm and you can't go between one and the other and so sorry but it's not going to happen and the richmond says well look at least at least could you send them back to earth because i got these brothers and if you would just tell if you just tell them what's going to happen if they don't turn around if they don't repent then you know so he can at least warn them and abraham says this is a really important verse and it says abraham abraham says if they don't they've got moses in the prophets they've got their bible if they don't believe moses and the prophets they aren't going to believe even if someone is raised from the dead that's a key verse and the reason it's a key verse is because it shows that almost certainly jesus did not tell the story because it presupposes that the audience knows somebody has been raised from the dead and people still don't believe so this is not a story this is you know in my talk i was saying you know there's some things that appear to be put on jesus lips this is one of those places and it's it's because of that the second thing i'll say two other things i'll say about it is that it is clearly a parable it is not a literal description of what's happening it this happens in the gospel of luke the section of the gospel luke is one parable after the other and a lot of these parables begin with exactly the same words there is a certain man that's exactly how this parable starts there was a certain man so it's a it's a parable um which means it's not a liberal description of anything the other thing to say is that there's no word about either one of these the rich man suffering forever he's just suffering now and so we don't know we don't know if it's eternal torment even in the in the parable but i don't think it's something jesus taught i think it's something later got put on his lips by somebody who's trying to make this point about uh even if somebody's raised from the dead they're not going to repent excellent so we're going to stay in the new testament for a moment and what is the scholarly consensus about first corinthians 15 29 regarding baptisms for the dead is there any evidence that early christians actually performed baptisms for the dead and we can thank corinne creland for that question so uh right i will say that when i'm talking to uh the protestant audiences i never get this question like mainline episcopalians methods they do not ask this question so all right baptism for the dead right uh the reality is we don't know uh we don't know what what it's all about um there are uh there are dozens of theories uh that uh the scholars have you know it could well be you know i mean obviously uh uh it could be that people are being baptized for the sake of others who have died already we don't know what what that would we don't know what that would involve um paul is presupposing that this is a pr whatever it is as a practice but you know it some scholars think it doesn't mean for the physically dead but for the spiritually dead um or scholars think that it means for people who died who were already people who have faith who had come to believe in christ but hadn't been baptized yet uh and so as i said and the theory is on my arm but the interesting thing is that paul presupposes that uh it's happening he doesn't he doesn't approve it or disapprove he just he states it kind of as a fact so he knew what it was about and they knew what it was about um and uh the other thing is that the reason he's saying it is the particular thing of importance for paul he's saying it because he's saying that if the dead are not raised in the future then what's the point of being baptized for them uh so it's only if there's a future resurrection that this matters and so so he's not making a point about the about baptism for the dead he's making a point about the resurrection uh and so yeah so sorry i wish i had a definitive explanation but i mean i know about 20 scholars who have definitive explanations and each one of them has a different explanation that's excellent so you mentioned that the devil was invented by apocalypticists about 200 bce who then was satan in job yeah great great question so um so it's there's a there's a figure in the book of job uh chapters one and two called hasseltong the hebrew the satan satan in hebrew means the the adversary and so this is uh in in the book of job this is not the devil this is not the evil power opposed to god what's happening is job is the most righteous man who's ever lived and he's got a great life as a result of it and god telling tells the divine beings around him the sons of god around him the divine counsel around him look at this man he is so righteous and then the adversary who playing plays devil advocate uh says well yeah of course he's that way because look what he's getting out of it and so and so god and the satan the adversary have this conversation and god allows him to harm job and to i mean it's awful as you know um but this is one of god's uh council members and so god has this divine counsel around him what ends up happening in apocalyptic thought is that this hassetan figure becomes the enemy not of some a righteous person like joe becomes the enemy of god and um and then you start getting the idea of the devil and which is a word that does not occur in the hebrew bible and uh and demons and forces of evil that that happens around the second you know in the second century bce and now now it's part of the evil forces that are aligned against god so before that the satan wasn't wasn't the devil figure so there's another question about i will stay with with satan for a minute if you don't mind or with uh devils did zoroastrian ideas of eternal punishment and devils influence jewish thought during and following the exile yeah another great question so um i've changed my mind about this this is one of the things i've changed my mind about because for years i taught that zoroastrianism which came out of persia had an influence on judaism because uh the the land air that we would call israel today was at uh was at one point conquered by the persians and so after the so after the babylonians uh did their thing and wiped out the land then the persians came in and after the persians came to greece and they kind of went like that and zoroastrianism is the dualistic religion that comes out of persia where these two eternal forces of good and evil and you get imagery that's very similar light and darkness and such that you start getting an apocalyptic thought and so the question the jewish apocalypse and so the question is since persia was there and since this thought is dualistic and it's got light and darkness it's got good and evil and it's got it it sure sounds like maybe came from zoroastrian and so uh i used to think so uh and uh i taught my students that and now i'm not sure at all i'm really not i'm not i'm not positive at all in part because um the zoroastrian texts that we have that embrace this view are dated centuries later and it's hard to know whether they represent villarastian views at that time the other problem is that this seems to have crept that the persian influence um ended with you know with the alexander the great uh in 323 well right around the 320s uh in israel and but you don't don't start getting um apocalyptic thought for another 100 years or more than 100 years and so it doesn't look like it's being directly connected with persia and so so there are these other reasons for dating they're kind of technical and scholars debate back and forth this is one of those things nobody's going to agree on but but i i i kind of doubt it now and i certainly don't certainly don't affirm that that's the case so what are your thoughts on the story of the witch of endor raising samuel's spirit at saul's request and how would it relate to your view of the ancient jewish belief of the soul after death thank you jacob bidrain yeah so uh right we got a lot of rolodexes out there they're going through their bible but yeah this is good this is another one yeah it's another one yeah yeah so for those who are really interested i mean i do deal with all of these in my book because these are all you have obvious passages you would go to i mean because this is so let me tell you about the of endor story in case uh some people may not may not know it so saul is the first king of united israel uh israel had been ruled by local tribe leader judges for a long time and then saul's the first game and uh that's great but he's got this personality problem and he's always doing things wrong and it's not going well for him um he has the spiritual advisor samuel after whom first and second chamber name he's the last great prophet of israel up to this point and the last judge of israel i mean and he um he uh he's his advisor but he's died and saul things are going very badly for the kingdom and the neighboring armies of the fair the philistines are gathered against them there's going to be a battle looks like they're going to lose saul needs advice his advisor is dead saul arranges for a medium to uh bring saul back bring uh bring samson bring samuel back from the dead and uh she's nervous to do this because the king saul has made this illegal by with penalty of death uh and so he disguises himself goes this medium convinces her to do it she doesn't know it's him she uh he wants to raise a person from there she raises this person up and and she realizes that the guy made him do do this made her do this is solve the game he's just from bad that but then samuel comes up uh it's kind of a seance thing samuel comes up and she recognizes him because he's all recognized because he's he's dressed like samuel he's wearing his clothes and he's an old man and and he's uh and he talks with him and samuel gives him some very bad news he said you shouldn't do this you're not supposed to be consulting mediums and he said and the bad news is you're going to be with me tomorrow so so again this sure sounds like you know he's gonna die and his soul's gonna go down to sheol with uh samuel so several things uh to point out the the normal typically hebrew bible scholars do not think this is talking about the soul of samuel coming up uh from shield sheol is not mentioned here samuel appears to come up out of the ground but why out of the ground because that's where he's he's in the grave he's in a grave that's where bodies are buried and he doesn't come up as a spirit he comes up as a body he's wearing his clothes and he's got his old he's an old man i mean so his body has been like supernaturally this is the problem is this woman is doing what god's supposed to do which is raise the dead and you can't do that you're acting like god and so sam samuel's all picked off and we're not sure it doesn't say why he's ticked off he doesn't say you know i was having a great time down there and uh you know he interrupted the parties i'm kind of upset about that he but he's he he just you you cannot use a medium and so because you've done this you know you're out of here too uh and so i don't think it's teaching that a soul uh dies and goes someplace uh i think it's it is a strange story but it seems to me teaching that that the body has been reanimated the way it would be later understood be reanimated in the resurrection so we're gonna go visit uh mormon theology for just a moment to uh mormonism divides heaven into three kingdoms celestial terrestrial and celestial is there any precedent for this in early christianity um only in a roundabout way um the um the there were a number of ancient people including a number of ancient jews who thought that there are multiple levels of heaven um and so um you have people who talk about going to the third heaven or people going to the seventh heaven and so um the idea is that so the idea the idea goes back to actually kind of goes back to plato so in so hundreds of years after plato there's a few a school of thought that's developed that's called middle middle platonism and the idea of middle platonism is that it isn't just that you've got kind of this material world down here and a spiritual world up there there has to be some kind of transition between one and the other and in middle platonism the idea is that you get these layers going up from from less material and more spiritual but you can't get to the spiritual right away you got to go through these layers and so heaven has these various layers and when you get to the very top is where god lives and so uh and so people go to different levels and so you certainly you do get this in the early christian tradition starting starting in the writings of paul who um who talked about going up to the third heaven um so yes there is press there's not a precedent for those names and for those precise delineations but the idea that heaven is tiered is is an ancient idea so there's another question about the belief that jesus descended into hell after his death and then came back to heaven and of course in mormonism there's a belief that jesus visited the americas so can you elaborate on those ideas in the sense that where did that idea come from that jesus went to hell so i'm writing a book that's dealing with this now actually i'm writing a scholarly book dealing with this um the um it goes all the way back to the idea that uh if jesus was a human if he died where do humans go i mean once once you have the idea once the apocalyptic thing has gone away and you start having this thing a soul souls going to heaven or hell then then you know souls go to in greek thinking souls go to hades and so jesus had to go to hades and so okay we'll call that hell so jesus had to go to hell then it came we thought well he got raised three days later what was he doing down there uh and so they started developing well they must have been preaching he's probably taking his salvation down there uh and so they developed these traditions that are called the harrowing of hell where jesus saves people who had been down there they they haven't been able to go to heaven yet because jesus hadn't died yet can't go to heaven if jesus doesn't die well so where are they they're down there in hades and jesus goes and gets them out of there um and in some traditions i'm especially interested in uh he gets everybody out because it isn't just about him having great preaching you know and that he's done some nice things here for us it's that he is so powerful he's more powerful than the forces of evil and nothing can stop him and not even hell can hold him back and so he takes everybody out and they go up uh and so that's you start getting the idea of christ going down to hades uh as soon as you have an idea of anything in haiti so it's a greek idea to start influencing christianity you start getting the idea of a harrowing of hell uh not too long after that i mean it becomes first expressed in a really graphic visual way in a book called the gospel of nicodemus which is in the fourth century of golothos you can make it in the new testament and you don't look at the idea of jesus come to the americas of course you know until your tradition started okay one last question since we're getting to the end of our time how do you reconcile jesus alleged statements that the kingdom of god is within you with the idea that he believed in the literal kingdom of god another great question so um remember that the idea that um there's a heaven in hell the rich man the lazarus thing is in luke 16 and luke is the only one that has this luke is also the only one that has this particular verse the verse is uh it's in luke 17 and it says that uh jesus is talking to his enemies the pharisees who don't believe his teaching uh uh and he and they don't believe he is who he is and they they abuse him and he says that if they only knew the kingdom of god is among you he says so the greek word is among you can be translated different ways and unfortunately in some bible translations it's translated within you which means you know it's inside of you somehow it's inside your body your kingdom of god's inside your body it absolutely does not mean that in this passage in luke we know it doesn't mean that for a lot of reasons but one reason is because he's talking to his enemies the pharisees and he certainly doesn't think the kingdom god's in them and so but there there there's a whole host of reasons for thinking that so what he's saying is that it's again distinctive to luke's gospel in luke's gospel the idea is that jesus brings the manifestation of the kingdom here with us now that in his ministry we can see what the kingdom is like in the kingdom there will be nobody who has a demon in him so jesus cast out demons there'll be nobody who's sick and so jesus heals the sick there'll be nobody who's hungry and so jesus feeds the hungry there'll be nobody who dies and so jesus raises the dead jesus enacts the kingdom in the here and now and so it's among us he's showing us what it's like that's what it means in luke but but it's again it's not something that jesus himself said um and even if he did say it it wouldn't mean it's inside of you and so yeah because jesus is this later king all right i have one i don't know if i'm gonna have a chance to say something but i want to say something certainly please do i want to tell people who are on this about my blog if i can just take 30 seconds to do that um if you enjoy the kind of things i'm talking about here uh then i talk about this stuff all the time i have a blog it's just called the bart urban blog i post five times a week between 12 and 1400 words a day on everything having to do with the new testament historical jesus the apostle paul books that didn't make it into the new testament early christian history up to the emperor constantine women in the church jewish religion jude old testament greek roman religion the whole i've been doing this thing since 2012 so they're eight years i i've not missed a week i've done it five times a week for every week for 12 over for over eight years uh there's a membership fee to join uh it's not expensive it's uh 24.95 for a year membership and i give every money to chair every bit of the money to charity i don't keep any myself none of this money pays for the overhead for it for any anything although it goes directly to charities dealing with hunger and homelessness uh and so um we uh we will looks like we'll be raising 200 000 this year from the blog uh we uh it's it's serious money and i hope people can join because uh you get tons for your money if you're interested in stuff it's like it's like it's a no-brainer so anyway i hope people can join it thank you so much not only for the brilliant lecture but the really marvelous answers to our questions and with your blog for an opportunity for us to contribute to good in the world so it has been a successful smith lecture and we thank you so much for being our guest and we thank all of our attendees tonight for supporting sunstone and may you have a wonderful good night

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 114,182

Keywords: Smith-Pettit, Sunstone Education Foundation, Lindsay Hansen Park, Karin Franklin Peter, Heaven and Hell, Agnostic, Bart Ehrman, Heaven, Afterlife, Immortality, Everlasting Life, Paradise, Damnation, Hell, Hades, Abyss, Gehenna, Perdition, Tophet

Id: L_eZf33UMs8

Length: 89min 59sec (5399 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020

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[u/GOB_Farnsworth]

A fascinating Sunstone lecture by Bart Ehrman. Some bullet points:

• There is no notion of life after death in Judaism until the second century BCE

• The earliest western notion of an afterlife consisting of punishment/reward (heaven or hell) comes from Greek thought - for instance, the Elysian Fields vs Tartarus. The notion of an immortal soul comes from Plato - previously to the development of the idea of rewards and punishments, all "shades" lived a kind of flavorless existence in hades regardless of merit.

• In Judaism the notion of an afterlife comes from the Book of Daniel (~167 BCE), but it's not a spiritual afterlife - it's resurrection and judgement. Those judged unworthy are killed again (destroyed), those judged worthy live in God's kingdom on earth

• Jesus' notion of an afterlife is very similar to Daniel's.

• Later gentile converts incorporated the notion of a spiritual afterlife (heaven and hell) into Christianity, just as the notion of a spiritual messiah had been incorporated previously.