Heaven and Hell (Bart D. Ehrman)

OVERVIEW

I’ve been meaning to get to Heaven and Hell by Bart D. Ehrman for an age. Similar to why I enjoyed The Hour of our Death by Philippe Ariès – for conveying just how much our conception of death has changed over the last millennium – I wondered how our conception of the afterlife had changed.

As it turns out, it’s changed plenty.

Hades

The ancient Greeks were afraid to die because they thought the afterlife (Hades) would be an eternity of body-less boredom. For them, all pleasures were physical pleasures, and so without a body, wouldn’t the afterlife be bland and miserable? Plato had a different view, that it was the immortal soul that was the real and best thing, not the body, and that at death the soul would be liberated (to do for eternity what Plato loved doing best: philosophizing). Epicurus agreed with Plato that the soul was real and made of material stuff but disagreed that it “went” anywhere after death. Like Lucretius, Epicurus argued the soul dissolved along with the body (and so death was nothing to fear, because we would never experience being dead).

Nothingness and Bodily Resurrection

Over in ancient Israel there was no afterlife. When you perished, your soul perished too. But this belief waned as Jewish thinkers grew more and more indignant at the unfairness of that arrangement. Why should the faithful live through suffering and persecution while the sinners accumulate pleasures and riches and then die and get away with it? (This dissonance was a uniquely monotheistic problem; if you believe in many gods, it’s easy to imagine some are wicked. When there’s only one, it’s harder to square). A subset of Jewish thinkers started believing that God’s vengeance and divine justice were coming, that God would resurrect the nation of Israel. But is it really vindication if you’re not around to experience it? Surely, God should resurrect not just a “nation,” but the individuals too. The reality is that theodicy, the desire for divine retribution and recompense, inspired these early conceptions of immortal resurrection. A growing portion of Jewish thinkers subscribed to the belief that on Judgment Day, which was imminent, the sinners would be eliminated and the faithful would be bodily resurrected to God’s new kingdom (take note: resurrected not to an immaterial plane of existence, but rather to a physical afterlife here on earth). While Plato thought the soul was inherently immortal, these Jewish thinkers believed God had to make the soul and body immortal. And what of all the sinners that had already died or were annihilated on Judgment Day? They stayed dead. Death was the punishment.

Around this time, some started wondering why God would wait for Judgment Day (shouldn’t divine justice be immediate?), and was death really a sufficient penalty for sinning? Others started imagining that maybe God had a nemesis… that maybe there was a powerful devil who accounted for all the evil and suffering in the world. And what were the logistics of bodily resurrection? How would rotting corpses become perfect bodies? What age would you be resurrected to? And would your amputated foot come back with you?

Heaven and Hell

Jesus held the apocalyptic Jewish beliefs of the time, that the devil caused evil, but that God would intervene soon.  On Judgment Day, God would reassert his power, resurrect the believers, and exterminate the remaining sinners. Paul, who helped popularize Christianity, thought the same. Of course, Judgment Day never came and rather than believe Jesus was wrong, his followers began to imagine he must have been misunderstood or misquoted. These later biblical authors took the temporal dualism of Jesus’s time (that the evil age would be transformed by Judgment Day into a good age), and they made it a spatial dualism… that there is a good place and a bad place and that they are present realities, not future events. This satisfied the growing belief that divine judgment should be immediate, it solved tricky resurrection logistics by doing away with bodily resurrection altogether, and it gave us the doctrines of heaven and hell that most Christians believe today (but that neither Jesus nor Paul believed). Heaven was a place where the faithful would worship God for all eternity and hell was where sinners would be tormented (annihilation was no longer sufficient punishment). This is why descriptions of heaven and hell do not occur until the later books in the Bible, because they arose to justify the absence of the Judgment Day proclaimed by Jesus. For thousands of years, there were no conceptions of divine rewards or punishments. Heaven and hell were devised to satisfy our cognitive dissonance and our deep longing to have justice in death, if not in life.

What is, arguably, the most important driving element behind our afterlife beliefs is our wanting there to be an afterlife. We want to be rewarded for our good behaviour, we want evil people to be punished, and we want, badly, never to die. Simply, we took everything we most desired and gave it to ourselves. The afterlife, like so many things, is a human invention.

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? Yes, because the author makes no positive claims.

If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Where our modern concepts of heaven and hell came from, and why they are anything but fixed.

Who should read this book? People who can’t shake the fear of dying and going to hell.