Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart D. Ehrman

Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart D. Ehrman

Author:Bart D. Ehrman [Ehrman, Bart D.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-03-30T16:00:00+00:00


Jesus and the Afterlife

Some readers of the New Testament may have questions about this summary of the views of Jesus on the afterlife. Haven’t I left out some of the most important passages, such as the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man in Luke 16, which seems to support the idea that eternal life and prolonged punishment come immediately at death rather than at the resurrection, or passages in John 3 and 11 that indicate eternal life is a present reality and not just a future one?

I have indeed put those passages to one side for now, and for a very good reason. I will be arguing in a later chapter that these are among the sayings of Jesus that were placed on his lips by his later followers, rather than things he actually said himself. This decision has not been made lightly or in order to twist Jesus’s words to mean something that I simply want them to mean. It has been made by following the critical methods I referred to earlier, in which the earliest forms of Jesus’s sayings (e.g., many of those in Mark and Matthew) are more likely authentic, especially those that would probably not have been invented by later Christians and then attributed to Jesus.

One of the other criteria I take very seriously is the need for any saying of Jesus to fit well into his own early first-century historical context as a Jew from Galilee. I have pointed out that for over a century now critical scholars have been widely convinced that Jesus subscribed to a thoroughly apocalyptic world view. My contention in this chapter is that his apocalyptic understanding of his world extended to his view of the afterlife. Jesus did not focus on what would happen to an individual at the point of death. He was principally concerned with that great act of God that was coming soon with the appearance of a cosmic judge from heaven, the Son of Man, who would destroy the evil powers in control of this world and establish a great, utopian, and eternal kingdom. Those who lived as God wanted them to—loving their neighbors as themselves, doing good for others in need—would enter into that kingdom. Those who lived lives of self-centered sin and wickedness, on the other hand, would be destroyed, never to exist again.

Like other apocalypticists of his day, Jesus believed this day of reckoning was coming very soon. It was right around the corner. It would happen in his generation: “Some of those standing here will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God having come in power” (Mark 9:1).

But what happens if it doesn’t come? Then adjustments have to be made, and those who accept Jesus’s teachings have to reinterpret and possibly even alter them—maybe a little at first but then, possibly, more thoroughly. Eventually, in the Christian tradition, Jesus’s own apocalyptic views of the afterlife would fade as believers started thinking about what would happen not only on some increasingly distant Day of Judgment, but in the meantime, when they died.



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