Heaven and Hell with Bart Ehrman

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
this week we are going to be featuring a couple
of interviews that I recorded last week. Because last week, Robert,

(00:24):
you were out of quote the office. You were at
least you were off work for a bit, and uh so,
so I recorded conversations with authors of some books, one
book that's already out this year, in one book that's
coming up. So on Thursday of this week, we're going
to be airing a conversation that I had with the
author of a fascinating upcoming book about the evolutionary biology
of cancer. But today we're going to be exploring a

(00:47):
topic in the realm of ancient history and religion. And
if you followed us for a while, I think you
probably know this about us, that one of our favorite
kind of trails to go down is tracing the evolution
of religious ideas through ancient history. And I think I've
outed myself on this podcast before as a kind of
non religious person who loves the Bible. Like you know,
I love to read ancient religious texts and learn about

(01:09):
them and see how the ideas from the ancient world
have sort of filtered through to us today and and
shape to the society's we live in. And so that's
exactly the kind of thing we're going to be diving into.
In this episode, I'm talking with a secular biblical historian
named bart Erman about his most recent book, which is
called Heaven and Hell, History of the Afterlife. This book

(01:32):
was released in March of this year by Simon and Schuster,
and it's all about the Christian ideas of life after death,
where they come from an ancient history, what influenced their development,
and how they changed over time. Uh So, there was
a part that cited in the intro of Bart's book
where he talks about a Pew Research poll that was
conducted a few years ago. I think maybe it was

(01:53):
in where uh it found that seventy two percent of
Americans believe in a literal heaven and fifty eight percent
believe in a literal hell. And yet I think most
Americans would be deeply surprised, even shocked, to learn what
historians can show about the origins of these beliefs. And
the strange thing is that like The historical conclusions that

(02:16):
Bart's going to talk about in this episode are not
fringe or unusual among secular scholars of the Bible and
historians of the ancient Near East. Uh. This is utterly
mainstream critical scholarship. And yet I think regular people are,
especially in the United States, are going to find it
very surprising. Yeah. Absolutely. And I want to stress something
here for everybody. So I I just got back, uh

(02:39):
to work this morning, and I plugged into like a
pre production um cut of this interview, and it's really
it's really excellent. So if you're even slightly scared away
by the idea of an interview with a secular biblical scholar, uh,
don't be because because Bart is is tremendous. He's he's funny, uh,
very high energy. I think you're really going to enjoy

(03:02):
this chat that Joe had with Bart here. Yeah. Bart's
full of knowledge, good humor, passion for his subject. I
think you're really going to enjoy the episode. But before
we're get to do it, I'll just give a little
bit of background on Bart. So here's his biography. Bart
d Erman is a leading authority on the New Testament
and the history of early Christianity and the author or
editor of more than thirty books, including the New York

(03:24):
Times bestsellers, Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, and the
Triumph of Christianity. And that last one is really interesting.
It's about how Christianity took over the Roman Empire and
went from a really small religion to the dominant religion
of the empire and just a matter of a few
centuries um. Anyway, So, he is a Distinguished Professor of
Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

(03:47):
and he has created eight popular audio and video courses
for the Great Courses. He has been featured in Time,
The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and has appeared on NBC, CNN,
and The Daily Show with John Stewart, as well as
the History Channel, National Geographic Channel, BBC, NPR, all the hits.
His most recent book, again, is Heaven and Hell. Just

(04:08):
one more thing before we get into it, I want
to mention, obviously we are dealing with the audio constraints
of remote recording in the age of COVID nineteen. So,
for example, around the twelve minute mark in the episode,
there is briefly some background noise. It sounds like a
fan was turned on or there was some rain. It
only lasts for about a minute or so, and and

(04:30):
so please just put up with a little bit of
background noise. And it's very brief. I promise it's not
the sounds of hell. Right, not audio recordings of the
underworld leaking up through some sort of mining microphone. Right.
The well to Hell was not unleashed in Bright's office.
Uh so, yeah, I would say, without any further ado,
let's jump right in barter Erman, Welcome to the podcast.

(04:54):
Thanks so much for joining us today. Yes, thanks for
having me so your book Heaven and Hell. Just finished
reading the yesterday and I really really enjoyed it. Uh
And I want to say that I started reading this
book at a very opportune time, because though I didn't
plan it this way. I'm also currently in the middle
of rereading The Divine Comedy. Actually my wife and I
are reading it together. And of course The Divine Comedy

(05:16):
Dante is wonderful poetry, but it's also psychologically fascinating because
when you go through the theology of Dante, you get
the sense of somebody who is simultaneously ingenious and thoughtful
and in some ways very intellectually bold and open minded
for his historical context. But in other ways Dante is
also very limited and provincial and in a word, medieval,

(05:38):
like the way you see him taking so much pleasure
in designing horrific tortures for his enemies from these, you know,
petty thirteenth century political struggles in Italy. Working with ancient
religious texts, do you find yourself encountering this kind of
irony embodied within the same author or tradition. A lot
part of my book on Having the Hell is dealing

(05:59):
with some of the earliest forerunners of dante. Um. Many
people think that he was creative in coming up with
this idea of a guided tour of the Inferno and
the Paradiso and the and the Pratorium, but in fact
he was borrowing from the motif of a guided tour
of the realms of the dead from earlier authors and

(06:22):
including in the Christian tradition. I think one thing that
very seriously UH contrasts between uh Dante and his early
for runners that I look at and the and about
I look at basically from the second century up to
maybe the fifth Christian century, so a very long time
before Dante. But the main contrast is, uh, most of

(06:42):
the authors of these works were not geniuses, and the
works the works are they are. They can be very
graphic in their descriptions, especially of Hell. Um uh there
they are less uh, they're less attendant to what's going
on in heaven, and so it's not like Dante, where
you get basically equal coverage between Heaven, purgatory, and Hell.

(07:06):
But you know, the ancient people are for some reason
more interested in the torments of Hell. And my guess
is that it's because it was easier to describe. Uh,
you know, if you're trying to describe eternal bliss and
everybody is like equally happy forever, you know what more,
what are you say? You just got to talk about
their bliss for a little while. Then there's whereas if

(07:27):
you want to talk about eternal torment, well, you know,
you can design all sorts of creative punishments and so
you can let your your creative juices flow, and so
that's what these ancient authors do. So there's nothing at
the level of a Dante in these sources, but they
are very interesting, many in many ways more interesting of
course for understanding how Christianity developed than Dante's coming after,

(07:51):
you know, centers and centuries of development. Well to ground
the discussion, maybe it would help to look at a
specific example. Could you talk for a second about some
of the specifics of say, the apocaly lips of Peter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um,
the the earliest one we have with these, uh, these
guided tours is the one you mentioned, the Apocalypse of Peter.
We we had known, they had known for centuries that

(08:13):
there was an Apocalypse of Peter, because it almost made
it into the New Testament. Uh. There were church fathers
uh from the fourth century the fifth century who thought
the Apocalypse of Peter is part of the Bible, but
he eventually didn't make it in and it got lost
until it turned turned up in seven. When it turned
up caused a big fere uproar. I mean, because oh

(08:34):
my god, this is like, this is a guided tour. Peter,
the apostle, Peter, jesus right hand man, is given a
tour of heaven help by Jesus himself. And so it's
a terrific text. I mean, it describes, as I was saying,
in in fairly brief order, uh, the heaven, which is
a great place. I mean, it's uh, you know, there
are lush trees and vegetation everywhere, and it smells good

(08:56):
and everybody's happy, and so you know, it's with you know,
a nice summer breeze blowing through the whole time. So
it's great, it's great. But then he sees the torments
in hell, and uh, they are nasty and uh. And
the interesting thing in this case is that many of
the punishments match the crimes. And so if somebody is,

(09:18):
say a habitual blasphemur that they blasphemed God, well they're
they're sending Oregon is their mouth, and so they are.
These are hanged by their tongues over eternal flames. Women
who have braided their hair to make themselves more attractive
so they can seduce men are hanged by their hair

(09:40):
over eternal flames. Uh. The men they seduced are hanged
by their genitals over neural flames. And they cry out,
we didn't know it would come to this, and so
so it kind of goes on. And unlike Dante, which
is a very sophisticated number of political and religious points,
the point here is pretty clear. There are a bunch
of things you better or not do and yeah, if

(10:04):
you do, you're a big trouble. So like, just don't
do it. So basically the basically I don't say it.
And so it's it's fairly fairly elementary, both theologically and politically.
So already by this later, did you say the Apocalypse
of Peter is probably a second century work? Yeah, so
church fathers know about it, uh, in the second century,

(10:24):
and they're good reasons for thinking that was written in
the early part of the second century. So maybe just
like twent or thirty years after some of the books
of the New Testament. Wow, So already by this point
we have some beliefs about heaven and Hell that look
very much like beliefs that people still have today about
heaven and hell. And I think maybe this should lead
us to what I would say is probably the biggest

(10:46):
single gut punch of the book, which is that these
standard beliefs about the afterlife that you would find among
probably most Christians today, the belief that when you die,
your soul separates from your body and either travels to Heaven,
which is a place of eternal bliss, or to Hell,
which is a place of eternal torture. These teachings, you argue,
are not found in the Hebrew Bible, which is what

(11:08):
Christians would call the Old Testament. And they are not
the teachings of the historical Jesus. And in fact, unless
I'm wrong, you can barely find anything like them in
the New Testament at all. Like maybe in a parable
in the Gospel of Luke. Is that about right? That
that is not just about right? That is right? Uh?
The the the Old the Christian Old Testament, Uh, does

(11:29):
not talk anywhere about souls dying and going to people
dying and their souls going to reward in heaven or
punishment and hell. It's not there at all. And so
part of my book is explaining what you do find
in the Hebrew Bible. You get a range of different
views in the Hebrew Bible, but you don't get that view.
And I try to show how that developed into a

(11:50):
different view that Jesus had uh, And that Jesus himself
did not believe that your body died and your soul
went to one place or the other, and neither did
the apostle Paul for most of his life. Uh. The
book Revelation doesn't teach that. And so the question my
book is. I try. I try to show that, But
then the question is, well, then where to come from,

(12:10):
because everybody simply assumes, of course that this is you know,
they believe this because the Bible teaches it. No, actually,
the Bible doesn't teach that. So h that's so it
seems like a pretty important point to me, given the
fact that there are two billion Christians in the world,
most of whom believe in this, and they just assume
it's in the Bible. But it's it's not. Yeah, it
seems so hard to believe because I would say the
belief in heaven and Hell basically along the lines I

(12:33):
just described as not just a very common belief. I
think too many people it is the defining or the
characteristic belief when they conceive of their own faith. Oh yeah, no, absolutely,
I mean, and I completely understand that. I mean when
I you know, I grew up believing in heaven and
Hell myself. I mean, I was raised in a Christian home,
and I became an evangelical Christian as a teenager, and

(12:54):
then I really believed in heaven and Hell, especially Hell,
and uh, you know, and so I was I was
gunning home about it and That's part of what really
made me want to write the book was that I
know there are a lot of people who are of
course hopeful for heaven, and a lot of people who
are just terrified of hell, and uh, you know, a
lot of people just don't know. But uh, you know,

(13:15):
it's worth knowing where these ideas came from, because people
shouldn't believe them because they think they're in the Bible.
That that is, because they're not, as you said, maybe
like in one little passage like stucked away in the Gospel. Look,
but I mean, but basically they're not there. They these
authors had a different view, and it's worth knowing what
these different views were because you simply shouldn't assume this

(13:37):
is the standard view and always has been among Christians. Yeah,
and it's um, it's remarkable how difficult these beliefs are
to shake, even if you rationally know otherwise. I mean,
I I personally, I grew up in East Tennessee surrounded
by a lot of fundamentalist Christianity, and when I think
about the way I conceive of Hell, I don't rationally

(13:57):
believe in in a hell anymore. But I my mind
sort of as a mansion where there's a room in
the back, and occasionally the door opens and that belief
just gets out and walks around. And I don't know
when that's going to happen. Do you find the same thing,
Does it sometimes just come out without seemingly unbidden? Not
as much now as it did. You know, when I left,

(14:19):
when I left the faith many years ago now twenty
five years ago or whatever, a long time ago. When
I left Christianity for a long time, one of the
things that's holding me back to begin with. Before I
left was the fear of hell. You know, I thinking,
you know, like if I like, uh, you know, I
really think that people are gonna be punished after death
by God. But now I'm doubting my faith. And if
I leave my faith, what if I was right in

(14:39):
the first place and now you know it took took
the wrong term, then I'm screwed me. It's like this
is not gonna be good. Uh. And so but then
when I did leave the faith, I just I became
convinced that God is not going to be torturing people
for trillions of years because they messed up for twenty
or they didn't believe exactly the right thing. I just
said just this implausible. And so over time what I

(15:02):
did is I ended up becoming more of a rationalist
and I became more of a materialist. And so you know,
I'm a complete materialist now a naturalist. I mean, I
just you know, I don't I don't think there is
some kind of other realm Uh. This is it. Uh.
And I don't think there's some of the life. This
is it. And for me, um, maybe because I'm such
a rationalist that uh, the thought that's really keep in

(15:23):
my head too much anymore, that yeah, actually you know
it might happen. Uh, I just don't think it is.
I'm sure a lot of people are still reeling from
the surprise of of you saying that that, in fact,
the Hebrew Bible doesn't teach heaven and hell and that
this was not the teaching of historical Jesus. That there
are probably things running through their heads to say, like,
wait a minute, that can't be right, can it. So

(15:45):
I think maybe we should talk specifically a bit about
the the evolution of beliefs about the afterlife that we
see in the ancient Near East of the ancient Greco
Roman world and then in the Bible. So uh, can
we talk about beliefs about bodies, souls and what happens
to them at the time of death. Uh, maybe starting
among in the pre Christian ancient world, maybe among the

(16:07):
ancient Jewish thought views that you would find in the
Hebrew Bible. Yeah, yeah, this is you know, as you know,
this is really what my book does. Is it traces
these ideas all the way back as as early as
we have records. Uh, you know, we have records going
we have written text going back to the epic of Gilgamesh,
which is it turns out, is a forerunner of Dante.
Gilgamesh actually has a tour to the Actual and so

(16:29):
and in the Old and So I go through the
Old Testament all the way so that the ancient he
What one reason that the Old Testament doesn't have this
view that you die and your soul goes to heaven
or hell while your body dies is because ancient Hebrews
didn't have the idea that your soul and your body
were two entities that could be distinguished from each other. Um.

(16:50):
The idea that you've got a soul and a body,
that you've got made up of two parts is a
kind of dualism to to to fundamental components dualism um.
Ancient Hebrews were not dualistic, and they're thinking about the human.
The ancient Hebrews thought a human being was one thing,
not two separable things. And it goes all the way
back to Genesis where God creates the first human, Adam.

(17:14):
He makes Adam out of the dirt. And so there's
this kind of this dirt thing on the on the ground,
and it's just lying, it's inert, it's not alive. God
breathes life into Adam, and so he brings life into
Adam's soul. He brings it, brings a soul in him,
which is his breath. Adam now has his breath and

(17:36):
that makes him alive. And Adam will be alive as
long as he has his breath. But when he stops breathing,
he's dead. Now we ourselves, we ourselves have a kind
of we have an analogous thing about breath. You know,
when when you stop breathing, your breath doesn't go anywhere.
It's just God. And that's how they understood the soul.

(17:58):
It wasn't something separable from the breath out or the body.
When your soul, when it leaves the body, like the
breath leaves, it's just gone. It doesn't go anywhere. And
so Hebrews didn't have ancient Hebrews didn't have this idea
that the soul would live on, because the soul is
simply the thing that made you alive, and when you're
not alive, it doesn't exist anymore. And so that's why
in the Old Testament, Um, nobody talks about the soul

(18:20):
living on after death. They there are places, um where uh,
the Hebrew Bible offers will talk about a place. It
sounds like a place uh that sometimes it's called sheel um,
And so people mistake that as being like this area
that everybody goes to when they die. They die and
their souls go down to shield. And uh, when I

(18:42):
try to show in my book, is it probably that's
not what sheol means. Um. The worst shield itself is
often part of the problem is that Bible translators really
sometimes mess us up. And so often when English Bible
translators will come across the worst shield, which occurs about
sixty times in the Old It's not very common, but
they'll translate it as hell. But what are you supposed

(19:05):
to read? He was supposed to think when you read, yeah,
you know, God saved me from Hell, or I don't
want to go to Hell. But what it's it actually
doesn't say hell. It says she all, and she all
is not hell hell. What we think it was Hell
is where your soul goes to get punished. But that's
not found in Hebrew thought. And so when I showed
my my book is that when when shield gets used

(19:28):
in the Hebrew Bible, it is almost always set um
as the synonym for grave or pit or the place
your body is placed um when it dies. And so
it looks like she all is simply where your remains are.
It's not a place um. And so uh so there's

(19:52):
no place in the Bible, in the Old Testament where
there's a place that you go either for rewards or punishment.
You just die. And that's why that's why the Hebrew authors,
like in the Psalms, are so afraid of death, because
they're not gonna have life anymore. There's not gonna be anything,
They're not going to be able to enjoy anything. There'll
be no physical pleasure. Um. They won't even be able
to worship God. They say this, and God won't even

(20:15):
remember them. He won't remember them because they won't exist,
and so they won't even think about them. And so
that's the situation with the Hebrew Bible, that people are
made up of body and soul. When they die, their
life is over and they get deposited somewhere and they
want to get to They want to have a nice burial,
because everybody does. But I mean they are gonna be
around to enjoy it, they'll be dead. Yeah, I think

(20:36):
that view is extremely clear in books, say like Ecclesiastes Um.
I wonder though about people might be thinking about what
about a passage like the Witch of Indoor story? Well,
maybe can you talk for a moment about that story
and how you would interpret that. Yeah, No, this is
good because it's exactly the passage people are gonna be
thinking of. And you get passages in the New Testament

(20:57):
people are gonna be thinking of, and so obviously I
have to talk about all these passages in my book.
And I should stress that when I talk about these passages,
I'm not coming up with some kind of creative, like
weird new interpretation of these passages. The kinds of stuff
I talked about in my book are things that biblical
scholars have known for a very long time. This is
most people, you know, they don't Most people don't talk

(21:19):
to biblical scholars or good reasons, and so they don't know.
But I mean, so I'm not I'm not saying anything
unusual at all here for a biblical story. They would
just all say, yeah, well, of course, um. So the
Witch of Indoor is the story in the in the
Book of First Samuel Um for Samuel's one of the
main characters is a well, Samuel's the main characters since
since the name Samuel is a prophet who is a

(21:40):
the last of the great prophets, and he he is
the counselor for King Saul, and King Saul is always
getting in trouble and always messing up and doing things wrong,
and God's always ticked off at him, and so and so.
But Samuel dies and Saul gets himself into another mess.
The the the opposing uh, the country next door. The the

(22:02):
Philistines are out to attack the Israelite armies and they're
surrounded and Saul doesn't know what to do, and his
adviser is dead, and and so he decides he's going
to get a medium like a It's called the Witch
of Endor, but it's more like she performs necromancy. She
raises his soul from the dead, uh, in order to

(22:23):
ask what's going on. And so he commissions this woman
who's afraid to do it because he comes to her
in disguise because he himself, the king has passed a
law against doing this kind of thing. You can't do
this and so so, but she's a medium and she's
gonna do it because and he she doesn't know his
him and anyway, so it's great and it's a fantastic, fantastic,

(22:44):
but she can. He convinces her she uh to raise
Samuel from the dead so Saul will be instructured about
what to do about this war. Uh. And and Samuel
comes up out of the dead and he's and he's
angry because Saul's brought him back uh. And he tells Saul,
you know, you've just disobeyed God one too many times
and so yes, there is gonna be a battle tomorrow

(23:05):
and by the way, tomorrow you'll be down here too.
So okay, so it's not good this and it's exactly
what happens, okay, Well, is the last sounds like a
soul is alive after death, and it's down someplace and
it comes back. It can go back and forth. And
it sure sounds like that, doesn't it. Yes, it does,
It absolutely does until you start looking at it more closely.

(23:27):
This passage never says that Samuel was in Shiel or
in Hades, or in Hell or in Gehenna or anywhere else.
He comes up, But why would a body, Why would
somebody come up? They come up because they're buried in
the ground. He comes up as a body, not as

(23:50):
a spirit. The wayt. Saul recognizes him is he's wearing
Samuel's clothes and so this isn't like, this isn't a ghost,
this is this is like sam and and Samuel when
he's upset, he doesn't say something like, you know, I
guys have such a great time up there in heaven
and now you bring me back. What are you doing?
He we don't know why his angry, you know, was
he enjoying a good sleep? We don't. But he doesn't

(24:12):
say anything about being with anyone else. He just this
is not something you're supposed to do. You're the kid,
and you know this, and you passed this. You can't
do this. And so God's really ticked off because God
told you not to do this, and so um uh.
And so it is not his um. It is not
a soul separated from the body that comes back. Samuel

(24:33):
actually comes back in bodily form fully clothed as an
old man and uh. And he has there's nothing to
indicate that he's been either in a place of torment
or in a place of reward, and so he Previble
scholars don't look on this as an instance of which somebody,
you know, showing that when you die, your soul goes
to one place or another. It's the only place, by

(24:55):
the way, where um in the Hebrew Bible, where that
kind of necromancy uh is performed. But we do know
that some a lot of Israelite thought it could be
performed because there are all these laws against it in
the Bible. Don't don't make a bunch of laws. And
the people are doing something, and so they at least
think their seance is going on, and you know, something's happening,

(25:16):
but you know what it was they were thinking is
are to know? This is kind of a tangent. But
that does make me wonder about this. So it's it's
an example of this belief in the persecution of witchcraft
or necromancy. Why do you think it is that monotheistic
religions like Judaism Christianity would have been so opposed to

(25:36):
people independently practicing magic or consulting the dead. Uh. In fact,
I believe correct me if I'm wrong. But this is
also sort of one of the horrors of the Book
of first Enoch, right, where these evil heavenly creatures come
down and they teach human women how to do magic spells.
Is that right? Yeah, they don't mention necromacy there, but
they do they do teach humans all sorts of practical

(25:59):
things God doesn't like, and so that's kind of that's
kind of what's going on with this necromancy thing. When
you're raising somebody up in a seance or or however,
you're doing it through magical rights. Um, the ancient thought
was that this person, Um, it's it's not that the
person's soul is living on is the person is temporarily
come back to life again. Their soul has come back

(26:21):
into their body, and because they have died and they've
come back from the dead, they have these kind of powers.
And in monotheistic religion, there's only supposed to be one
superhuman power, and that's God, and so these other powers
are threatening, and people usually turned to uh necromancy and

(26:42):
other forms of magic precisely because the established religion wasn't
working too well for them. Uh And so they weren't
they weren't learning what they needed to learn, they weren't
getting what they needed to get. They weren't, you know,
it just wasn't and so they try an alternative means.
And in these monotheistic religions, God is a jealous God
and he doesn't like it when you go to some
other divine force. And so that that's why it's like

(27:04):
a form of cheating almost, well it's a form of cheating.
It's like, um, you know, you go to your you
go to your priest for advice, and then you go
home and pull out your ouiji board. I mean, look like,
just to what I said, don't pull out your weigi board? Right?
Do people to use weigi boards? Anybody don't. Even when
I was a kid, we use weigi boards. Oh yeah,

(27:24):
always great, okay, okay, okay. So so that's the view
of of the ancient Jews. They would have mostly believed
and of course we should acknowledge that whenever we're talking
about views and describing them to groups of people, there
was probably some diversity, but we're talking about like the
dominant views that are represented in the record, right. Well,
it's it's a very important point because in my book

(27:45):
I try to show there are in fact different views
in the Hebrew Bible itself. I mean, you mentioned Ecclesiastes,
and you know, the Book of Daniel has a very
different kind of view, and so there there are varieties.
The one variety you don't find in the Hebrew Bible
is that you die in your soul goes to having
our health. Right. Um, so then what about the uh
to turn away from ancient Judaism. What about the influence

(28:07):
of Greek philosophy and like the ideas of Socrates and Plato,
uh and and how those came through in the pagan
beliefs of the Roman Empire. Yeah, it's very important, far
more important than most people realize. In the earliest Greek
records we have, they come our earliest records come from Homer,
from the Iliot in the Odyssey, and uh they're the

(28:28):
earliest foreigner Dante in the Western tradition. So Gilgamash is
in the ancient areas, but in the Western tradition, the
earliest foreign Dante is a Homer Odyssey. The Odyssey book
eleven is that Dyssey is going into the underworld uh
and uh and visiting people there, including his mother and
his former colleagues in the in the Drojan War, and

(28:51):
and he meets all these people and and the point
of this description is to show what it's like down there,
and it's not good. It's not good for anybody, because
everybody is just down there the same they've got they're
like they're shadows. They're called shadows. They're not even people
anywhere there, but they're kind of shadows of people. And
they've got no strength and no power, no mind, they
can't think, they can't remember, it's like they can't talk.
It's like they just it's awful forever. Uh. By the

(29:13):
time you get to Plato about four hundred years later,
so Plato is riding at the early fourth century b c.
E Um, so you know, four years before Jesus ministry Plato.
By the time of Plato, Greeks has started thinking that
this idea that like everybody goes to Hades and it's
the same and it's boring for eternity, and there's no,
that's not right. I mean, how can I you mean

(29:36):
that somebody who is a valiant warrior, who is upright
and who always does the good thing and helps other people. Uh,
he dies and like that's it. He doesn't get any reward.
And there's some schmuck over here like this tyrant who
oppresses people and just cares about his own self and

(29:56):
getting massively rich and powerful and doesn't care who he
hurts in the process. He dies, and he's not going
to get punished. No, that can't be. How it is
as though Greeks came up with this idea that in fact,
after death there are rewards and punishments. Um. We don't
know if other people at the same time came up
with this idea, but we find it most firmly in

(30:17):
the Greeks, especially in Plato, who devoted a lot of
time in his dialogue and her surviving dialogues to show
that the soul and the body are two different things,
and that the mistake people make in life is catering
to their body when the important thing is their soul.
And so Plato was pushing for philosophy the love of knowledge.

(30:39):
That's what philosophy means, the love of wisdom, because he
thought we needed to attend to the needs of our
inner selves, especially our minds and our mental states, and
our values and our views of what's right and wrong
and our ethics and how we live, and those are
the things we should be concerned about, not like, you know,

(31:00):
getting drunk all the time and having parties and having
sex randomly. He's like, players say, no, that's just caging
to your body. And the problem is if you if
you're giving your body's pleasures, then you're gonna not pay
any attention to your soul. And when you die, your
soul is gonna live on, but your body's gonna die.
And so you don't even to make sure your soul
is doing well when it dies, or it's gonna be

(31:21):
bad news. And so Plato Plato tells these myths of
the afterlive. He calls the myths. I don't think he
means them literally, but he tells these kind of stories
of people who die and they check out what it's
like afterwards, and those who tend to their soul have
very good afterlives, and those who are just you know licentious,

(31:42):
ty rental bastards. They you know, they're tortured forever, and
so you get rewards and punishments, and so Plato um
Plato popularized this idea. It's not clear that he invented it,
but it's found in a number of places in his dialogues,
especially say in in Uh the Fate and in the Republic,
And it ended up becoming hugely significant understanding of things

(32:05):
for the history of the development of heaven and hell.
So there's a curious fact from your book that caught
my attention, which is that you mentioned several times how
for many ancient people, the worst fade imaginable was to
be denied a decent burial. Uh. And in a minute,
when we talk about the beliefs of Jesus, we can
talk about the meaning of Gehenna, this word that sometimes

(32:28):
translated as hell in the New Testament. But before that,
could you just help us understand this mindset of like,
what what was it like and what were the causes
of the mindset where you're obsessed with uh, not having
a you know, a profane, disrespected burial. And I know
this this shows up in lots of folk tales beyond

(32:49):
just the Bible, like the grateful dead folk motif, where
you know, uh, you know, a person on a journey
comes across a corpse that's being denied a decent burial,
and then pay the hero pays for the corpse to
get a decent burial, and then later that spirit comes
back to help the hero in disguise. In some way.
I think this occurs in the Book of Tobit. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
In some ways it seems strange to the modern mentality,

(33:12):
but in other ways it doesn't. But let me just
state what you just said, and stated emphatically. In most
cultures we know about, least in the Western world, Uh,
not getting a decent burial was a horrible fate and
people really were afraid of it because not that not
that they're going to suffer in health or it or anything.
It's just like there's something about getting a decent burial

(33:33):
that closure to life. And if you don't have closure
to life, it's like your life it just didn't end
up well. Um. And you find this, you find it
in the Hebrew Bible. Uh, you certainly find it in
Greek understandings of things. You find it in Roman ideas.
I mean it's just let's all throughout and in Judaism,
and it's in Christianity. The modern analogy, I guess is

(33:56):
people don't think about that so much because just about
everybody gets a decent burial, though, you know, some people
don't want to die at sea and kind of be
thrown in there and me eating my fish, I mean,
because you know, you know, yeah, I don't like that,
or some people don't like the idea of of um
uh you know, of how they're going to be buried
or where they're gonna be buried, or you know they
you know, no, I don't want to be creamingd No,
that's spooky, you know. Or I don't want to bury

(34:19):
their worms down there. That's so we do. We do
think about that. But the other way we think about
it is we think, you know, I wonder how many
people are going to be at my funeral. You know
you're worried about it. That you're worried about it, Well,
what are you worried about. You're not gonna be there.
It's like you don't even know, like so it doesn't
make any sense, but we do. And it's like that
only to like the hundred power in the ancil in

(34:39):
the ancient world without a decent burial. You know, they're
afraid of it. Uh, they and and it was a
horrible way to Anguly. It's even weaponized sometimes. I believe
it was in a book of yours I read. Uh again,
correct me if I'm wrong. But you talked about how
part of the fear of crucifixion in the Roman Empire
was not just that it was painful, not just that

(34:59):
you would die, but specifically that it was a humiliation
of the corps, that the corpse would be left to
the scavenging animals and exposed and not be given a
decent burial. Yeah, no, it's one of the It's interesting,
you know, when you when you read ancient documents on crucifixion.
Every everybody gets their knowledge about crucifixion from what everybody
else says. I mean modern people. The way you know

(35:21):
what it's like to be crucified, somebody else has told you,
and somebody else told them, somebody else told them, and
nobody bothers actually to read what they say in the
ancient sources about it. It's interesting there's no actual description
of the process in the ancient source, Like there's no
description of how they actually did it, but there are
a number of references to what happens after they did it,
when sometimes meant to be dark humor and sometimes very seriously.

(35:44):
But you get these references to the bodies being on
the cross for days and being eaten by the scavengers,
especially the birds, and um uh, you know that's part
of the punishment. You don't get a decent burial you
you are, you're torn to shreds by the animals. And
so like this was and people would watch this happening
to somebody and so I mean in the Roman world,

(36:05):
crucifixion was used as a deterrent to cry. Uh. You know,
they didn't have the idea that developed in America that
capital punishment is fine so long as you do it
as privately and theoretically as painlessly as possible. Romans had
the opposite idea, you do it publicly, and you make
it as torturous as you can and as humiliating as can.

(36:27):
So everybody seeing this thing says, oh my god, I'm
not going to do that, because you know this is
what's going to happen. As you know, I'm not going
to steal a chariot boy and that's what they do.
And so uh so, yes, but they did leave them.
They apparently did leave them on the crosses, and that's
part of it, because they couldn't get a decent burial. Okay,
So even if we don't fully understand the causes of
this difference and belief, we should always have it in

(36:48):
mind that having your corpse desecrated or not getting a
decent burial, it's just like the worst thing you can
imagine in the ancient world. Yeah, that's why all these scenes,
you know, you have if somebody like in like in
a war narrative, you know, they desecrate the body of
drag it around the city or something, this is just
thought to be whore. Of course, it still it still is. Yeah,

(37:09):
all right, we're going to take a quick break, but
we'll be right back. And we're back. So maybe we
should talk now about the teachings of Jesus. I know
there are several there are a lot of other things
in your book that you cover about the you know,
before we get to Jesus, you talk about the evolution
of Jewish thought and some of the later Jewish writings,

(37:30):
like like the Book of Daniel and mccabee's and maybe
we can come back to that if you want. But Um,
I'm sure a lot of people are wondering about something
we teased earlier, which is that, Okay, if the historical
Jesus did not preach modern beliefs about heaven and hell,
what were the teachings of the historical Jesus with regards
to the afterlife? And you may also need to talk

(37:51):
a bit here about historical method like why why can't
we just read the gospels to know what the historical
Jesus taught. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna have to provide
some background in the development of Jewish thought to make
sense of this. So I'm going to go back to Daniel,
because you can't understand jesus views without understanding the context
that he's that he's in. Um, most of the Hebrew

(38:13):
Bible thinks that, as I was saying things, when a
person dies at the end of the story, they're dead. Uh,
there's no no afterlife of any kind. You're just dead.
And I pointed out that Greek's ended up had something
similar to begin with, but then with Plato it started
you've got to have rewards and punishments, and that same
development happened within Judaism, but in a different way. It's
not clear if they were influenced by Greek thought or

(38:35):
or it's not clear how it happened exactly, but about
I don't know. Two U fifty years before Jesus Um,
a number of Jewish thinkers started thinking that, in fact,
death cannot be the end of the story, and it
can't be the end of the story for a very
specific Jewish reason. Ancient Jews believed that God had called them,

(38:57):
the Jews, to be his people. They were the chosen people.
God had given them the law. If they kept the law,
they'd keep up their end of the bargain, and God
would keep up his end of the bargain and protect
them and uh and be on their side and help
them out when they were in need. As time went on,
century after century went by and Jews were not helped,

(39:20):
they were constantly being wiped out constant internal problems, uh
economic problems. Problems I mean just various things of hunger
and disease and UH crop failure, but also destruction in war,
military disaster, not having possession of the land God had

(39:40):
promised them. And often you know, the ancient people would
say yeah, it's because we're disobeying God and God's punishing us.
That was that was the view of the prophets in
the Old Testament. Every prophet in the Old Testament says that,
you know the reason of suffers. God's punishing you, and
you just stopped doing that, and then he'll reward you. Well,
at some point Jews started saying, you know, look, we're
doing the best we can here. You know, we we

(40:01):
may not be like the most perfect human beings on earth,
but we're doing our best to follow God's law. We're
eating kosher, we're keeping the Sabbath, were observing the festivals,
were circumcising our babies, and these pagans over here are
complete smucks and they are ruthless and they're destroying us.
And surely there has to be an answer to that.

(40:22):
Uh So what ended up happening in Judaism is the
answer was that was this? The answer there rose about
two or fifty years before Jesus, was that, yes, these
things are happening now and God's people are suffering, but
it's not just because God's punishing them. There are also
forces in the world that are opposed to God and

(40:44):
his people. They are against us, and they have power
in this world and they are making us suffer. This
is when Jews started developing the idea that there's a devil. Uh.
There's Satan, a figure who is opposed to God gets
imagined and and talked about, and Satan has henchmen, they
call them demons, and there are other forces in this

(41:07):
world and it's they're out to get us. So the question, well,
why why is that? Well, they have different explanations. Why, Well,
human sin and so these powers are led into the world.
Or is because angels did this, or they have different explanations.
They are a little bit fuzzy sometimes, but they But
you have these evil forces. The good news is that
God ultimately is sovereign and he ultimately is going to

(41:29):
reward his people. Um. God is going to intervene in
history and he will destroy these forces of evil who
are ruining people's lives, who are running the kingdoms in
charge now, and He's going to take them out of power,
and he's going to bring in his own kingdom, the
Kingdom of God that will be ruled by his representative,

(41:49):
the Messiah, who will establish a utopian state. Uh. And
so these Jews modern scholars called this view Jewish view
apocalyptus schism, from the word apocalypse at the end of
this a this age is bad, it's getting worse, but
the apocalypse is coming. And when the apocalypse comes, then

(42:09):
God will destroy these forces of evil and bringing his
good kingdom on earth. The first place you find this
in the Hebrew Bible is in the Book of Daniel.
Daniel chapters seven through twelve, especially you start finding an
apocalyptic view. H Daniel was written about two hundred years
before Jesus was active in his ministry, a hundred eighty years,
two hundred years before Jesus was active. By that time,

(42:33):
this has become a very popular view in Judaism is
a view that, so far as we can tell, was
held by the majority of Jews. Um it's certainly written
by the majority of Jewish authors that we have from
the period uh that God was soon intervened and bringing
this kingdom. The thing about this kingdom was that it
was not that your soul was going to die and
go to heaven. The kingdom was going to be here

(42:56):
on earth and it was going to be lived in
boy be Lee. People who were on God's side would
be brought into this Kingdom of God here on earth
in their bodies. But what about people who, like you,
died already. So like, you know, suppose next year God
does it and he wipes out all the wicked governments

(43:17):
and all the people supporting them, and he brings in
peace and unity and justice for all forever, and we
have this great Kingdom of God. Well that's nice, But
like one of my grandfather, I mean, he was a
good guy. You mean, like he lost album And you know,
my mom, really, are you kid to me? Of course
she doesn't. And so Jews simultaneously developed the idea of
the resurrection of the dead. This is a view you

(43:39):
don't get in the vast majority of the Hebrew Bible,
but you do get it in Daniel and you get
into the teachings of Jesus and throughout the New Testament.
The teaching of the resurrection of the dead is that
even dead people are going to be brought back to
life and they too can enter into the Kingdom. This, then,
is Jesus teaching. Jesus teaches all the time I about

(44:00):
the coming Kingdom of God. And he does not mean
heaven where your soul goes when you die. He means
the Kingdom that God is bringing back to Earth. God
made this planet and he made it a paradise. Literally,
God made the Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve.
They sinned, they got kicked out. We lost the Garden

(44:21):
of Eden. But God's going to bring it back. Just
as Adam and Eve were in their bodies when they
enjoyed it, will enjoy their bodies, not just us, but
everybody is raised from the dead. If they've been on
the right side, what if they've been in the wrong side,
They're going to be punished, and it's going to be
an eternal punishment, but it's not eternal torture. Jesus did

(44:45):
not believe in the eternal torture. What Jesus believes is
what other apocalypse is believed, which is that when the
Kingdom arrives and people raised from the dead, those who
are on God's side will enter the Kingdom, and that
everybody else will realize they've been left out of the Kingdom,
and they'll be horribly upset. They'll be weeping and gnashing
their teeth, and then God will annihilateate them. It'll be

(45:08):
complete destruction. Uh. And so the eternal punishment is not torment.
It's death. It's eternal because it will never end. God
will not reverse his decision. You will be dead forever
and only those around God's side will live in the
utopian kingdom of God. So that's that's Jesus teaching in
a nutshell. Jesus never talked about this torment. He always

(45:31):
talks about destruction, and so uh things that might come
to people's mind in response to that would be okay. So,
first of all, maybe you can deal with this. There's
like a passage in Luke where where Jesus tells the
parable of the of the rich man and Lazarus, and
and it looks like in this parable there is some

(45:52):
kind of existence right after you die, and it consists
of rewards and punishments, rewards for the for the poor man,
and punishments for the rich man. And it doesn't seem
to be like a bodily resurrection at the end of
time when God comes and conquers everything. So how would
a how would a biblical scholar deal with a passage
like that? Well, no, it's a great question, and it

(46:15):
is for people who know their Bible. It's the first
passage that comes to mind. Of course, well, yeah, well
lazars in the rich man. So, um, maybe I should
summarize the story, or do you think everybody you got that,
you got this filthy rich man who's having sumptuous banquets
every day and bringing fine clothes and lives in this
mansion and uh. And there's this poor guy outside his

(46:37):
gate named Lazarus who's like he's starving to death and
he's covered with diseases, and the dogs and coming up
to lick his wounds, and they both die. And the
rich man ends up down in the place of torment
and fire, and Lazar's ends up in Abraham's bosom, so
he's which means he's up having a banquet with the

(46:58):
forefathers of Israel, Abraham, the father of Israel, and the righteous.
And the rich man wants. Rich man looks up, he
sees lads or something, and he tells Abraham, look, said,
would you send him down? Just put let him put
his finger in the water and cool my tongue, because
it's I've been fired down here. And and uh, Abraham
says this, Sara can't. There's a chasm between us, a broadcasm,

(47:20):
and nobody can go back and forth. And so you know,
he can't come and help. And he said, well, at
least send us, send them to my brothers. At least
we're still living. I got these brothers, and like, they've
got to know about this, because if they're they're in
danger of coming here too. And Abraham says, no, I'm
not gonna send him, because he said they should just
read their bibles. If they don't believe the Law of

(47:41):
Moses and the prophets, they're not going to believe it
if somebody comes back from the dead. Okay, that's what
he says. So even if someone is raised from the dead,
they won't believe. So that's that all right. So um,
that well, it sure sounds like Heaven done hell, and
yes it does. So several things about it. Number one,

(48:03):
it's a parable. A parable is not a historical statement.
A parable is a as an imaginative story intended to
make a point. Um. That's the first one. We know
it's a parable because in Luke's Gospel it's in a stream.
It's a lot of section that's just filled with parables,
and a number of them begin with exactly the same words,

(48:25):
there's a certain man who and that's how this one
begins there's a certain man who uh so, so it's
a parable. It's not nondescription of historical reality. Number one,
number two. Um, there's nothing in that's parable about the
rewards for punishment being eternal. We don't know if this
is a temporary holding stage or if this is we
don't know. It doesn't it doesn't say that's number two.

(48:47):
Number three. Jesus almost certainly did not tell this parable.
So this is this is where we get into what
you were saying earlier about how do critical scholars go
about understanding what Jesus said and did. The reality is
we have we have four gospels in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John. We have other gospels not in the New Testament,

(49:09):
lots lots of them, um. But these four are the
are the main ones that people know about, and they're
the four they're probably are four earliest gospels, our oldest gospels.
These four gospels, though, are almost certainly not simply historical
accounts of what really happened in Jesus life, what he
what he actually said and did. As if somebody was
down there with their cell phone recording it. Uh, you know,

(49:32):
there were no cell phones recording anything. The Gospels are
written in Greek. Jesus native language was Aramaic. Jesus didn't
know Greek, and the authors of the Gospels did not
know Aramaic. They lived outside of Israel. Jesus lived inside
of Israel. They were writing forty fifty or sixty years later.

(49:55):
So there's reasons for thinking all of that that I'm
not going to go into unless you unless you want
me to. I happy too. But these people are so
where do they give their stories from? These people do
not claim to be followers of Jesus. The authors the
books are all anonymous, so they're written by so they
don't claim to be written by followers of Jesus. The
followers of Jesus were lower class, illiterate. They're called illiterate

(50:17):
in the New Testament, illiterate Aramaic speaking peasants from some
rural place in Galilee and places like that, didn't have schools.
The disciples could not write. And so where these gospels
come from. They came from authors living fourty or fifty
years later, four or five decades later later, living somewhere else,
who have heard stories about Jesus and they're writing them down. Okay,

(50:42):
so stories have been in circulation for not just a
month or two or a year or two or a decade.
I mean they've been in circulation from forty to sixty years. Uh.
Sometimes this gospels completely agree with each other, but that's
because some of them used each other. Matthew Luke both
used Mark for example. Again I could this takes a
lot of time and a bit demonstrate um and so.

(51:03):
And the big problem is these gospels not only are
much later by people who didn't know but had heard
stories in circulation like word of mouth. And you know
what happens to the stories in the word of mouth.
Even in the ancient world, stories got changed every time
they got told. Well, uh right, so it's it's it's
not only that, but these gospels contradict each other. All
you gotta do is read two accounts in the Gospel

(51:25):
and just to take the same story to take you know,
take Jesus Birth and Matthew Luke. Just read them carefully
and and just see exactly what each one says and
compare them. You can't reconcile them. There are places that
cannot be reconciled. Why because people are changing the stories.
People are changing stories they're making up stories, they're putting
things on jesus lips that they're saying he did things

(51:46):
he didn't do. I mean, it's just that's just you
know that that's been known by scholars are well over
a century, and it's like standard stuff that gets taught
in every critical biblical scholars class. The parable of Lass
and the rich Man almost certainly was not one of
the parables Jesus told. He certain he almost certainly did
tell some parables. I think, Uh, you have to have

(52:06):
ways of demonstrating these things, just like you've got to
have ways of proving everything you know you've got. You've
got history has to be proved. You can't just take
somebody's word for it, as somebody says that, Uh. You know,
by inauguration there are this number of people there. You know,
you've got to check to see if that's true or not. Uh.
And so there are certain things that you checked for. Uh.
And historians have a way have checking ancient stuff, just

(52:28):
as we have ways of checking modern stuff. If you
check the story of Lasts Richmond, there are very good
reasons for thinking that Jesus didn't tell the story. For
one thing, of course, it has a different view of
after ihypehim the one Jesus had, but that you can't
use that because that's the question you're trying. So that's
arguing in a circle. But there are other things about it. Um,
it's all found only in Luke, So like there's no

(52:49):
one else who tells the story that we know of.
And so how do you know, like unless it's verified.
Uh you know, it's not verified. You just got it
on the loop. I'll just catch to the chase because
this is going on too long. One reason for real
annoing it wasn't wasn't a story of Jesus told is
because the story presupposes that a man has already been

(53:09):
raised from the dead. The end of the story is,
if they don't believe Moses and the prophets, they won't
believe even if a man is raised from the dead.
That means that the reader, the Christian reader, these are
Christian readers reading this, are going to say, yeah, that's right, boy,
they didn't believe when a man got raised from the dead. Boy,
you got that one right. Uh yeah, Well that's because

(53:30):
the storyteller knows that Jesus been raised from the dead,
and as Jewish listeners most of them are not accepting it,
and so uh, it has marks of being a later composition.
It also, by the way, does coincide with Luke's understanding
of the afterlife. The author of Luke, his understanding the
afterlife is different from the understanding put on that Jesus
himself apparently had, and so they are all these reasons

(53:51):
for him. It doesn't go back to the historical Jesus. Uh.
This brings up an interesting another tangential thought I was
wondering about. So when you consider what purpose the Gospels
were supposed to serve as written documents, did they serve
and originally were they intended by their authors to have

(54:12):
an apologetic purpose, like as preaching documents to outsiders or
do you think of them primarily as things that were
written for Christians who were already convinced to be you know,
read and to I don't know, further edify them in
their faith. Right. Um. This is something that's been debated
over the years, although it's not debated too much anymore.

(54:32):
Just about everybody who is an expert on this stuff
thinks these books were not used for evangelistic purposes. You know,
this is it's not the sort of thing like you
wouldn't hand the Gospel of Matthew to somebody say hey,
read this so you can become a Christian. Then take
a look and said, are you a kid? I know?
And I gotta read this, come on, get out of here.
And so uh so, there there are all sorts of
hints within the books themselves that they're written by Christians

(54:55):
and for Christians to promote Christian faith. Having said that,
one of the secondary uses of these books would surely
have been to tell Christians what to tell others when
they were trying to convert them. Um. And so the
books themselves would not be tools of conversion or evangelistic tools,

(55:16):
but they would be informing Christians of information that they
could give to others. And one of the reasons that
Christians need to have some ammunition is because they were
being opposed in the Roman world. Most people thought they
were nuts, and Christians say, so, no, we're not nuts.
Actually we have the truth. And um, I'm gonna I'm

(55:37):
gonna explain why we have the truth. Well, you need
you need to have some kind of things to tell
people to show that you've got the truth of all
the four gospels. Luke the one we were just talking
about gives most evidence of having this function of trying
to convince outsiders that Christianity is a good thing and
that it's a harmless thing. It's interesting, you know, one

(56:00):
of the problems that Christians had in the early Roman
Empire was that the guy they worshiped was crucified for
crimes against the state. He was he was a state
criminal who was executed for it. And so like, if
that's the guy you're following, h you know, that doesn't
look too good in the eyes of the law. And
so they had to explain, well, actually, yeah he was,

(56:21):
but you know, Pilot didn't want to do it, and
the Romans were actually at Jesus side. It's this damn
Jews that made us do it. And so so they
they're putting the fault on Jews uh and exonerating Romans
to show that we're not a threat to Roman society. Uh.
And Luke does that more than any of the others.
It doesn't. Luke also repeatedly mentioned the fact that Jesus

(56:43):
was innocent, Like it uses the word innocent. Yeah, so
when he's on trial before ponscious Pilot, uh, Luke. Luke
stresses three times, three times. Pilot actually declares that Jesus,
he's innocent. He doesn't deserve this, and the Jews leaders
forced him to crusifiment then at when he's being crucified. Uh,
in Luke Scott only Luke Goffel. You know, you have

(57:04):
the centurion who's crucified him. And in Mark Scoffel, the
centurion looks up at him and he realizes that, oh
my God, what will he say? Truly this man was
the son of God. But in Luke's gospel, the same
guys looks at him and then he said he says,
this man was innocent, and so he said, well, yeah,
if he's a son of God, he was in yeah, yeah.

(57:24):
But the point is Luke is emphasizing he was innocent,
and and so it's not you know, everybody, all the
Romans knew it is the Jewish people didn't recognize it.
So you're mentioning several uh different strains of thought that
are developing after the life of Jesus. You think the
consensus of biblical scholars today would be that Jesus, the
real historical Jesus, was some type of apocalyptic prophet. He

(57:47):
was preaching, you know, the imminent return of God who
would destroy the enemies of Israel and and and bring
about this good kingdom on earth. But obviously that changed.
You're talk in the book about a process of de
apocalypticizing the Christian faith over the following centuries. Can you,
in brief terms, what does that process look like, what
what motivates it, and how does it happen. Let me

(58:09):
let me preface this by saying, but that you're the
first person who's interviewed me who could say the apocalypticize
drives by students nuts. I talked about the de apocalypticization
of the tradition, and they don't They don't like that.
So uh, sod apocalypticize. So if Jesus has this apocalyptic
view that the apocalypse is coming and that God's gonna

(58:31):
wipe out things and it's going to uh, it's gonna
make everything right. The reason one of the functions of
that kind of religious discourse, that kind of apocalyptic language,
was to encourage people who were in the midst of suffering,
because you're telling him, look, yes you are suffering. God

(58:52):
is on your side. Is these powers of evil that
are lined up against us, But God's on your side.
And the point of this is that God is soon
going to intervene and take out these forces of evil.
So if you just hold on for a little while,
it'll be okay. That's why the Book of Revelation says,
you know, he's coming soon, and it's why the apostle

(59:15):
Paul says, you need to be alert because it's coming soon.
It's gonna be like a thief in the night, and
you know, if you're not awake, you're gonna be robbed,
and so you need to be alert. And that's why
Jesus himself said, truly, I tell you this generation will
not pass away before all these things take place. Jesus
prediction that his own disciples would see it. Uh. And

(59:38):
that's the nature of this kind of apocalyptic language, and
it still is, by the way, people today who believe
in the Left Behind series or who think Jesus is
coming back, they invariably think, you know, it's gonna be
in my lifetime. You know, maybe next time, sometime next Thursday.
I don't know, it's gonna be pretty soon. And so
that's that's all part of part of it. In early Christianity,

(01:00:00):
it was a very firm belief it was going to
come back right, It's gonna happen right away. Jesus said,
it's what Paul taught. But then the weeks went by,
and the months went by, and the years went by,
then the decades went by, and people are saying, uh, yeah, well,
you know, it's supposed to happen by now, and it
hasn't happened. And people then had to come up with
ways of explaining it, and they're all sorts of ways

(01:00:21):
of explaining it. Some of the books of the New
Testament are written to try to explain it. Second Peter's
written to explain why it hasn't happened yet. Um. Second
Peter is the book that says that with say, let
you know, you say it's supposed to come, didn't come.
But look, you're you're following a human calendar. Uh. In
God's calendar, a day is as a thousand years, and
a thousand years is as a day. So when God

(01:00:42):
says it's gonna happen soon, you know, if he means
like in three days, that could be three thousand years,
which makes you wonder why he said it's gonna be soon.
I mean, like it's helping me much that it's gonna
be through that. But anyway, so anyway, so part of
what happens in the tradition is that the apocalyptic emphasis
gets muted, and eventually it gets dissolved and eventually gets

(01:01:03):
argued against Christianity becomes d apocalypticized, meaning that this apocalyptic
emphasis at the end is going to come, the end
of this world is gonna come in our lifetime, ends
of disappearing, but something replaces it. The dual ism that
you get an apocalypticism is a kind of a horizontal

(01:01:24):
dualism that you can put it on like a timeline,
just so you think, have a timeline that goes across
the page horizontally, and you know you've got on the
left side, you've got the time up to now, then
there's a break, and then you got the time after now.
So you draw this line with a horizontal line with
the vertical line in the middle of it, and the
vertical line is breaking this evil age that's going to
be destroyed, and then there's gonna be the age to

(01:01:47):
come with is good, and so utopia is going to
come in suddenly and immediately when God destroys these forces
of evil, brings in his kingdom, that horizontal timeline. The dualism.
The horizontal dualism is re attained when people get rid
of the apocalypticism. They keep the dualism, but what they
do is they flip the horizontal line on its axis,

(01:02:09):
so that now it's a vertical line of vertical dualism.
It's no longer now and then ver horizontal. It is
down here and up there, And so now it's not
what's happening now and what's gonna happen, Then it's what
happens here and there, and so it's it's and it's
so it's a spatial line instead of a temporal line.

(01:02:32):
The spacial line is uh that it's not going to
be an act in the future is going to be
to you when you die, You're gonna go up or down.
And so rather than the Kingdom of God being here
on earth, the Kingdom of God is with God up
in heaven. And so people will go up to heaven
to be to receive their eternal reward. It will not

(01:02:52):
be life here on earth and to be life above
with God in heaven. What about the people who don't
make it, well, they go below. If the righteous are rewarded,
what happens to them, they're punished. Uh really yeah, but
now it's a lot of destruction anymore because God's not
destroying the forces of evil. And so what people are
what these de apocalyptus are doing, are they're changing the

(01:03:13):
Jewish view into the Greek view. Let me give you
a little bit. Sorry, I mean, this is kind of complicated.
Let me give you just the background on this. When
Christianity started, it was a Jewish religion. Jesus was a
Jews followed the Jews. They tried to convert Jews. They
didn't have much success. Paul comes along, he converts gentiles,
non Jews. These people he converts are people who are

(01:03:34):
trained in Greek circles. That means they were trained thinking
like Plato, you've got a soul and you've got a body.
They're they're not Jews, they're Greeks, the Greek Greek background.
They believe that when you die, your soul gets rewarded
or punished. They come into Christianity and they bring their
beliefs with them. They don't simply adopt what Jesus taught.
They understanding like what they already think. They already think

(01:03:56):
body and soul two separate things. Rewards and punishments, and
now as gets the apocalypticized, their views get confirmed in
the new theology, which is not that there's a Kingdom
of God coming to earth and some most people are
gonna be destroyed, but that when you die, your soul
that's now separable, is going to go up to heaven
or it's going to go down to hell. The person

(01:04:19):
God creates as eternal because God is eternal. That means
heaven is eternal, and health is eternal, and so you
have eternal reward and eternal punishment. And in a sense,
it's taking the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of
Plato and smashing them together into an amalgam that neither
one of them would recognize. That's that's where heaven and
hell comes from. Wow. Yeah, that's interesting. So so on

(01:04:43):
one hand, you've got the time elapsing is causing the
sort of decay of the potential for apocalypticism, and then
you have the influence of the Greek thought that's prevalent
in the gentile world. But what role does political power
and acceptance in culture have in the in the changing
views of the afterlife? Because we know that originally um uh.

(01:05:06):
You certainly point out in your book that this view
that Christianity was illegal everywhere in the Roman Empire is
not true. That's a myth. But it was sporadically persecuted
in the Roman Empire. So over time, we know that
Christianity becomes more popular, becomes more prevalent, and eventually becomes
uh accepted and even the the you know, the official

(01:05:26):
religion of the empire. How does that change views on
the afterlife if at all? Yeah, No, it's a significant
question because, um, what I argue in my book is
that precisely Christian understandings of persecution and martyrdom were some
of those understandings are things that actually drove this new
view of heaven and hell related to the reason I

(01:05:49):
just just gave. So explain it. It's as you said,
it's not that you know, millions of Christians are getting
thrown to the lions or tens of thousands, or even thousands.
I mean, but we heard about it just just like today.
You know, I've got all these students. I live in
the South, I live in North Carolina, and these students
are basically raised in Christian household who believes that they're

(01:06:09):
persecuted as Christians and you kind of look our eyes.
They really but Christianity has always had this kind of
persecution thing, and it goes all the way back um.
And so most of early Christians were not persecuted, certainly
not martyred, but they heard about persecutions and martyrdoms. And
when people were martyrred, when it did happen on occasion,
you know, someone had to wonder, you mean, this person

(01:06:31):
is going to die, and like that's it until like
I mean, when is the incoming. It's gonna be another
sixty years. That's not right that this person died. He's
got a way around for sixty years. And so so
that that helped facilitate the idea that at the moment
of death, a martyr will be in the presence of God. Uh,
the marty. First it was the martyrs. The martyrs are
thought to be immediately to the presence of God until

(01:06:54):
the resurrection. But as time went on and there wasn't
any like future resurrection happening, then started thinking, well, everybody goes.
And so the the opposition by Rome helped facilitate this
idea that it's at death, uh, that it's going to happen,
not in some distant future moment. So the Roman persecutions
went on very sporadically, not uniformly, until the early fourth

(01:07:19):
century when they became more consistent. There were some imperial
decreased paths that were made more plausible persecution in a
lot more places. Um. But then Constantine converted to Christianity
and he brought an end to the persecution in the
year three thirteen, and so what happened to the views
of the afterlife? Basically what happened is the views got cemented. Uh.

(01:07:42):
They weren't invented at that point, they were cemented at
that point. Uh. They became uh stronger tools of conversion
because now even the emperor believed in them, and they
were used to convert people. And they became the dominant
view of Western civilization because is now Rome was the
dominant empire, and now Roman by the end of the

(01:08:04):
fourth century into the fifth century was becoming almost predominantly
Christian and Christianity and takes over the Roman world. It
ends up becoming the religion of the Middle Ages in
the West and becomes the religion of the Renaissance and
the Reformation and modernity. And that's why everybody believes in
heaven and hell, Because everybodys always believes in heaven and
hell unless you go to the earliest times. All Right,

(01:08:25):
it's time to take a quick break. We'll be right
back with more. Thank you. Alright, we're back. One of
the interesting little tidbits from your book that that stuck
with me was when you're talking about the the political
power and acceptance of Christianity over time, you talk about
a later document called the Apocalypse of Paul that also

(01:08:47):
includes a guided tour of heaven and Hell with the
City of Christ and then the people outside it enduring
eternal torment. And it struck me that in this document
the worst tortures are saved, not for like the violent
murderers or the torturers of Christian martyrs, or even they're
not even for nonbelievers. The worst tortures are saved for

(01:09:07):
Christian theologians who held a different view than the author
on what would seem to us to be a relatively
minor thing, like a minor dispute about the interpretation of
Christ's incarnation. What's going on here with this this harsh
punishment of minute differences in theology, And do you see
other examples in in the history of religion like this

(01:09:29):
that develop along these lines. Yeah, it's very interesting. This,
this Apocalypse of Paul, is a very interesting book. So
we're not sure exactly when it was written, but is
certainly after the Conversion of Constantine, probably at the end
of the fourth century, at the beginning of the fifth century.
The form of this book that we now have, it's
important for both what came after it and what came

(01:09:52):
before it. The Apoxes of Paul was known to Dante.
This was one of Dante's influences, the earliest influence he had, um,
and so some of his ideas, uh come from that.
And you'll notice that Christians get punished in Dante as well. Um.
The predecessor of the Apocalypse of Paul was the Apocalypse

(01:10:12):
of Peter that I talked about, And in the earliest
one of these, we have the Apocalypse of Peter. As
I was saying, people get tortured for blasphemy God, or
you know, committing adultery or but it's always moral sins
when you get to the Apocalypse of Paul. Uh. So
now we're in a different period in in the apocalyp Peter,

(01:10:33):
which is you know, like forty years after the New
Testament was written, it's um, you know, it's it's warning
Christians not to sin um. But the Apocalypse of Paul
is really focused on Christians ut sinning in The point
is not just don't like commit moral sins. It's not
just about stealing and uh you know, you know, committing

(01:10:55):
infanticide or striking your parents or whatever. It's not about
just stuff you do wrong. It's also about what happens
in the church. The people who are punished the worst
are the church leaders in hell uh forever and um
you know, so some of these are moral sins. Um.
So that if you are a you know, if you're

(01:11:17):
a bishop of a church, the leader of a church,
and you um, and you perform in your duties of office,
and then you go home and sneak out and go
and commit adultery, Oh boy, you are gonna have a
bad You're gonna be worse than it's gonna be worse
for you than the run of mill adulterer. So and
so and so the bishops are being punished and the

(01:11:38):
deacons are being punished, and I you know, these people
are like because they're they're supposed to be setting examples,
and they're standing the wrong, so they're worse. But the
very worst punishment is the one that you mentioned. It's
called it's three times worse than any other punishment. Uh.
And it comes to um Christians who think that when
they think that Christ is not a full flesh and

(01:12:01):
blood human being, but he's only God. In other words,
they believed Christ was so much God that he wasn't
completely human like the rest of us. Now, you can't
say that you'll be tortured forever worse than anybody, you know,
you'll be so uh yeah. And so this is being
written in a context where most people are Christian, probably

(01:12:23):
in the environment this person is in. He's not worried
about Pagans. In the earlier practice of the Apopus of
Peter idolaters are punished and persecutors and Christians are punished.
Not in the Apops of Paul several hundred years later,
because you don't have those people anymore. And it's this
how moral sins, it sins in the church that really
bother him more than anything, especially bad theology. I wonder

(01:12:45):
if that's just an availability heuristic issue, like if this
is somebody who's writing Christian literature in the name of Paul.
They're probably thinking a lot about their enemies with theological
minor theological disputes. It's just what's on their mind. It's
it's on their mind, and it's who are the who
are the big enemies of Christianity, and and you know

(01:13:06):
they're the ones who get it the worst. So in
the second century and the Apostle Cepeter wrote the worst
Enemies where the persecutors uh those who were committed idolatry,
worst vitals, and those who you know, committed sins of
violations of God's law, those are enemies. By the time
you get to Paul, the enemies are in the church,
because the churches are split. You get bad theologians, you

(01:13:27):
get people bleeding crazy things. You've got you know, and
you've got immorality in the church. And so those are
the ones being punished. Okay, Bart, I've got one more question.
So in the Divine Comedy, people who Dante runs into
in purgatory, I noticed are constantly begging Dante to go
back and tell their relatives, especially female relatives, that they

(01:13:49):
should be praying for them more. Where does this idea
come from that the prayers of the living, especially the
prayers of women, were useful and important to those in
the afterlife and could affect their fate there. It does
proceed the official Catholic doctrine of purgatory, right, no, it
comes after Okay, so the okay, so yeah, let me
get a little bit background on because the U I

(01:14:11):
deal with this in my book. I have a section
on purgatory, uh in my book, as well as a
section by the way on the idea that everybody gets saved,
which is you know, also interesting. But but with purgatory. Um.
This is an important topic for a lot of Catholics
because the Catholic Church continues to teach perigatory. And I'm surprised.
I've talked with the number of Catholics after I wrote
my book who didn't realize really what purgatory is. It

(01:14:34):
didn't realize they'd have to suffer in there. I thought
it was just like a holding pen. And I'm sorry
I should ready it's not fun, you know, it's not fun.
So um, So purgatory for for those of you who
are are not Catholic, or those of you Catholic who
aren't paying attention, uh, purgatory is is the doctrine that

(01:14:55):
eventually developed. It says that there's not just heaven and hell. Um.
The reason for purgatory developing is again, it's kind of
the same as you of justice. I mean, it's not
really fair that everybody dies and gets the same thing,
and so rewards and punishments seem only fair. But on
the other hand, you know, not everybody is deserving as

(01:15:16):
a saint. You know, I'm going to go to heaven,
but it's not fair for them to be tortured forever.
And so there's so they come up with this middle place, uh,
which is for it is it's specifically for people who
are going to end up in heaven, but they have
to pay for their sins first. There there their sins.
They are not holy enough to go directly. They need

(01:15:37):
to be purged of their sins. And that's why it's purgatory,
because they're being purged of their sins and purging is painful,
and so they have to go through a certain number
of punishments. But uh, they can get out faster if
living people intercede for them. Um, So what's that all about?

(01:15:58):
Where's it come from? So? What do in my book
is I don't talk at length about the later doctor
in purgatory, except to say or do or Dante's Purgatorio,
except to say that the official Catholic doctrine was not
implemented until the thirteenth century. Um and so, uh So,

(01:16:18):
you know Christianity around for since the first century, So
it's twelve twelve centuries before purgatory becomes a standard doctor
in the Catholic Church. The term purgatory was invented in
the twelfth century. Uh And so there are people who
claim that purgatory wasn't invented until the twelfth or thirteenth century.

(01:16:38):
And so, in one kind of technical sense, I guess
that's right. But what I try to do in my
book is show that there were earlier forerunners of this
very idea that some people who die are punished temporarily
before allowed being allowed to enter their heavenly reward. And
what I do is I look at the earliest examples

(01:17:01):
of that, which are in texts that people, the general
run of the mill person wouldn't know. If they don't
know Dante, they don't know that probably the you know,
the Martyrdom of Perpetua, or or the Acts of thecla
or but there are these there are these books that
that talk about um a saint and she's it's usually

(01:17:22):
a woman, a living woman who has a special relationship
with God. She's very holy. Who um who praise for
either a relative or somebody that they're requested to pray for,
who's being who's having a bad afterlife, and God hears
their prayers, here's here's the person's prayers, and the person

(01:17:43):
then is released from their punishment and is rewarded. Uh.
And so there are several stories like this. They're fascinating
stories in their own terms that we won't get into,
but they're they're really interesting stories. They start out in
the second century uh and go up into the third
century and then and and onward. And so this idea
that it's possible to kind of get out early, get

(01:18:04):
out of punishment early, is an idea that's floating around.
And so some people did have this idea that there's
this other place somehow that where and so people have
these various ideas, and um, you find them in Saint Augustine,
for example, UH plays with this idea a little bit. Uh.
He's not quite sure about it, but he affirms it

(01:18:25):
didn't seems to affirm it in some places and so
so it becomes a standard idea, but then only later
in the thirteenth century doesn't become a doctrine. And there
are very interesting books if you if you've got people
among you your leader readers who are really interested in
um kind of scholet of views of things. There's a
guy named Jacques Lakoff who wrote to this whole book
called The Birth of Purgatory that explains why in the

(01:18:46):
twelfth or thirteenth century this became all became something. Uh,
and it became and it wasn't just be for religious reasons,
is because of the socio political context within which it developed.
It's just called the Birth of Purgatin where they can
look that up. And all right, Bart, I think we're
running towards the end of our our time here, but
I just want to thank you so much for joining

(01:19:07):
us today again. I genuinely really loved the book, as
I've enjoyed all your books before Heaven and Hell. I
think if you enjoyed our conversation today, listeners, you should
definitely check out the book, but you should also look
up Bart's blog. Bart, do you want to talk about
that for a moment, I do nothing. I like talking
about more. Uh. So I have a blog, Um, I've

(01:19:28):
had it for over eight years. UM started it in
two thousand twelve. On this blog, I post, UM, I
post five times a week. Most of my posts were
between twelve hundred and four hundred words. And the post
deal with everything having to do with all the stuff
we're talking about now, and about anything about the New Testament,

(01:19:50):
the historical Jesus, the writings of Paul, Book of Revelation.
It talked about martyrdoms in person, he talks about women
in early Christianity, talks about Jews in relationship to Christians.
But and I also talk about early Judaism and the
Hebrew Bible and Roman religion and like the massive the thing.
I've been doing this, you know, every week, five five posts. UM.

(01:20:10):
There's a membership membership fee to join the blog. Uh.
And the reason there's a membership fee is because I
use the blog to raise money for charity. UM. The
membership fees low. It's about you know, it's about fifty
cents a week. I mean it's like right now we're
gonna be we're instituting a new blog soon. We're launching

(01:20:31):
a new blog. But but right now, a year membership
is twenty four cents, and for that you get all
of these hundreds and hundreds of pos plus archives going
back eight years. UM. So I don't keep any of
the money myself, and not a penny goes to operating expenses, UM,
and so all of the money goes directly into charities.

(01:20:53):
We have raised UH about nine fifty thou dollars over
the years, and that amount is going up. It looks
like this year we're hoping we're gonna hit two undred
thousand dollars just for this year, UH from people joining
the ball and so we also there's an option of
like if you just want a one month membership for
less or try it for three months, you can do that.
But just go to the bar room my blog and

(01:21:15):
check it out and UH, and you'll see all the
money the charities all go to, actually, they all go
to things dealing right now with the crisis, mainly charities
dealing with hunger and homelessness, both UH locally and UH internationally.
So I support five five charities and all the money
goes out to them. Bart thank you so much. It's
been a real pleasure. Yeah, it's been great. Thank you

(01:21:36):
so much. All right, so that does it. But thanks
again to Bart for for sharing his expertise with us.
I really had fun talking to him, and at the
end there I just want to remind you yet again,
Bart mentioned his blog. If you're interested in this sort
of subject matter, his blog is a great place to
go deep. Plus, as Bart mentioned, every penny of the

(01:21:57):
subscription money goes to great causes, so you can check
that out at ermine blog dot org. And Ermine is
spelled e h r m a n, so that's e
h r m a n blog dot org. And again,
the book is Heaven and Hell History of the Afterlife
by Bart Ermine. In the meantime, if you would like

(01:22:17):
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and
wherever that happens to be. Just make sure that you rate, review,
and subscribe. That really helps the show out huge things.
As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
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(01:22:38):
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(01:23:06):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Heaven and Hell with Bart Ehrman