## ★★★★☆
Bokomtale Heaven and Hell
Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart D. Ehrman ISBN 13635667
The standard Christian belief is that when you die, you have an immaterial soul that ascend to heaven. Some also belive that you may face a judgement and risk end up being tormented i a hell. This belief, however common in the past millennium, was not held by Jesus or any writer in the Old Testament.
— “Jesus did not teach that when a person died they would go to heaven or hell. He taught that the Day of Judgment was soon to come, when God would destroy all that is evil and raise the dead, to punish the wicked and reward the faithful by bringing them into his eternal, utopian kingdom.”
Bart Ehrman compares the view of the soul, afterlife, heaven and hell in Gilgamesh, Homer, Plato, the Gospels, St. Paul, the Apocalypse and antique theologians. When Christianity spread throughout the Roman empire, Greek platonic ideas of a soul was imported into the new religion. Ehrman trace how these ideas gradually morphed so that the original religions views of Jesus and St. Paul even ended up being declared heresies.
While fighting their Greek and later Roman occupiers, the Jews gradually replaced the biblical views of the soul and afterlife with ideas from their despised rulers: — “… its view of the afterlife therefore present an intriguing irony that was almost certainly lost on the author. While celebrating the passionate Jewish resistance to Hellenistic culture, the author champions Hellenistic philosophy, especially its stress on the superiority of reason to passion and its prioritization of soul over body.”
The Christian idea of the soul definitely a Greek invention: — “As Greek-speaking and Greek-influenced pagans, they would have been raised on the very Platonic idea that the soul is immortal and cannot die, and that life after death involves a separation of the soul from the body for a soulish existence forever. Possibly these pagan converts still think so as Christians. For them, there is no resurrection of the dead, because life in the body forever is an absurd, even repulsive idea. The body is the problem. What lives on is the soul.” — “This is one key difference from the Greek thought represented best by Plato. Ancient Israelites did not subscribe to the view of the immortality of the soul. Souls are not inherently deathless, destined for an eternal existence. In ancient Hebrew thought, there was no “soul” in the Greek sense.”
Ehrman’s book explain how religious dogmas evolved. What most Christians belive is Jesus’ teachings is actually ideas based on Hellenistic thought created many generations after.
bookshelves: religion, history, e-books, antiquity