Title: Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife
Author: Bart D. Ehrman
Genre: Religion
Trigger Warnings: Death, existential anxiety, discussions of torture and Hell
Back Cover:
What happens when we die? A recent Pew Research poll showed that 72% of Americans believe in a literal heaven, 58% in a literal hell. Most people who hold these beliefs are Christian and assume they are the age-old teachings of the Bible. But eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament and are not what Jesus or his disciples taught.
So where did the ideas come from?
In clear and compelling terms, Bart Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. He discusses ancient guided tours of heaven and hell, in which a living person observes the sublime blessings of heaven for those who are saved and the horrifying torments of hell for the damned. Some of these accounts take the form of near death experiences, the oldest on record, with intriguing similarities to those reported today.
One of Ehrman’s startling conclusions is that there never was a single Greek, Jewish, or Christian understanding of the afterlife, but numerous competing views. Moreover, these views did not come from nowhere; they were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. Only later, in the early Christian centuries, did they develop into the notions of eternal bliss or damnation widely accepted today.
Review:
I’m not really sure what I expected out of this book. I picked it up mainly because of the author, as I’ve enjoyed the previous books of his that I’ve read and he always teaches me something new about historical Christianity. This book definitely taught me a lot about historical beliefs about the afterlife, but I didn’t find it nearly as engaging as Bart’s previous books.
I think part of that was he spent so much time on context. On one hand, it makes perfect sense to clarify what the ancient Jewish people and the Romans thought about the afterlife so we can trace how the Jewish thought that Jesus knew and the Roman context that Christianity grew out of affected Christian beliefs about what happens when you die. On the other hand, I already knew most of the Jewish thought that Bart discusses and I was really uninterested in the Greco-Roman philosophy about souls, so that whole section was really uninteresting to me.
It did get more interesting later, and I did learn a lot about beliefs about afterlives and resurrection in the very early stages of Christianity – apparently a lot of the early afterlife debates were less about Heaven and Hell and more about if a physical body actually get resurrected when Jesus returns or not. It also traced the idea of Hell as a place of eternal punishment through first- and second-century Christian writers.
There really is a lot of fascinating information here. But for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, it’s less engaging than previous books by Bart Ehrman. Some of that could be me, though, as I was reading it as an audiobook at work while recovering from a nasty sinus infection and wasn’t in the best headspace to engage with a book. Regardless, if you’re at all curious about how the ideas of Heaven and Hell developed, I definitely recommend this book.
Bluejay Reads 