In the previous post, I opened the question of the development of the Christian notion of the afterlife by looking at the Greco-Roman conceptions of Homer and Virgil. We saw that sometimes between those two authors, the Greco-Roman world developed a notion of eternal rewards and punishments for the souls of the deceased. But, as I noted, Christianity didn’t come out of Greco-Roman religion and philosophy – even though it was certainly influenced by it. Christianity started as one of the streams of Judaism. Jesus was a Jew; his first followers were Jews. Paul, the great apostle – was a Jew. They didn’t see themselves as members of some kind of a new and different religion. The separation between Judaism and Christianity was more of a gradual process than a single event. It certainly reached its peak during the second century. So, the natural question is what did the Jews in ancient times believe about the afterlife?

It is interesting to see that in the Hebrew Bible there is a view of death similar to Homer’s. These accounts (the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible) were written approximately at the same time as Homer’s Odyssey. In the oldest parts when a person dies he is dead – there is nothing after death. When you are dead, you don’t have a body any longer; you don’t have a soul any longer. You are simply dead. In fact, you can’t even worship God and He doesn’t remember you anymore! It is not a happy portrait. At this point, it is important to emphasize that Jews had a different understanding of the human person from the Greeks. Before Plato (but especially in the works of Plato) the idea was that the human being was made of two substances: a body and a soul. When a person’s body dies, his soul lives on – according to Plato. The soul is immortal. That’s the Greek tradition. The Hebrew tradition is very different. In Hebrew tradition, a person is not made of two things but one: a living body! When God creates Adam in the Book of Genesis, He makes the shape of a human being out of the dirt. At that point, Adam is only a model, but then God breaths into him and Adam comes to life. By the breath. When the breath leaves the body, a person is dead. But, in the oldest Hebrew tradition, when the breath leaves it doesn’t continue to live in some everlasting place. It’s over. There are several places in the Hebrew Bible where a place called Sheol is mentioned. The word “Sheol” shows up mainly in poetic books (e.g. Psalms) where authors are very relieved when they are delivered from Sheol. Precisely because in Sheol – there is only death. Sheol is probably not like a Hades in the Greek tradition. In contrast to Homer’s view of Hades, Sheol appears to be a synonym for a grave or a pit – it’s used synonymously with these concepts. Again, this raises a very big question about justice. If God is in charge of this world, God created this world (as the Jews believe), and I live as a righteous person, worshiping God and following all of His commandments. After all of that, I die and that’s it? No afterlife? And on the other hand, my neighbor is a murderer and a thief who despises God, and he’ll get the same treatment as I? Where is justice in that?! This notion (“death after death”) starts to change at the very end of the Hebrew Bible with the final book to be written (somewhere in the 2nd century BCE): The Book of Daniel. In this book, a new way of Jewish thought is embraced. A new way of thinking that scholars came to call: Apocalypticism (Greek word for revealing). Proponents of the Jewish apocalypticism taught  God had revealed to them the secrets that can make sense of this miserable existence we have to live out here on Earth. Their views came to be extremely important in the development of Christianity! So, what did they believe in?

1. They were dissatisfied with the idea of Sheol!
   1. Death after death without any ultimate justice. That can’t be right!
2. Furthermore, they were especially concerned with the fact that the people who followed God (e.g. righteous Jews) were suffering during their life on Earth. On the other hand, evil people are in a position of power (e.g. pagan Romans), enjoying all of the material benefits. That can’t be right either!

About 200 years before Jesus, Jews started to think there are forces of evil in the world that are controlling this world and that these forces are making life miserable. These forces of Evil are opposed to God, and God’s people – that’s why righteous people suffer. An idea of a Devil as a supreme enemy of God is developed during this time. Furthermore, according to the Jewish apocalyptic worldview – things are only going to get worse! But God is ultimately in charge of this world and He is going to intervene in this world to redeem his own people! By doing that God will bring the good kingdom on the Earth. The current kingdom is the evil one – it is run by the forces of evil who are making righteous people suffer without any cause or reason. However, God will ultimately solve the problem – He will send his agent/messenger/Messiah who will destroy the forces of evil. So, Jewish apocalypticists strongly believed in the coming of the Messiah and the Day of Judgment. After the Day of Judgment (where the forces of evil will be destroyed), Messiah will (in the name of God) establish a good kingdom of God here on Earth. Furthermore, the Day of Judgment will apply not only to those who will be alive at that time but also to those who have already died. There is going to be a future resurrection of the body – according to Jewish apocalypticists. It is important to emphasize once again that these apocalypticists were Jews and they did not believe in the distinction between the body and the soul. They did not believe the soul lives on after death. Well, how can then be an afterlife? The afterlife for these people is that the body comes back alive. The breath returns to the body. Everyone who died will be raised from the dead when the Day of Judgment comes. Those who were (during their lives) on the side of God will be brought into this eternal God’s kingdom on Earth – the kingdom will be on Earth, not somewhere in the heavens! People in that kingdom will have perfect immortal bodies and they will live there happily ever after – forever! Utopian existence on Earth. What about those who were opposed to God? They will be raised from the dead as well when the Day of Judgment comes. However, they won’t get into the kingdom. God will show them the errors of their ways and judge them by wiping them out. There will be the total annihilation of the sinners at the end of the times. Furthermore, that end is coming very soon – it is right around the corner. These apocalyptic thinkers were trying to encourage those who are suffering because of their righteous life by telling them “Just hold on for a while because soon God is going to intervene, you will be vindicated, and god paradise will arrive here on Earth!”. That is, in a nutshell, a Jewish apocalyptic thought.

Scholars for over centuries have recognized that Jesus of Nazareth was an apocalypticist (I’ve written about this in more detail: here). For the sake of this post, I’ll remind you that this has been the view of scholars throughout Europe and North America from the days of Albert Schweitzer (early 20th century). It is still the most accepted theory among scholars specializing in the study of historical Jesus (see for example: here). Historical Jesus was a Jewish apocalypticist who proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God and the necessity of repentance. People need to repent and turn toward God before the coming of this eternal Kingdom. Did historical Jesus believe in heaven (as a place where your soul goes after your death) and hell (as a place somewhere under the Earth where your soul goes to be punished)? It is a controversial issue among scholars with proponents on both sides. So, for example, Bart Ehrman (UCLA) thinks that Jesus never believed in the literal heaven and hell (see: here). Rather, he had a view that was in accordance with the classical Jewish apocalypticism: When the Day of Judgment arrives, God will reward the righteous people by bringing them into the Kingdom of God on Earth, and punish the sinners by wiping them out (meaning: he will destroy them once for all; they will stop existing in any form). On the other hand, Dale C. Allison (Princeton University) thinks that Jesus did in fact believe in some kind of interim state (heaven and hell) before the Day of Judgment because (as he stated in a correspondence we had a year ago) “Jesus Judaism was Hellenized, and Hades was already influencing ideas about Gehenna before the first century” (see: here). It is sufficient to say that this is still a very controversial issue debated among scholars. For our purpose here, it is important to understand how this idea of heaven and hell developed in Christianity during the 1st and 2nd centuries.

Believing that the end is coming very soon (see for example Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians), first Christians (after Jesus’ death) realized that it didn’t come in the sense they thought it will. Years passed, decades passed, and the end (in a sense of a big event; the second coming of Jesus; the Day of Judgment, etc.) didn’t come. And people ended up having to reinterpret Jesus’ teachings. Historical Jesus emphasized in his teachings the notion of a “Horizontal Dualism” – dualism between this evil age and the age to come. What ends up happening is that the people started reinterpreting dualism from the horizontal to the vertical view. It is no longer about the time (This age vs. the age that will come). It’s about the space, it’s about up and down. The main emphasis is no longer on the Kingdom of Earth (even though it is still a part of the equation) but on the Kingdom of Heaven where God reigns. It is there that soul of the righteous people will go after the person dies. And, of course, the souls of the sinners will end up in Hell (under the Earth). One thing that facilitated this shift (from Horizontal to Vertical form of Dualism ) is that most of the people that the early Christians converted to believe in Jesus and his message were not themselves Jewish. In other words, the vast majority of people who converted to Christianity (already by the end of the 1st century) were the Gentiles. They came from pagan backgrounds; they came from Greek ways of thinking. Needless to say, the Greek way of thinking was dominant throughout the Roman Empire because of the strong Hellenization that started already by the time of Alexander the Great (4th century BCE). Remember, Greeks (certainly after Plato, but probably even before that) believed that soul is immortal. The body dies, but the soul lives on. These people who converted to Christianity naturally brought their own ideas with them. They weren’t Jews. They started thinking not like Jewish apocalypticists, but more like Plato who argued that when you die your soul goes either to Heaven or Hell. But, in a sense of Christianity, your destiny is dependent on the belief in Jesus and on your good deeds. If you believe in Jesus’ resurrection and do good deeds your soul will go to heaven after you die and if you don’t your soul will go to hell. Since the soul is immortal, the rewards (in heaven) and punishments (in hell) have to last forever. This shift in thinking is visible already in some parts of the Gospel which suggests that the shift happened in the second part of the 1^st century (e.g. parable of Lazarus and the rich man in the Gospel of Luke).

However, the Jewish background of Christianity was too strong. After all, Jesus was a Jew! Consequently, the idea of the Day of Judgment remained alive in the Christian way of thinking! Souls of the dead people are in heaven or hell (the idea of purgatory developed during the subsequent centuries), but they won’t be there forever. The Day of Judgment (The Second Coming of Christ) will come when God will resurrect the bodies of all the people and they will be judged according to their own beliefs and the way of life. Those who believed in God and Jesus and acted accordingly will be rewarded (body and the soul!) by entering the kingdom of God here on Earth – a kingdom that will be eternal. On the other hand, sinners and those who opposed Jesus will be tossed (body and soul) into Hell forever.

So, that is, in a nutshell, the way that the Christian concept of the afterlife developed. One major difference is that in Christianity, the afterlife is the goal – it is the center of hope and salvation. This life on Earth is just a temporary thing, we have to live according to Jesus’ teachings and believe in his resurrection to gain salvation. On the other hand, ancient Greek stories about the afterlife are clear that the only thing important is this life on Earth – the afterlife by itself can’t be a place to put our hopes up! As a kind of disclaimer in the end: Nothing stated in this or a previous post suggest that the Christian notion of the afterlife is a myth. I’m not writing a theological or a philosophical thesis about the existence (or non-existence) of life beyond the grave. My goal was to explain the historical circumstances that influenced the emergence and the development of the idea of the afterlife in the early Christian texts. Whether the afterlife is real or not, that’s a question historians can not answer. You have to find that answer for yourself.