I am pleased to let all you blog members to know that on Saturday July 18, 2:00 – 5:00 pm ET, I will be doing a FREE two-lecture course on where the Christian idea of hell (as a place of eternal conscious torment) came from.   This course is NOT connected with blog per se, except insofar as I am connected with both.  It is rather a production of my on-line course company, Paths in Biblical Studies.  But since this is a complete Freebie, I thought I would be remiss not to let all of you know about it who haven’t learned about it from another channel.

The course is called:  What theHell? The Real Teaching of Jesus on the Afterlife.   It will will consist of two lectures of 50 minutes each, followed by a live Q&A.  Anyone can come.  There’s zero cost.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about it here:  https://learn.bartehrman.com/what-the-hell?widget=courses

Here’s a brief overview:

What The Hell?

The Real Teachings of Jesus on the Afterlife 

Many people have trouble understanding how a good God could send billions of people to eternal torment because they have not believed the right things or behaved the rights ways. In particular, many fear they might be among the damned and do everything they can to escape the never-ending torment.  But is this what the Bible actually teaches?  Is it what Jesus himself thought?  In this free course, we find out.

Lecture One:  When Hell Disappeared from the Bible

This lecture considers the views of the afterlife found throughout the the Bible – from Genesis to Revelation, asking, in particular, if it actually teaches that some deceased souls will enjoy paradise in heaven but most will undergo never-ending torment.

The answer will be a resounding No.  Beliefs in a literal hell have been imported into the text, not derived from it, and are based on patently inaccurate translations of the Bible’s original Hebrew and Greek.

 

Lecture Two:  Who Invented Hell?

The notion that the soul lives on after the body is such “common sense” today that it is very difficult for most people to imagine it otherwise.  If it is not in the Hebrew Bible and is not what Jesus taught, where did it come from?

In this lecture we see how, starting around the second century, Christianity abandoned the afterlife teachings of Jesus about a future resurrection of the dead, and turned instead to views spread throughout the non-Jewish world, that souls would live forever in a state of blessing or despair.

This kind of study addresses a vital question:  Do we need to fear eternal torment after death?  And it provides a vital answer:  Not if we accept the views of the Bible and Jesus.

 

Again, this is the link:   https://learn.bartehrman.com/what-the-hell?widget=courses