Loading...In my previous two posts I’ve talked about Jesus’ view of the coming destruction of sinners. My goal is to compare and contrast his views with those of the book of Revelation. For both Jesus and the prophet John (author of Revelation) the future will not only bring very nasty destruction for some people on earth, but also an amazing salvation for others.
Here is how I talk about the future rewards of the righteous in my book Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
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It is easier to document Jesus’ words about the dreaded fate of sinners in Gehenna than about the blessings of the saved in the Kingdom of God. Even so, we have seen one teaching that is repeated in the Gospels: the coming Kingdom will entail a fantastic banquet where the redeemed eat and drink at leisure with the greats of Jewish past, the Patriarchs. This is a paradisal image of great joy.
Another key passage involves Jesus’ discussion of what life will be like once the resurrection has occurred. The earliest account is in Mark 12:18-27. In the immediate context, Jesus has come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, and a group of opponents, the Sadducees, want to confound him with a verbal trap. The non-apocalyptic Sadducees, as we have seen, did not believe in a future resurrection of the dead or, apparently, in any afterlife whatsoever. But since the core of Jesus’ teaching was an apocalyptic message, these naysayers thought they could publicly reveal the error of his ways.
They come up to Jesus and propose a situation. According to the law of Moses, if a man who is married dies without leaving any children, his brother is supposed to marry the widow and raise a family in his brother’s name (see Deuteronomy 25:5-6). This was to keep the man’s bloodline alive. In the Sadducees’ cunning hypothetical situation, there was once a man who had six brothers. He was married, but he died childless, so the oldest remaining brother took his widow as his own. But he too died childless. And so it went, until all seven brothers had been married to the poor woman. Finally she herself died. Then the Sadducees spring their trap, thinking they’ve identified an obvious absurdity in Jesus’ view of the coming resurrection: if all seven had married the woman, which one of them will be her husband when they are raised from the dead?
Jesus was not fazed by the question but, as was his wont, turned it against his opponents. First he tells them they simply don’t understand the Scriptures that predict a resurrection or God’s power that will make it happen. What they don’t realize is that at the resurrection, no one will be married. Instead, those who are raised will be “like the angels in heaven” – unmarried and, presumably, eternally happy about it. She won’t be anyone’s wife.
Jesus goes on to point out that in the Hebrew Bible, when God addresses Moses out of the burning bush, he tells him: “I am the God of … Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6) These three patriarchs had lived centuries before Moses, and Jesus wants to make a point about the verb “to be,” that God uses the present tense: I am their God. He does not say he was their God. For Jesus the fact that God said he is their God indicates that they were still alive. They had not been annihilated in death. They were being kept until the future resurrection. Sometimes it really does matter what the meaning of the word “is” is.
Moreover, for Jesus, when the Patriarchs were raised, they, along with all the righteous, would not simply be revivified and brought back from a very long Near Death Experience, only to lead another life leading up to a second death. They would be given a glorified, immortal existence, comparable to that of the angels. Here Jesus is endorsing the view that we have seen elsewhere, starting with the book of Daniel. The resurrection of the dead meant being given an exalted existence for all eternity; it would not be a mere replication of life people have now in this world of sin and suffering. It would be like the lives of God’s powerful and glorious angels, an eternal life blessed by God in a world where there would be no longer any traces of evil.
In Mark 14:61-62, Jesus is asked by the High Priest if he is the Christ, and he replies “I am […] and you will see the Son of Man […]”
This “I am” here, is that God’s “I am” or is it merely answering in the affirmative? Is Jesus claiming the authority of God in this passage?
I think he’s just saying “Yes.” It’s the same wording as teh blind man in John 9: “Are you the one Jesus healed?” “I am.”
Re: Mark 12: 18-27 (or Luke 20); I have always thought this question posed to Jesus was perhaps referencing Sara’s seven husbands (who were done in by Asmodeus) in Tobit 3:8. I know we cannot say definitively the Sadducees had this passage and story in mind, but a little more than a Coinky Dink?
Was Jesus saying that the patriarchs were still alive? I’ve never understood it that way. I thought that everyone, prior to Christs’s return, were merely “sleeping” until the resurrection took place.
I suppose sleeping people have not yet ceased to exist.
I laughed at this:
“Sometimes it really does matter what the meaning of the word “is” is.”
Very well played professor! Not only have I learned so much from you in how you have made scholarship of early Christianity accessible but I also very much appreciate your style and wit!
Sexuality is fundamental to creation of biological and human life Therefore it seems odd that monotheism could develop. It seems odd that divine life not reflect sexuality in important ways–and very unusual within ancient religion. I wonder if the place of a wife is taken by God’s relationship to the world or some part of it, eg, humanity, the Jewish nation, the early Christian Church, etc. Is that a frequent or important metaphor throughout the Bible?
Yes, God’s people are often portrayed as his “bride.”
This may be more of a theological (and Catholic vs Protestant) question than a scriptural one. After the fall, is humanity viewed as basically good but “disordered” (eg, lack of integration of or balance with respect to one’s powers and motives, full of inner conflict, fearful, weak, “sick”) or as hopelessly evil without trust in Jesus. In both views, humanity needs God’s help/grace in order to be consistently good. So maybe it’s a matter of degree? One distinction might be whether humanity can do any sort of good without God’s help, eg, whether non-Christians can do any sort of good? I don’t know that Jesus talked about this. But maybe Paul does?
I’m asking this from the standpoint of Christianity. But also does the OT have a view about humanity being disordered vs evil?
Yes, that’s a big area of debate among Christian theologians, going back to Augustine and on to debates between CAtholics and Protestants.
That eternal life better be better than some OT descriptions. Can’t recall chapter and verse but references are made to precious gems and streets of Jasper and suchlike. Sounds like a marble slab or mortuary with nice decorations. Nothing green, nothing growing, no animal life. Cold. Cold as an old time patriarch’s cramped, constipated, misogynistic heart. And rather heartless as well; jolly times in heaven as friends and relatives and loved ones who didn’t make the cut crackle and roast in eternal flame. Mmmm! Smell the aroma! Roasting flesh! Almost as fine as napalm in the morning…
“an eternal life blessed by God in a world where there would be no longer any traces of evil”. Is this life you talk about here on earth or somewhere else? I always believed,this earth we live now, would be our renewed transcended planet with no evil existing. Or was it changed to another place over time ? It is also interesting, that jesus mentions noone will be married. The Mormons are contrary to that. They believe that to reach exaltation in Celestial glory/realm like God, one needs to be married, maybe like God was married himself and could of had a wife ? They refute/ignore, Matthew 22; 30, as you alluded to. Go figure how some denominations arrive at their conclusions.
For Jews like Jesus it was here on earth.
One thing (among many others) that has always baffled me with regard to that view is how would people feel happy ”all the time”? I mean, we *feel* anything always in subconscious comparison to other feelings – this is analogous to maybe my favorite quote of yours, that “the way to understand anything is to understand it in relation to what we already know” (sorry if I paraphrased you a tad, you have ended a talk of yours with this[?] quote and I remember how it struck me as so insightful). How could one feel always happy, if there was no possibility for sadness? Where would this feeling of happiness emerge from?
Yeah, it’s a strange idea actually. But apparently it’s all part of the divine miracle of eternal life!…
It is always perplexing to fall into interpretations to vindicate the Cosmic Deity’s (God’s) expression impediment.
If the verse “I am God of Abraham, etc.”, was to allude to living patriarchs instead of dead, then that God should have said “ I am God of Abraham, etc OF WHOM TO ME ARE ALIVE”.
Period. case closed.
Even Mohammed explicitly said that since by his time the eternity concept was well established though.
But it is the mythical personal experience & unique understanding of ancient text that is perceived as a Morse code of the mysteries to all generations that drive thousands of meanings 🤯🤯.
Another point,
If you gonna have banquets with Patriachs or as words on Jesus lips (“But, I will not drink until that day when I DRINK it new WITH YOU in My Father’s kingdom.””
Mat 26:29
So in this state (kingdom) there will be physical drinks (which you should enjoy 😉) but on the contrary you will be CASTRATED 😳😳 from your sexual organs.
So Eating is desirable but sex is abhorrent.
You can understand how the ebionites ( Yeshua’s convictions likely derived from) or Paul preference to abstain from marriage come from. It is the despised perception of sex among those men.
My memory from previous blog posts and other discussions is that while you think verse 25 goes back to the historical Jesus (“they neither marry nor are given in marriage”), you do not think verses 26 and 27 do so (“the reference to the Patriarchs and to God being of the living and not the dead).
I won’t go over the reasons for thinking so now, but I am very surprised that you are now citing those verses in discussion of what Jesus thought.
I don’t recall ever saying that. But then again, I don’t recall what I had for lunch yesterday….
Well, certainly to me it seems strange that someone who is pedantic enough to hang so much significance on the tense of a verb would come up with this argument while believing that the resurrection of the dead is yet to come and that the dead are not, in the present, living.
That aside, it would be interesting to know if Apocalypticists in the time of Jesus had any other arguments to show that their beliefs were implicit in the Torah all along.
If Jesus came up with this himself it tells us a lot about his attitude to Scripture and how it should be read.
Thankyou for that very nice turn of expression : “Instead, those who are raised will be “like the angels in heaven” – unmarried and, presumably, eternally happy about it.” 🙂
It elicits from me the same chuckle as I recall the words ascribed to poor old Socrates : “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” !!
Did other religions in the ancient world offer rewards and punishments as found in Christianity? If not, how were they different?
You find rewards and punishments in numerous traditions, most famously in the writings of Plato.
Being raised up to be “like the angels in heaven” seems problematic if Satan and his demons were fallen angels; it suggests people in heaven could still be capable of sin. (If former sinners will be incapable of sin, are they really the same people?) Do we know if Jesus and/or other apocalypticists believed Satan and his minions to be fallen angels? Luke 10:18?(Or was that idea a separate development?)
Many Jews did — this is one of the themes of teh opening section of 1 Enoch, e.g.
The Patriarchs of the Jewish past probably would rather go play Backgammon with their friends than dine with a bunch of youngsters.
Why do you think Hegesippus, via Eusebius, has James quoting Jesus, “He is sitting at the right hand of the Great Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven,” when he then says, “Many were convinced, and gloried in James’s testimony, crying, ‘Hosanna to the son of David.'”? This is James doing the testimony. History of the Church, Book 2, 23:11.
Then, after they began to stone him,”But he turned and knelt, uttering the words, ‘I beseech Thee. Lord God and Father, forgive them: they do not know what they are doing’.” These are of course, also given to Jesus in the canon. You know how to date Hegesippus? Really?
Dr. Charles W. Hedrick says the Apocalypses of James are “early” in relation to the canonical Gospels. And they have James saying, “Hail, Brother!” upon greeting Jesus, obviously a pre Judas’s “Hail, Master!” before “seizing him” (watered down due to late virgin-birth Markan nonsense).
Jerome says Origen “often uses the Gospel of the Hebrews,” which has Jesus breaking bread and giving it to James, not Judas. Not intriguing?
I believe I answered that question already.
What do you think Matt. 6:22, “When thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light” means? And John 3:8, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whither it cometh nor goeth, so is everyone born of the spirit”? Why did he say them?
“single” in Matt 6:22 is famously thorny; since it is contrasted with “evil/sick” it is often taken to mean that if one can see clearly one is enlightened; John 3:8 is complicated because of the context, the double entendre throughout, especially here with the meaning of “spirit” “wind” and “breath” in an analoty to the Spirit and the need to be born “from above.”
I’m not sure I agree with Jesus’s interpretation of God’s use of the present tense. Rather than proving that the patriarchs are still alive in the present, sustained by him in anticipation of the resurrection, I think it’s God indicating that he exists in Eternity. In that timeless realm he is simultaneously with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in each of their local versions of “the present,” as well as with Moses.
Ha-ha-ha!
“Sometimes it really does matter what the meaning of the word “is” is.”
I love it!
I guess the Catholics wanted to avoid such ambiguiy in their prayer, “Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”
Dear professor, how do moral atheists fit in this context?
I’m very much hoping they enter into the kingdom. 🙂
In the Kingdom of Heaven people “will neither marry nor be given in marriage”. Would this be why some apocalypticists (man, that’s hard to spell) like Jesus and Paul didn’t marry? An example of Kingdom ethics – in the Kingdom there would be no marriage so Jesus’s followers did not marry now.
It certainly could be, yes.
Hi Dr Ehrman!
What is your book: Jesus Before the Gospels about?
Thank you!
It’s about how people “remember” the past and how “oral cultures” pass along their traditions (not accurately! As everyone seems to think), as a way of trying to figure out how much in the early Gospels is historically accurate (it includes a lot on what we know about the value of eyewitness testimony and it’s reliability)
Interesting!! Thanks so much!
Which reminds me of my overall … concluding question from that book.. whether anything that the gospels report Jesus to have said can reasonably be historical ? So, on that note… would any Jewish apocalyptic so speaking have included gentiles among the righteous to enter the Kingdom?
Sure. Including Jesus!
“In Paul’s View of Resurrection ” on the Blog (October 6, 2012) you lay out Erhman-style (detailed, logical, cited) exactly what Paul thinks the resurrection will be.
Is what Jesus says about the resurrection in Mark consistent with what Paul is saying in Corinthians? At first glance it seems to be…
I don’t think there’s anything particularly inconsistent, though he doesn’t go into any detail. Was there a point you wondered about in particular?
Obviously “Jigsawing” the heck out of your writing.
Paul says: Jesus’ resurrection was a bodily resurrection, then their own resurrection will as well be bodily. Which means it is not simply spiritual…. The entire argument, in other words, is predicated on an understanding that Jesus was physically raised from the dead…The people Paul attacks are those who mock his view that there will be a real physical resurrection of the body.
Vs.
Jesus says: Instead, those who are raised will be “like the angels in heaven” …They would be given a glorified, immortal existence, comparable to that of the angels.
I am a natural harmonizer. But even I can see the case be made that Jesus isn’t talking about a physical resurrection here. Point given, but it does seem the Sadducees (who actually heard him) understood him to be saying there is a physical resurrection of some kind in laying their trap and publicly calling him out on just that issue.
So, while noting they don’t seem necessarily contradictory, I am asking if you think these views could be called “consistent”?
Sorry, I’m not seeing teh inconsistency. Both passages talk about humans existing after death in glorified bodies that owuld never die, not as spirits that don’t have bodies. Or do you mean something else?
“. . .a glorified, immortal existence, comparable to that of the angels.” What about them angels? Was there a common view regarding angels at the time of Jesus? Do we know if he shared that view? Were the angels just sitting around, waiting for God to dispatch one with a message? Did God pick a particular angel for a particular message? Did they appear to have physical bodies none of the time, all of the time, or depending? Could one angel be at several different physical locations at the same time? This reflects my general criticism of so much “religious” discussion — what is claimed today is often a problematic effort to solve a problem with what was said yesterday. This doesn’t apply to your work, which is an effort to recapture what the arguments were, not their validity. Experiencing an eternal non-physical afterlife? Ugh! Some would say that *that* would be Hell.
Good questions! Unfortunately the sources talk about angels and what they were doing without explaining what they had in mind or giving additional details (like what they do in their downtime). The word angel just means “messenger” and so these are God’s messengers, who usually take on human form, to do his bidding, with great powers. They do seem to be located in one place at once. I wish we had fuller expositions!
Surely, Bart, you,’ve seen Indians with a red mark on their forehead, called a ’tilak,’ especially women, who wear it cosmetically. This represents ‘the single eye,’ or ‘mind’s eye’ in mysticism, the etheric portal to higher planes. This has nothing to do with sound, healthy, whole, sick, good or evil. It is ‘single’ like they had it years ago before the NIV, etc. When one’s eye is single focused, your mind is “en-light-ened.’ You are now in the astral, or star-like light-realm. Reams of writings on this abound.
The Sound in John 3:8 is the Shabd in Surat Shabd Yoga, the practice of the Sound Current. One can actually hear it, right from the start. Sit quietly and you will hear it. It sounds like humming inside your head and coming from everywhere at once. Think, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ lyrics. Led Zeppelin had to have someone doing Yoga! “Your stairway lies on the whispering wind…” Very cool.
Incidentally, this is ‘Apophasis Logos.’ There is no Louis Painchaud “secret denial of the proclamation” or April DeConick’s “secret revelatory discourse.” These are blind guesses. Gospel of Judas says, “Word said without saying.” Same as wind of spirit, breath of life, Mark’s *pneuma.*
Bart:
Your readers might be interested in this symposium discussion of a new book ‘Secularism and Hermeneutics’ by Yael Almog that was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education https://syndicate.network/symposia/literature/secularism-and-hermeneutics/. I look forward to any comments by you or other members on this discussion.
So sorry. Off subject, but I keep thinking of things and you are the only person I know to ask. 🙂
Great commission.. . If Jesus said this global commission, then why was Peter and the church surprised when Cornelius received the Holy Spirit? And why was Peter reluctant to preach to him in the first place?
Secondly, wouldn’t the risen Jesus have explained plainly to the apostles the obsolescence of the Old Covenant, (including circumcision) and the Gentile inclusion into the church, rather then letting them have to sort and debate and figure things out like in Acts 15 and the mysteries that were revealed to Paul?
Am I thinking the right way here or am I missing something?
Exactly. The author of Acts wasn’t familiar with the ending of Matthew. And yes, one would think so….
This is unrelated to the topic of this post but I note the recent passing of John Shelby Spong, whom I see was a son of North Carolina & a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill. I read that his academic credentials were not overly strong but I wonder, Prof Ehrman, if he was at all influential in your life journey? It seems he certainly spoke up for what he thought & believed, against the flow of many around him, and walked away from a deeply conservative evangelical upbringing.
He was a great man and a superb communicator of biblical knowledge to a broad audience. No, he didn’t influence me directly, though I did meet him and talk with him, when we were both giving lectures in the same places.
I have a question about Luke 23:43:
The NIV renders this as:
– Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
The NWT renders it as:
– And he said to him: “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise.”
The placement of the comma makes an important theological point. The NIV (and all other translations that I checked) places the comma so that the statement means that Jesus and the thief will enter paradise that same day (i.e. right after their deaths).
The NWT places the comma so that only the promise of paradise is given on that day. The entry into paradise may come later (for example, after judgement day?).
Dr. Ehrman, is the placement of the comma in the NWT supported by the Greek original? Is this a possible translation of the original sentence into English?
I have a long discussion of this in my book Heaven and Hell. I argue that the comma really has to go after “you.” Part of it involves the Greek, but another has to do with what makes sense. Why if Jesus and this other man were dying would he want to tell him that he was talking to him “today.” What other day could he be talking to him?
Thanks! I can’t believe I missed this. It’s right there on page 196, which I verified when I pulled my copy of ‘Heaven and Hell’ off the shelf 🙂
I wonder how that worked, in Luke’s mind: Jesus knew he was going to paradise right after dying, but he also knew that he would have to appear to the disciples three days later in his actual physical body, able to eat broiled fish. Was Jesus able to travel back and forth between paradise and his fleshly existence on Earth? Fascinating…
I think Luke must have thought that he came back from heaven for a bit. My sense is that that’s what a lot of people still think today, though I could be wrong.
Prof Ehrman,
Excellent delivery on ‘Expecting Armageddon’ yesterday.
Please, how do you juxtapose this earlier statement as picked from ‘Heaven and Hell’ to the Jewish understanding of the soul? Doesn’t this presuppose a soul living apart from the body?
“For Jesus the fact that God said he is their God indicates that they were still alive. They had not been annihilated in death. They were being kept until the future resurrection.”
Yes, I can see the confusion. My view of it is that Jesus is saying they are not permanently dead. God will raise them. It’s not that their soul is existing somewhere now but that it is still potentially there for God to breathe back into their bodies (unlike what the Sadducees thought, that they were permanently dead).
Prof Ehrman,
Please did the Jewish understanding of the soul in contrast to the Greek ever present as a problem to the Church Fathers? Did it ever come up in any of their writings and what was their position on it?
Thank you.
Most of them simply assumed the existence of the soul as a separate entity; I don’t recall them discussing an alternative Jewish view.