Loading...Miracles converted millions of people to the Christian faith in the ancient world. What about the fear of hell?
Here’s how I talk about it in my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster)
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One of the reasons stories of miracles proved so effective in making converts is that Christians combined them with the claim that God’s manifestation of power in the present foreshadowed what he would do in the future. The present life may have been filled with pain and suffering: people were starving; they were afflicted with blindness, loss of hearing, paralysis, the ravages of disease, or abject poverty; they were attacked by hordes of evil demons. Life could be, and for many it was, a wretched existence, a cesspool of misery. But God’s miracle workers
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Dr. Ehrman,
Your series has made a strong cumulative case for the miracle thesis.
But this post introduces a significantly different explanation. MacMullen argues that hell was “the chief, perhaps the only, argument for conversion.” That does not sound merely complementary. It sounds like an alternative primary explanation, one that pushes the miracle thesis into the background.
Two serious scholars, then, seem to reach quite different conclusions about what most strongly drove conversion. You emphasize divine power as attraction; MacMullen emphasizes eternal punishment as coercion.
Do you see these as genuinely compatible, or does one of them carry more explanatory weight than the other?
Respectfully,
Tjalling
In my book I argue that the torments of hell, as proclaimed by Christians, were not part of this natural world but were acts of God — that is “miracles.”
As if life isn’t hard enough, we gotta worry about being tortured for eternity on top of it!
I worried incessantly about hell when I was a fundamentalist Christian. Breaking the speed limit was cause for hell. I repented over every little thing back in those days. After I left the church, I still had an ingrained fear of hell many years after. So glad to be done with that nonsense.
The most perverse aspect of traditional Christianity is claiming that a loving God created a world knowing that in the end billions of people would end up in eternal, everlasting torment. And the thing is I don’t think that’s even what Jesus actually taught, but that doctrine is held so fast by his supposed followers.
trAditional christianity forgot about the Old Testament & Made God, as Santa Claus
Jeez, I sure hope I don’t get cast into that eternal lake of fire. But if I make it to Heaven, will my parents be upset if I don’t want to hang out with them all the time?
Nope. No one gets upset in heaven. Hey, it’s perfect.
Hi Dr. Ehrman. Thanks for all the work you do. I am wondering: What do you think are the best ways for laypeople to develop the skills and knowledge to read more “serious” scholarship (i.e., not meant for a popular audience)? (Obviously a Ph.D. would be nice, but it seems unrealistic at my stage in life.) Is it best to start at the undergraduate level (e.g., your New Testament textbook)? Or do you think there are better ways to learn about the field? Thanks in advance.
Yes, that’s what I’d suggest. Start with a solid textbook. Then read some of the works mentioned in the bibliography (go with the ones that sound most interesting). Then read the books those books refer to, etc. It’s a slow process but there are intriguing discoveries to be made at every point.
Thank you Dr Ehrman. Fascinating and very plausible too. Isn’t there an inherent contradiction in the early Christian (and Medieval) concept of Hell? The Devil and his demons seem to be spending eternity punishing the very people who, according to the Christians, were doing the work of the Devil in their mortal lives?
The idea is that they are making life miserable for everyone — here on earth and then afterward.
The Fear of Hell as an Incentive to Convert. Origen of Alexandria might have taught that this world is the Hell to avoid. Don’t worry about dying and going to Hell. Instead, worry about dying and returning to Hell. Worry about being LEFT BEHIND and being BORN AGAIN. Emperor Ashoka of the Mauryan Dynasty of India sent Buddhist missionaries to the Ionian Greeks of Egypt, Achaia, and Anatolia around 250 BCE. After all, it is reported that Jesus said that Hell was created for Satan and his angels. This world is the Hell that was created for Satan and his angels. This world/Hell functions as a QUARANTINE FACILITY and PENAL COLONY for the created immortal souls. The ancient Gnostic Christians were 50% correct, after all.
The Buddhist missionaries taught that the afterlife was a terrible place. A hellish experience awaited immortal souls. No mortal ascended to join the gods. Siddhartha Gautema burned the bridge behind him? Siddhartha Gautema barricaded the door behind him? Hindus and Buddhists prayed a different Rosary; they appealed to the gods to shorten the Hell of departed family members. This is the origin of Purgatory.
Suppose Constantine never converted and Christianity remained legal but not favored. Do you think paganism would have eventually disappeared anyway?
Absolutely. That’s one of the things I try to demonstrate in my book.
This post resonated strongly with me, having grown up in a Fundamentalist Church. I’m presently in a deconstruction period with whatever shards of faith I have left after the past dozen years or so. One of my realizations is how often, even when very young, I sensed that things weren’t quite right in the kingdom. It seemed to me (and still does) that Christians have, since the onset, performed the exact opposite of “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative,” and I believe this is exactly where that viewpoint began. It seemed to me that I was required to be the milk of human kindness under threat of eternal torment. However, it also seemed to me that, to stay in good standing with my church family, I should keep my little mouth tightly closed and follow the party line. Here I am at the end of things, realizing that this was not the only impression of mine that was right on the mark.
As you’ve pointed out previously, Roman Christians concocted the idea of an eternal hell from Plato. So, those ideas should already have been familiar to pagans. And, as you’ve pointed out, those ideas weren’t taught by Jesus, Paul, the earliest Christians, and the Jerusalem church. They taught there was no afterlife except in a future resurrection of the body.
All these recent blogs of yours have shown how petty and impoverished the Christian religion had quickly become. Belief is coerced and created by alleged miracles and psychological extortion based on Platonic threats of a negative afterlife. If Houdini lived back then, he could have created a religion using card tricks, cutting women in half, and pulling rabbits from hats. And then use scare tactics to gain followers. I suspect Houdini’s religion could have easily taken over the Roman empire.
Since historians have basically shown that Christianity gained power this way, through alleged miracles and threats, that shows just how cheap human nature often is. It also reveals the inward poverty of popular Christianity.
Thank you for explaining the influence of the concept of hell. Heaven and hell are central concepts in orthodox Christianity, but I have always wondered where exactly the line is drawn between them.
For example, if one person stole two loaves of bread and another stole three, would one go to heaven and the other to hell simply because of the difference of one loaf? Of course, I realize this is a deliberately simple example, but it makes me wonder how early Christians imagined the boundary between salvation and damnation.
Did they think of heaven and hell as a strict binary division, or were there more layered or graded understandings of the afterlife? Paul, for example, speaks of being caught up to the “third heaven,” which seems to suggest a more complex cosmology.
In some Buddhist traditions, even the hell realms are subdivided into multiple levels, and these states are not necessarily eternal in the same way Christian hell is often imagined. Did early Christians have anything comparable, or did the binary heaven/hell model become dominant only gradually?
In the Christian tradition, MOST Christians think that it’s either heaven or hell, a binary choice, not that they are layered in different degrees of reward and punishment. Or if there are degrees, they aren’t particularly significant..
Thank you for explaining the influence of the concept of hell. Heaven and hell are central concepts in orthodox Christianity, but I have always wondered where exactly the line is drawn between them.
For example, if one person stole two loaves of bread and another stole three, would one go to heaven and the other to hell simply because of the difference of one loaf? Of course, I realize this is a deliberately simple example, but it makes me wonder how early Christians imagined the boundary between salvation and damnation.
Did they think of heaven and hell as a strict binary division, or were there more layered or graded understandings of the afterlife? Paul, for example, speaks of being caught up to the “third heaven,” which seems to suggest a more complex cosmology.
In some Buddhist traditions, even the hell realms are subdivided into multiple levels, and these states are not necessarily eternal in the same way Christian hell is often imagined. Did early Christians have anything comparable, or did the binary heaven/hell model become dominant only gradually?
What stood out to me most is that effective propaganda often creates a problem and then offers the solution. It reminded me of an infomercial: “Here’s a danger you didn’t even know existed. But don’t worry—we have the fix.”
In this case, many people in the ancient world apparently weren’t worried about eternal torment. Christianity introduced the idea that they were in grave spiritual danger and then presented salvation as the answer. Whether one believes the claim is true is a separate question, but the structure is familiar: first create awareness of a previously unknown problem, then offer the remedy.
It’s a tactic we still see today in advertising, politics, self-help movements, and countless marketing campaigns. The lesson for me is to ask a simple question whenever someone presents a solution: Is the problem independently verifiable, or am I only hearing about it from the people selling the cure?
Yup. It’s amazing the number of things we didn’t know we needed….
Your argument that Christianity’s combination of evangelism and exclusivity helped explain its remarkable growth is very persuasive. At the same time, I wonder how we should compare this with other historical cases. Buddhism spread widely without the same kind of exclusivity, while Manichaeism was highly missionary but did not ultimately survive as a dominant religion. Islam, on the other hand, was exclusive and became enormously successful, but its expansion seems to have been connected much more directly with empire, law, and political power.
Do these examples suggest that exclusivity and evangelism were decisive specifically in the Roman context, rather than universal factors in religious expansion?
I’d say every istance has to be studied on its own terms; I certainly don’t think the reason for one religion spreading (say Mormonism) would be the reason another did (say Hare Krishna).
Thanks. Fascinating ! I’ve been terrorized by the threat of eternal damnation all my life. David Bentley Hart articulates a strong argument against it for Christians who argue, “you had the opportunity to choose G-d by free will, and you rejected it” : Any rejection of G-d, who is the ultimate good, must necessarily be based on a faulty understanding of G-d, and therefore cannot be a free choice. Therefore it can’t be punished as if it were.
Yes, D. B. H. can be very Platonic at times. (Plato has Socrates aregue that anyone who truly knows the good would never do anything bad…)