Loading...For this week’s readers’ mailbag I have chosen three unusually unrelated questions, one on whether we should be afraid of going to hell, one on how I prepare for public debates, and one on how we got the name Jehovah from the Hebrew name of God, YHWH. This shows just how wide ranging your questions can be on this blog! If you one you would like me to address in the future, let me know.
QUESTION:
What would you say to someone who is scared of going to hell?
RESPONSE:
I suppose the first thing I’d say is that I understand the fear very well, from the inside, as I too used to have it. This was especially a problem for me when I first began to realize that I didn’t believe the Christian message any more, the claim that one had to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus to be “saved” and that anyone who didn’t believe would be condemned to the eternal torments of hell. One of my greatest fears in “leaving the faith” was: What if I’m wrong? That could be costly. Eternally!
It took me years to get over it. I have lots of thoughts about the doctrine of hell – and am thinking, in fact, of devoting a book to “The History of Hell” (or possibly “The Origin of Hell”) where I deal with the topic at length. Here let me just say one thing about it.
I have come to think that if there is a God in the universe, he is either relatively indifferent to us (which is why he would allow such awful pain, suffering, and misery for literally billions of people) or he is good. I’m probably heavily influenced by my past in thinking that he would probably be good. If God is good, would he really want to torture a person for trillions and trillions of years – and that would only be the beginning – in exchange for disbelief of a few years?
What do we think of humans who torture others for, say, three hours? We think they are among the lowest life-forms in the universe. Do you mean God is worse than that? Trillions of times worse? That he is gazillions times worse than the most malicious and evil Nazi the world has ever seen? I simply don’t believe it. And if someone does believe it, well, I think it would be interesting to explore why people would believe that a good God was at heart totally evil. (I know that people who believe in eternal punishment would say that God is not evil but “just.” But “justice” means, among other things, devising punishments that fit the crimes. We don’t torture people for months for robbery. Surely God is better than us, not worse. Quadrillions of years of torture in exchange for, say, ten years of disbelief is by any standard incommensurate. I just don’t believe it’s true.)
QUESTION:
How do you prepare for debates? What makes a good debater? If your grandchild wanted to learn to become a good debater what advice would you give them?
RESPONSE:
I have a public debate two or three times a year. There’s a simple answer to how I have prepared for them. I have spent forty years of my life preparing for them, intensely studying the New Testament and early Christianity in most of my waking hours. What do I do in preparation for a particular debate? Very little, as a rule. I come up with a PowerPoint presentation of my opening speech and casually wonder what the other person is going to say. That’s about it.
I suppose I’m a good debater because I have a lot of experience, starting when I was fourteen years old and joined the high school debate team. When I was a seventeen-year old senior, I and five of my colleagues won the Kansas state debate tournament. Anyone who wants to be a good debater should do what anyone needs to do to become good at something, whether it is shooting baskets, writing essays, or building bookshelves. They should do it a lot. Hopefully with some guidance from someone who knows what they’re doing.
Being a good debater means understanding all of the ins and outs of an issue; knowing the data; knowing what scholars have said about the data; knowing how to evaluate a good argument, and a bad one; knowing how to expose the weakness of the views of others; knowing how to present a persuasive case, one that will be convincing not just to oneself but to others; knowing how to speak publicly in a way that’s both interesting and compelling.
What would I advise my granddaughter who wanted to become a good debater? Study hard and join the debate team!
QUESTION
My one question is related to how many syllables there most likely were in the pronunciation of the name YHWH? The Jehovah’s Witnesses argue that many of the abbreviated names in the Bible that contain a part of the tetragramation contain 2 syllables of the divine name, indicating that YHWH possibly had 3 syllables much like Jehovah, and not 2 like Yahweh.
RESPONSE:
OK, this one is tricky. Here’s the short answer. The tetragrammaton literally means the “four letters,” and is a technical term used to refer to the name of God in the Hebrew Bible, YHWH. Ancient Hebrew was written without vowels. Only the consonants were represented. Readers knew how to pronounce the words by providing the appropriate vowels. But we don’t have records of their pronunciations, and so we have to reconstruct them as best we can on the basis of surviving evidence.
Scholars have long maintained that the name YHWH was probably pronounced as a two-syllable word, Yahweh. Since this was God’s actual name, it was treated with special reverence, to the point where, eventually, it was no longer thought to be appropriate even to pronounce it. It was too holy. And so, when Jewish readers would come to the name, instead of saying it they would say the Hebrew word for “Lord,” which was Adonai.
When early Bible translators began rendering the Hebrew Bible into English, they had to decide how to translate the tetragrammaton. And what they (some of them) did was to take the four letters of YHWH (originally a two-syllable word) and add to them the vowels of Adonai (a three-syllable word). That ended up as something like YaHoVaiH, which came into English as Jehovah. Jehovah, then, is a made up word, based on the consonants of the tetragrammaton and the vowels of Adonai, the word “Lord.”
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I would love to read a book about the history of hell. You should write it!
This is off-topic. You’ve mentioned that most Europeans are mainly atheist or at least non-religious. Why is that exactly?
It’s one of the great intellectual developments of modernity, the move away from religion in Europe.
You wrote, in response to Pattycake1974: “It’s one of the great intellectual developments of modernity, the move away from religion in Europe.”
I recall someone (I don’t remember who) having said in a recent post that Europeans are currently becoming *more* religious, with the exception of the French. That what we might think of as “Western civilization” (my term, I don’t remember what term the other poster used) as a whole *can* still be seen as becoming less religious, but solely because of the U.S. and France.
Your response? What are the latest, trustworthy statistics?
Personally, I of course hope you were right – that all or most of Europe is becoming less religious.
No, I don’t think that’s the case. Most of Western Europe is pretty secular (including England, which is highly so)
It is not a great intellectual development.
It is not a great development for humanity.
Turning backs on god/s
Losing a whole area of Life
Reducing Life
Increasing Anarchy.
Disqualifying oneself from healing and improving Christianity and Islam.
There are enemies who gloat on the failure of others to be good stewards of this valuable aspect of the human experience. Those who encourage moving away from god/gods and religion rob people who fail to acknowledge what is valuable.
Elaine Pagels has a good book on it. Bernard McGinn has a great book on the Antichrist. And scholar, Jacques Le Goff, has also written an excellent book called The Birth of Purgatory that’s quite interesting.
I just purchased another book by Pagels that someone recommended. Haven’t got to read it yet though.
Isn’t Pagels book on the origin of Satan, not Hell?
Ah, right! But also her book on Revelations is relevant.
+1 Would definitely pick that up from Bart.
I agree! I’ve done a bit of research myself on this and would love to get Bart’s take on it.
Re Question 1: I still think (as I know I’ve said elsewhere) that the best response would be to *explain how the concepts of Heaven and Hell originated* – which would lead to the conclusion that there’s no reason to believe in them.
And if the questioner is also (understandably) afraid of just *ceasing to exist*, tell him or her – even if you don’t personally believe in it – that many people *do* believe in another possible form of “survival”: reincarnation. (Which *might*, at some point, include remembering a “cycle” of lives and coming to understand how they were connected.)
That’s my fear–ceasing to exist.
No need to fear. You didn’t dislike not existing before you were born!
True
Bernie Sanders was in Huntington a week or so ago. One of my coworkers went to the rally. She said people were yelling that they were going to go to hell for supporting Sanders. As if that’s supposed to make sense.
I think that’s the fear of *most* thoughtful people.
I myself don’t claim certainty – for anything; but for many years, I’ve inclined strongly to belief in reincarnation. There’s real evidence for it – much more evidence than for, say, the truth of Christianity!
I’d advise anyone who’s interested to read “Life Before Life,” and the more recent “Return to Life,” by Jim B. Tucker. He’s a child psychologist and researcher at the Unversity of Virginia. Many years ago, he worked with the late Prof. Ian Stevenson, who did an enormous amount of research on past-life memories of children in Asia. That was considered suspect because there’s widespread *belief* in reincarnation there. But Prof. Tucker has taken on the more challenging task of researching children’s past-life memories in America, and elsewhere. And even if he may be a little too ready, in some cases, to assume children’s parents have no reason to encourage them to make up “stories,” I think the sheer *volume* of cases that “check out” – can be matched with earlier people who really lived and died – would convince most open-minded readers.
I know it’s unwise to speculate too much about “how reincarnation works.” (There’s *no* ground for assuming people who are suffering “deserve” it!) But its being an almost-certain fact suggests that there must be *some* point to it – that perhaps, at the end of a “cycle” of lives, we’ll remember them all and understand how they were connected.
For another, less scholarly, way of looking at it, here’s a link to an essay of mine:
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/1238886/1/Born-Again
I’m not sure I like the idea of being reincarnated.
That’s understandable. It’s scary to think about becoming a vulnerable infant, and child, again! Possibly being born as the opposite sex. Possibly (though it doesn’t seem to happen often) being born in another part of the world, with a different language and culture.
Also, no future incarnation will be, completely, the same person as one’s present-life self. The “material” part of the new person – the genetic heritage – will be completely different. And even the part of oneself that reincarnates might divide, to incarnate in more than one newborn. Many years ago, I read about a study that involved hypnotizing several sets of twins, and one of triplets. The results seemed to indicate that in each set of twins, both of them had the same past-life memories – as did all three triplets. The researcher had been trying to prove “genetic memory”; but there were circumstances that ruled it out.
Many people prefer to believe in the Christian “Heaven,” where they think they’ll live forever, in what they imagine as perpetual bliss. But there’s no reason to think “Heaven” exists, other than hallucinatory “near-death experiences” of people who weren’t really dead. Experiences that seem to reflect what they’d hoped for – or, less frequently, feared.
There’s real evidence for reincarnation – not dependent on hypnosis. And some children who recount verifiable past-life memories also describe “between-lives experiences” that seem hallucinatory in nature. Everything from having been with “God,” to having just “hung around,” invisible to living people, till they felt an urge to follow a specific person…and then, somehow, incarnated in that person’s expected child.
Also read Journey of Souls by Michael Newton.
Why would you fear ceasing to exist?
I think it makes me sad more than anything.
There might not be any reason to believe in it that involves empirical evidence but, psychologically and emotionally, there has been reason for some people to believe in it. Nevertheless, part of a good response to the question about whether Hell exists should include pointing out that there’s no evidence for it.
Dr. Ehrman, this is a bit off topic, but have you ever seen the film Agora? It concerns the last days of Hypatia of Alexandria and the religious turmoil that engulfed Alexandria at the time. I’m curious what you make of the filmmaker’s attempt at showing the dynamics between the Christian, Jewish and Pagan population of the city.
Haven’t seen it! Need to . I’m veyr interested in Hypatia and have read what all the ancient sources have to say about her.
Did the reverence for the word YHWH originate from the commandment not to take the name of the Lord in vain? And if so, does that mean this commandment only applied to the term YHWH since that was God’s “name” and not other terms such as Adonai or Elohim? I’m not sure how they made distinctions between names and titles, if such distinctions even existed.
Also, if you write the book on the history/origins of hell I would definitely be interested in purchasing.
Yes, I think that ultimately that’s where the reverence came from, and that idea that God himself was so holy that even his name should not be pronounced.
Could it be that the Israelites first lost the pronunciation of the name of God due to the upheaval of the Babylonian invasion and the subsequent changes to their language and script, and then came up with the excuse that the name of God was too holy to pronounce?
I don’t know — it’s an interesting theory, but I’m sure Hebrew philologists have worked out an answer.
The Intro or Preface to the RSV claims some 12th century monk somewhere is the one who put YHWH and Adonai together.
Ah, thanks. I need to trace the history out.
Regarding the fear of Hell question: Bertrand Russell said “If there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.”
I have a colleague whose husband teaches a course on “The History of Hell” at Penn State – Hazleton.
As for the proper pronunciation of God’s name, we may find a clue in the theophoric names we see in the TaNaKh itself. (For those who don’t know what a theophoric name is, it’s a name that includes a god’s name within it, such as how the name Apollodorus has the name of the god Apollo within it.) Usually it’s the entire name of the god (as in the case of Apollodorus), and when we look at the theophoric names of ancient Israel’s neighbors, they also use the entire god’s name — e.g. Jezebel has the name of the Canaanite god Bel (Ba’al) within it, and the Aramean ruler Benhadad has the Aramean god Hadad within it.
The funny thing is when we see Israelite theophoric names we tend to only see the first two or three letters of the tetragrammaton (YH or YHW) in the names — for instance, in the theophoric name Mattityahu (Matthew) we only find Yahu, YHW, not the entire name of God, (i.e. מתתיהו not מתתיהוה). Now, it’s assumed that this is the case because uttering the entire name of God was verboten, but that only became the case post-Exile. Before then Israelites would freely say God’s name (which, incidentally, also suggests that the bulk of the Hebrew Bible was probably written or redacted post-Exile as well.) So why wasn’t God’s entire name included within those Israelite theophoric names pre-Exile? Well, maybe they were! Maybe the reason the name Isaiah (Yeshaiyahu) only ends with -yahu (i.e. ישעיהו rather than ישעיהוה) is that that was actually how YHWH’s name was pronounced — Yahu.
Just speculating.
Now that last paragraph is something I am very happy to have learned. Always wondered, and the story is better than I would have imagined.
Jehovah from yhwh
Bart, the questions about the character of God raised in your discussion of Hell, made me think of this excerpt from a letter Catherine Beecher wrote to her brother, Edward, after he’d come up with the idea of a pre-existent state in which the soul chose to do wrong:
“I reply how do you get this? If you say by a Revelation from God, I say before I can confide in his teachings I must have proof that all this horrible misery and wrong resulting from the wrong construction or nature of mind is not attributable to the Creator of All Things. His mere word is nothing from the Author of a system which is all ruined and worse than good for nothing. He must clear his character before he can offer me a Revelation.” (L. B. Stowe, Saints, Sinners and Beechers, p. 99.)
I’m not sure those of us raised in various Bible church cultures will ever be able to let go of the last fragment of trepidation when it comes to the potential of an everlasting damnation, we’ve been raised in the paradigm that the world is a massive cosmic trial court where humans having committed some unpardonable sin are in need of an outside entity to deposit our shadow nature in before we are acceptable to our Creator.
Religious doctrines in the end are analogy describing an infinite God interacting with a finite world. The strong hold that dualism has our minds can lead us to believe that the infinite and the finite are opposites, when in fact, the infinite does not stand opposed to the finite, but encompasses it. The prophet Isiah quotes God in chapter 45: 5-7, “I am the Lord and there is no other; Besides me, there is no God. I will gird you though you have not known me, that men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun, that there is no one besides me. I am the Lord, there is no other, the One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity. I am the Lord who does all this.”
So apparently, God does at some point claim to be responsible for the evil that occurs in this world. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
My issue with the whole idea of everlasting damnation is this. Is the world everlasting, from a linear point of view like we experience time in the finite world we live in? Or, is the infinite nature of God eternal, in the sense of a sort of Einstein’s view of relativity, where time in the sense that we perceive it does not exist? If the nature of God is infinite in some sort of non dualistic eternal, beyond what are senses perceive – how is it we are “saved” at some point defined in time when time does not exist within the infinite? All the points of salvation described in the Bible, whether they are excepting Jesus as your savior or being baptized take place in a non existent linear time, so how do you get your head wrapped around that idea? My question is, was there some point in the Bible where Hell as we now know it comes to the forefront because man became more aware of linear time while concurrently he started looking to be rescued from his experience of the world in a growing awareness of his living in a finite plane of existence? Our current culture seems obsessed with the after-life rather than the here and now.
To address you uneasiness with God being evil, It seems to me that the human mind, in extremes, cannot be expected to think in accordance with the infinite understanding of God, I gave up on making that a goal a while back. For me then, there is nothing more immoral that absolute moralism. And to envisage a God who can permit a world order involving even the possibility of the everlasting hell is surely more profoundly immoral than the idea of a God who can cause relative evil.
You mentioned Einstein’s theory of general relativity–
I just started reading Russell Brinegar’s book about his near-death experience where he was met by loved ones who were alive today but also existed in the future and were communicating with him what I would call telepathically. He was a fundamentalist Christian who became an atheist but now believes in something called the “cosmic mind at large”. He believes he was enlightened to the fact that our earthly existence is actually the past, like the light from stars; we still see their illumination even though they died millions of years ago.
I’m not far into it yet, but I find it fascinating because my sister had a similar experience years ago (no nde however) and she swears there were people without bodies communicating telepathically. Time was not what it seemed either. You could say it was her brain hallucinating, but other things happened that cannot be explained. She also saw evil in some people….actually, a lot of people.
If this cosmic mind is real, I hope it’s *good*. I hate to think of an afterlife with more battles to fight.
in my view, believing in an all good or all-evil or a God responsible for both says more about the believer than about God or the universe. Part of the verses you cite, in the KJV, says outright, “I create good and I create evil.” Although I choose neither, if I had to choose between Judaism and Christianity, I’d choose Judaism in part because there is room in it for not taking the afterlife so seriously, for focusing on this life,and Jews do not believe we are fallen, and do not believe, therefore, that we need salvation in the Christian sense of the word.
Regarding the first question about hell: those who seem to make the greatest use of hell as a fear technique are fundamentalist Christians. If hell is true it should be based on Christian writing, and particularly on the teachings of Jesus. Yet Jesus rarely spoke of hell. The term he used was gehenna, referring to a small garbage dump out side the walls of Jerusalem and is used metaphorically. The word Hades is used once and that is of Hellenistic origin.
My point is that I think the notion of a god who is so evil as to punishing nonbelievers for eternity is not a part of Jesus’ teachings of compassion at all. It is more of a device invented by the church to control illiterate people, culminating with Dante’s description of hell written in his poem The Divine Inferno in the medieval period.
I do not know all of the details of how this horrific concept developed and I do hope you write a trade book dealing with this issue since it has become a central doctrine in many Christian communities.
Your argument about there not being a Hell is very convincing. I guess “Pascal’s wager” hooks a lot of us, me included. I would be very interested in seeing you write a book about the history of the concept of Hell and would also be interested in seeing you then follow-up with a book on the history of the concept of Heaven. Of course, I am very interested in all of your trade books. Keep plugging away.
Re: fear of Hell. That fear is, I think, actually a derivative fear that plagues the religious believer. It’s not the most basic human fear. Which is? Death? Possibly. Or the pain that often accompanies death? Perhaps. But if you give it some thought, you’ll realize that the basic human fear is fear of non-existence. Which leads to the religious belief in an immortal human soul that survives death. Which leads the religious belief in a supernatural realm that includes a creator god and, possibly, other supernatural entities, and gives the human soul somewhere to land after death.
But what good is immortality if a Christian person can’t enjoy it. This is where the other basic human motivator enters–greed. Greed for everlasting pleasure (which, because of our limited imaginations, looks a lot like the pleasures we enjoy in this life). Christians don’t want eternity to be a Jewish Sheol or a Hindu everlasting cycle of reincarnations. They want a supernatural and everlasting version of what they have in this life.
But we humans also realize that you don’t get something for nothing in this life. And, obviously, that carries over to the afterlife. Which leads to the idea of everlasting rewards and punishments. Which, inexorably, leads to the doctrine of Hell and everlasting punishment.
But everlasting punishment is too harsh for most Christian believers to stomach, so many Christian sects tone down the harshness by the invention of Purgatory. And Catholics formerly believed in a place called Limbo where unbaptized infants went after death. But as a result of recent advances in theological thinking, the Limbo idea has been discarded.
Of course, Hell and Purgatory are really of academic interest only to most Christians because most Christians believe they will somehow slip into Heaven, eventually, since everyone of them believes that he or she is a “good person” and that the Christian god is a loving and forgiving overlord.
A book on the history of hell or the origins of hell (you could call it “What The Hell*) would be very interesting and probably a best seller. There are probably more people concerned about going to hell than about going to heaven and a better understanding of how hell came about would be helpful to a lot of those folks.
* The title opportunities are endless. To Hell And Back. Going To Hell. Hell, If I Know. One Helluva Book, Abandon All Hope… etc. The folks in marketing would have a blast with this one.
I have done my own study on hell, but would be very interested in any book/document you would write on the subject as you may have much more to add. I also wonder if you or any good scholar has written anything on the various early christian beliefs covering different views such as universalism, hell, afterlife and predestination, gnostic views? Also if you have any knowledge of astrotheology and whether this has any basis on Christian beliefs? Again i have done my own research as far as i can and time allows but would value a ‘sound’ scholars input. Sorry I know I am asking for a lot of questions here!
I’m afraid I don’t know anything about astrotheology. There are several books on afterlife; just google something like “A History of Heaven” etc.
I highly encourage and support a book on Hell. I think it is needed. When I left Fundamentalism and traditional Christianity the notion of Hell and the Theology of The Fall of Man and substitutional atonement made no sense to me and no matter how hard I thought I could never make it make sense to me. God seemed pure evil to me. I could go on but I think I would be saying things you already know.
In pursuing my degrees in Mental Health Counseling I gravitated toward a type of therapy called Transactional Analysis (TA) which divides our Ego States into Parent, Adult & Child. The Parent Ego State contains all the messages on how to live life. It is our learned aspect of life. Ideas and concepts that we learned about Hell are stored there. Another aspect of TA relevant to this is the Karpman Drama Triangle which analyses the rolls and games people adopt when in conflict with others. Sometimes we don’t even need another to play this game we can do it with our thinking all on our own. The Karpman Drama Triangle consists of the roles of Persecutor, Victim and Rescuer and how fear and guilt are used to keep people in these roles and playing a game.
Sorry, for the instructions on TA but the relevance is how concepts of Hell can be used to manipulate others. The things we learned about Hell located in our Parent Ego State are never critically analyzed by our Adult Ego State. Plus, sermon after sermon often goes around and around on the Drama Trama where messages about Hell are used to keep people in the state of victim hood through fear and guilt and this is often done by ministers playing the persecutor role. It is used to keep people in line and in control. This is often unconscious and both the ministers and congregation do not know it is happening. It was a real eye opener when I saw this.
The doctrine of Hell has caused mankind needless fear and suffering and an educated and scholarly book showing historically on how the myths of Hell were created and perpetuated and how damaging it can be is sorely needed?
No need to apologise, methinks. Thanks for the info.
I’m going to research this further; sounds quite interesting.
This sharing of knowledge is one of several good reasons I joined this blog, and, enjoy it so much.
Thanks again.
Strangely, it seems like many ancient people believed the afterlife was horrible for everyone. They couldn’t believe you just ceased to exist when you died, nor could they believe in some wonderful land in the clouds. There might be ways you could get yourself a better place in the afterlife, but they were never 100% reliable. Death was just all the worst things you could imagine in life–not being tortured for your sins, necessarily. Just like a really bad dream that never ended. Not true of all cultures, obviously–but religion may well have adapted itself to try and quell this natural fear that you’d be caught in some perpetual cycle of half-existence.
Honestly, if you’ve ever been really sick (or hung over), you know how this feels. Remember the story of the man suffering from seasickness–a well-meaning fellow passenger tells him “Don’t worry, nobody ever died from seasickness.” To which the poor man responds “The hope of dying is all that’s keeping me alive!”
Christianity eventually came to preach that the opposite was true–that this life was the nightmare, the cycle of half-existence, from which we’d be released by death–if we behaved and believed properly. But hell seems to have been needed to balance that out. Then purgatory as a form of compromise, and limbo to get out of sending unbaptized babies to hell.
People used to think a lot more about death, because people died a whole lot sooner, and lost loved ones a great deal more often.
Professor Ehrman,
Richard Bauckham claims that Jesus only indirectly spoke about his own status in public, and hardly ever explicitly said he was “Messiah” or “Son of God” or anything else. Do you agree with this? If so, why do you think he acted in this way?
I think he told only his disciples that he was the future messiah. Maybe he didn’t want to get executed….
If you get to hell before I do, please save me a good seat! 😉
Curiosity Question: As a non-believer, do you ever address (in writing) philosophical questions/topics, specifically topics such as Free Will, the nature of consciousness, or even theological arguments (Kalam, Ontological arguments, fine-tuning, etc.) ?
Just curious…
NO, I typically avoid philosophical issues, since I’m not trained as a philosopher!
I notice intellectual Christians like Stephen Colbert cannot accept that God tortures people in eternal Hell. They back-pedal the Hell doctrine and say, as Colbert does in an interview, that we choose our hell, which is our choosing to separate ourselves from God’s unconditional love. How would you respond to Christians like Colbert who define hell in these softer terms?
I’d say they make much better sense than those who take these things literally, but that I still don’t believe it myself.
DR Ehrman:
I understand hell to be a place of separation from God’s presence and kingdom, for beings, human and otherwise, who love evil, take pleasure in sin and refuse to repent of their sins even when they stand before God face to face. I believe we shall all have to appear before Christ and give an account of what we have done.
I believe when the day comes for a person to stand before the Lord, (a person who didn’t want to believe in the Lord in this life because he or she didn’t see Him or didn’t understand How He does things), If that person then believes in the Lord when standing before Him, I believe God will accept that person and grant Him or her eternal life. However there will be the loss of whatever God had intended to Give that person but salvation is a free gift once you see the Lord and believe in Him.
God is Just and fair.
Belief is cheap. I might be interested in the story of obtaining salvation and eternal life if I knew we were Fallen and if I knew the biblical God exists and if I knew there is a Heaven and a Hell but I know none of these things and I don’t think you do either. You just believe them. BTW, there is no story of the Fall of Humankind in Genesis 2-3 except the one Christians read into it.
Would love to see that hell book!
Fantastic mailbag this week. I love your idea on writing a book on the development of Hell. However, that would be years away and I, for one, would be highly interested in a few blog posts on Hell in Christian antiquity. I need at least an appetizer here Bart!
I’d love to read “the history of hell”!
This is what I think. If I go to hell (or heaven) after I die, what part of me goes? Not my physical body, that dies and decomposes. What about my mind? Well memory is stored in the neural connections of the brain. We know that because damage to that part of the brain can wipe out a person’s memory. So once the brain dies, so does memory. Personality is also a result of the unique neural connections of a person’s brain. We know this because again, damage to the brain can completely change a person’s personality, so they are like a different person. So once I’m dead, the person who goes to hell will not look like me, will not behave like me and will not remember they ever were me. In what sense is that person me?
Yup, very good questions. Ones I too have asked!
Please, do write that book about Hell Bart – and soon!
I agree with much of what you say about the fear of Hell. I have had similar thoughts for some time, but I don’t have faith that such ideas are true. The risk-reward deal is quite out of whack.. I think its quite possible there is something us geniuses have overlooked:)
I guess I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist::)
Another thought, if one wants to alleviate “fear of Hell” without denying too much Christian doctrine…
I remember something I learned about in a Catholic high school – the view of Hell advocated by some (contemporary) *Catholic* scholar. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the person’s name. But this was seemingly being accepted by a good many Catholics as a legitimate view:
“Hell” is really just a state of *eternal separation from God*. All the souls who go there have *chosen* that. And they aren’t suffering! They just don’t know – can’t even imagine – the *bliss* being experienced by the souls *united* with God. Those in Hell don’t think they’re missing a thing.
Hello Professor,
On Unbelievable, Bauckham said that you are the only scholar who thinks Papias might be referring to gospels other than the Mark and Matthew we have today. Would you agree with that? I would have thought that other scholars are skeptical, too.
Thanks!
Well, I’m sure there are others, but it’s not a common view. But I think maybe it should be! It seems especially clear about Matthew to me….
The Good News can’t be that Jesus came to earth to rescue us from the wrath of his (our) father…
Question for Bart. Can you compare and go over what you believe was the theological meaning intended of the crucifixion/resurrection as between the different gospels and the epistle writers? Thanks.
Interesting idea. I’ll add it to the list.
Dr Ehrman,
Do you think Jesus believed in some sort of Hell? If yes, how different was his conception of Hell, compared to the “modern” christian view(s) ?
I don’t think he believed in a place that your soul went when it died, if that’s what you mean.
I hope that you write the book on the history of hell. It’s a fascinating subject.
Xavier de guillebon ( a teacher of faith ?) have you heard of him Bart? You have never worked with Dan Brown ( Monty Python and the holy grail LOL ) and pretty sure you said you have never worked with him so I guess you never heard of him. He looks like a Freemason ! Illuminati! Jk prob a little more than that..?
Nope, haven’t heard of him.
Ok cool, no worries !
So.. Jesus says you might go to hell ( Tartarus and Hades what I personally Believe and especially since my Father in heaven Is Zeus he is also known as the punisher with Poseidon with a temper as well ! ) if you point and laugh at me or someone when speaking of the mysteries ? not funny is what Jesus was speaking of ? Personally I don’t think Jesus was joking.. Tartarus and Hades.. people need to know more about this… But it would be one thing if I walked around speaking about this..but I don’t ! But I know I am a polite, kind, and humble soul..I keep this knowledge to my self.. on the other hand people might need to take the time on their own to educate them selfs! Just like I did.. I don’t have a degree but I am Educated where It counts ! Or maybe that is why we have preachers and such.
The savior answered and said, “Truly I tell you that he who will listen to your word and turn away his face or sneer at it or smirk at these things, truly I tell you that he will be handed over to the ruler above who rules over all the powers as their king, and he will turn that one around and cast him from heaven down to the abyss, and he will be imprisoned in a narrow dark place. Moreover, he can neither turn nor move on account of the great depth of Tartaros and the heavy bitterness of Hades that is steadfast […] them to it […] they will not forgive […] pursue you. They will hand […] over to […] angel Tartarouchos […] fire pursuing them […] fiery scourges that cast a shower of sparks into the face of the one who is pursued. If he flees westward, he finds the fire. If he turns southward, he finds it there as well. If he turns northward, the threat of seething fire meets him again. Nor does he find the way to the east so as to flee there and be saved, for he did not find it in the day he was in the body, so that he might find it in the day of judgment.”
I have a question for the Readers Mailbox: What is the difference between the Day of Atonement and Passover? If I was making up a story about a man named Jesus who died to atone for sins, would it make for sense to have him die on the Day of Atonement? Does his dying as a Passover sacrifice instead give a little more evidence that it was not made up? Did the two sacrifices mean anything different?
OK, I’ll add it to the list!
Maybe OT here, but relevant elsewhere…
You think Christianity would have survived even if Constantine had tried to crush it rather than embracing it. Fair enough…and I realize, of course, that you know way more about ancient Rome than I do.
But what if either Constantine or another Emperor (before *or* after Constantine’s having favored it) had tried to crush it in an *intelligent* way…by waging the ancient equivalent of a “propaganda campaign” to publicize its fallacies?
With the resources available to a government, even in that era, I think it should have been possible to establish that:
1. There was *no* ground for believing Jesus of Nazareth had risen from the dead, then (conveniently!) “ascended into Heaven.” All the people who claimed to have seen him were diehard followers, who couldn’t be trusted.
2. Even more to the point, it *hadn’t* been “prophesied” that the “Messiah” expected by some Jews would be crucified (or die in any other way) and rise from the dead.
3. The “Heaven” and “Hell” Christians were talking about had *not* – as they probably claimed, by roughly Constantine’s time – been recognized by *ancient* Judaism (and “forgotten” by contemporary Jews, who’d also failed to recognize their Messiah).
4. Even the “Kingdom of God on Earth” – if some still believed in that – was *not* an ancient teaching, but went back only a century or so before Jesus’s time.
Couldn’t the Roman authorities have dealt Christianity a fatal blow by publicizing all that – sending their own “preachers” out to proselytize, telling the simple truth?
Yes, that’s precisely what Constantine’s predecessor Diocletian, and the rulers associated with him, especially Galerius, very much tried to do: systematically stamp out Christianity.
Something else I’ve been thinking about…
We know that in eras *after* Jesus’s time, there have been myths about dead heroes being destined to “return in the time of greatest need.” King Arthur (who probably wasn’t a real king at all). And at least two real kings I’m sure of – Frederick Barbarossa, and a Portuguese king whose name I don’t remember.
In modern times, that type of myth morphed into something else: claims that famous or infamous people who’d died were “really” still alive (the tales about them only being dropped when so much time had passed that they *couldn’t* be alive). John Wilkes Booth. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Hitler, supposedly in Argentina. James Dean. Elvis Presley.
Is there *any* evidence of notions like that in the ancient world? Of notables other than Jesus rumored to be either “still alive” after their deaths, or “destined to return”?
They are few and far between, and I don’t know of any before Jesus. Later we have Nero redivivus and, of course, the view that Jesus himself was John the Baptist returned from the dead. But the latter was influenced by Christian views.
Silly though it may be, I can’t help getting this concept out of my head: A book on the history of heaven and hell, but a front/back double cover upside down edition. Read from one side it’s about hell. Read from the back and it’s about heaven.
I can visualize that, good idea!
Here’s a public lecture I gave at my former university on the history of hell many years ago. Still reasonably entertaining…
http://cas.loyno.edu/sites/cas.loyno.edu/files/the-temperature-of-hell.pdf
Hi Bart,
I’m getting a ‘page not found’ when I click on many story links. Any idea what’s up?
Nope! These are old pages?
Yes. Could my membership have expired?
Memberships are automatically renewed (that’s how you set them up with Paypal)
Dr. Ehrman,
Do historians know how close the Christian concept of hell is to the Jewish concept?
In my studies, which are neither academic nor rigorous, it seems that the modern concept of hell doesn’t exactly exist in Judaism.
There are some vague Talmudic references to a place where unrighteous people might go, but also some suggestion that this place might be temporary, like purgatory.
Do you believe that the New Testament’s authors believed in hell as Christian fundamentalists envision it today?
Also, is this concept consistent throughout the church historically?
I have read that the Greek Orthodox view of hell is quite different than, say, the Roman Catholic or Evangelical view.
Yet, I’m curious to know what historians think, as my reading of the subject is hardly academic.
Ye,s the idea that your soul goes to hell to be tormented forever is not a common view in Judaism, at all….
Dr. Ehrman, I am curious as to what you think of the concept that CS Lewis advocated, that hell is locked from the inside? God does not send sinners there as punishment but they choose hell because it is preferable to spending any time at all with God. Does it get God off the hook if He doesn’t really want to torture anyone but He will if that is what they want?
I have a little trouble imagining someone deciding they really didn’t want anything to do with God after about 15 minutes of torment….
Good day Dr. Bart,
In my thinking, there can not be any god for the universe, the Abrahamic one never for sure, yet just for the sake of intellectual contemplation I would say if one exists it would be an indifferent one (same as you think) or an evil one (opposite to what you think).
The reason for my second line of thinking I would say:
because this world is built on preying on life. We prey on animals and plants, animals prey on plants and on each other, insects on insects, and so on. Nothing and no one can exist unless they take the life of something or someone else, this is pure evil, no one devises such a system intentionally unless they are evil (or they had no other choice, which again makes them evil because if they were good they would rather not make such a system in the first place).
Currently I am reading “Jesus before the Gospels”, I thank you for this one and for the ones before it, you’re a true beacon and you have goodness inside your heart.
Sincerely,
Nidal
Bart, excellent point of course on eternal damnation not quite fitting the crime of doubt. Reminds me of the George Carlin routine, which I’m sure you know:
“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man — living in the sky — who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!
But He loves you.”
HA!!!
Biblical Jesus’ Position in Response to Bart Ehrman’s Post against the Eternality of Punishment
Matthew 25:
…44″Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’
45″Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’
46″These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Is there New Testament Criticism on these verses? Would you say Jesus did not say this because it was added later; or is there some other problem?
Interesting that you say Jews didn’t believe in Hell given this:
Daniel 12:2
“Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.
~ ~ ~
2 Thessalonians 1:9 Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence …
(but 2Thessalonians is not an undisputed authentic letter of Paul)
Sleeping in the dust hardly the idea of Hell we’ve been talking about. And “everlasting contempt” seems like a view of one that others might have–that is to say, that the memory of you will be one of contempt, perhaps while you remain asleep in the dust rather than rising to everlasting life. This is not the Hell Christianity teaches.
Are Adonis and Adonai cognates? My Shorter OED gives Adonis as “my Lord” from Phoenician but for Adonai it just says it is from Hebrew. Are there connections between Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Phoenician other than the Greek alphabet coming from Phoenician?
Thanks, John.
Hmmm… I don’t think the Greek Adonis is related to the Hebrew Adonai, but maybe someone else on the blog does!
Bart,
It’s comforting to know you had the same fears of leaving the faith and what if I’m wrong? I can’t tell you how scared I was for so long and the therapy I went through to help me. It still haunts me some to this day but the more I read your blog and get answers the more the anxiety leaves. You though are the greatest help I’ve ever had in helping overcome this fear. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you! If there is an afterlife I know you’ll be there and hopefully we can swap stories.