The History of Heaven and Hell

Dr. Bart D. Ehrman lecture: “The History of Heaven and Hell!” (Jan. 9, 2021)

The summary of the video lecture by Dr. Bart D. Ehrman:

The immortality of the soul by Plato

Starts from 11:05 of the video.

Plato lived at the end of the beginning of the 4th Century BCE
He was from Athens, Greece, and widely considered to be the greatest philosopher ever
Plato inherited a lot of views from the traditional Greek understanding of death
When a person dies they did not really have an afterlife
The idea of death [in Homer, Odyssey, book 11]: when you die your soul
- did not have a body
- did not feel anything
- did not have any memory
- could not talk
- was just a shadow (in fact they call it a shadow)
The immortality of the soul is a doctrine that Plato developed at great length
- Your body does die but your soul lives on
- Plato believed in justice after death
The book of the republic is his largest, ten book dialogue, Plato’s utopian vision of what the perfect society would look like
- He ends it with a fable of a man named Er who dies and wake up to tell people what it was like:
- People who are wicked go off and get punished
- People who are righteous get rewarded for a thousand years then they come back and they get another chance at it
Christianity did not rise out of plato, but instead of Judaism

The Jewish tradition: The Hebrew Bible

Starts from 17:14 of the video.

Jesus was jewish and his and his followers bible was the Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible was written by lots of different authors over a very broad of time
The earliest books of the bible were written in the 8h Century BCE and the last in the 2nd Century BCE
The entire Hebrew Bible does not believe that there is a life after death
Ancient Hebrews did not have the Greek view of the soul
They did not think that the soul could be separated from the body
The soul was like the breath
When we breathe we are alive; when we stop breathing we are dead
When you stop breathing where does your breath go?
Your breath does not go anywhere. You stop breathing. The soul stops existing when you die
In ancient jewish tradition, when the first man get created God takes a lump of clay
- He breathes into it and that makes Adam a living creature
- When adam dies the breath leaves and he’s back to being clay again ashes to ashes dust to dust
- Sheol is not a common word in the Hebrew Bible
- Sheol can be found only in poetic texts like mainly in the Psalms proverbs and a few other poetic texts
- Sheol is the synonym for the other worlds
- The synonyms for Sheol was a grave and a pit and death
- Probably Sheol was not a place where you go when you die in the Hebrew tradition
- It means you get put in the grave or if you cannot afford a grave and you were poor and you get thrown into a pit, and in either case you were dead
- The Hebrew bible did not teach an ongoing existence after death and that is why the Psalmist will say things like in Sheol one is not able to worship God and in Sheol God does not remember you because you did not exist
- The only way you can exist is to have a body by the breath