Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And this week we are going to be featuring a couple of interviews that I recorded last week. Because last week, Robert, you were out of quote the office. You were at least you were off work for a bit, and uh so, so I recorded conversations with authors of some books, one book that's already out this year, in one book that's coming up. So on Thursday of this week, we're going to be airing a conversation that I had with the author of a fascinating upcoming book about the evolutionary biology of cancer. But today we're going to be exploring a topic in the realm of ancient history and religion. And if you followed us for a while, I think you probably know this about us, that one of our favorite kind of trails to go down is tracing the evolution of religious ideas through ancient history. And I think I've outed myself on this podcast before as a kind of non religious person who loves the Bible. Like you know, I love to read ancient religious texts and learn about them and see how the ideas from the ancient world have sort of filtered through to us today and and shape to the society's we live in. And so that's exactly the kind of thing we're going to be diving into. In this episode, I'm talking with a secular biblical historian named bart Erman about his most recent book, which is called Heaven and Hell, History of the Afterlife. This book was released in March of this year by Simon and Schuster, and it's all about the Christian ideas of life after death, where they come from an ancient history, what influenced their development, and how they changed over time. Uh So, there was a part that cited in the intro of Bart's book where he talks about a Pew Research poll that was conducted a few years ago. I think maybe it was in where uh it found that seventy two percent of Americans believe in a literal heaven and fifty eight percent believe in a literal hell. And yet I think most Americans would be deeply surprised, even shocked, to learn what historians can show about the origins of these beliefs. And the strange thing is that like The historical conclusions that Bart's going to talk about in this episode are not fringe or unusual among secular scholars of the Bible and historians of the ancient Near East. Uh. This is utterly mainstream critical scholarship. And yet I think regular people are, especially in the United States, are going to find it very surprising. Yeah. Absolutely. And I want to stress something here for everybody. So I I just got back, uh to work this morning, and I plugged into like a pre production um cut of this interview, and it's really it's really excellent. So if you're even slightly scared away by the idea of an interview with a secular biblical scholar, uh, don't be because because Bart is is tremendous. He's he's funny, uh, very high energy. I think you're really going to enjoy this chat that Joe had with Bart here. Yeah. Bart's full of knowledge, good humor, passion for his subject. I think you're really going to enjoy the episode. But before we're get to do it, I'll just give a little bit of background on Bart. So here's his biography. Bart d Erman is a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity and the author or editor of more than thirty books, including the New York Times bestsellers, Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, and the Triumph of Christianity. And that last one is really interesting. It's about how Christianity took over the Roman Empire and went from a really small religion to the dominant religion of the empire and just a matter of a few centuries um. Anyway, So, he is a Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he has created eight popular audio and video courses for the Great Courses. He has been featured in Time, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and has appeared on NBC, CNN, and The Daily Show with John Stewart, as well as the History Channel, National Geographic Channel, BBC, NPR, all the hits. His most recent book, again, is Heaven and Hell. Just one more thing before we get into it, I want to mention, obviously we are dealing with the audio constraints of remote recording in the age of COVID nineteen. So, for example, around the twelve minute mark in the episode, there is briefly some background noise. It sounds like a fan was turned on or there was some rain. It only lasts for about a minute or so, and and so please just put up with a little bit of background noise. And it's very brief. I promise it's not the sounds of hell. Right, not audio recordings of the underworld leaking up through some sort of mining microphone. Right. The well to Hell was not unleashed in Bright's office. Uh so, yeah, I would say, without any further ado, let's jump right in barter Erman, Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us today. Yes, thanks for having me so your book Heaven and Hell. Just finished reading the yesterday and I really really enjoyed it. Uh And I want to say that I started reading this book at a very opportune time, because though I didn't plan it this way. I'm also currently in the middle of rereading The Divine Comedy. Actually my wife and I are reading it together. And of course The Divine Comedy Dante is wonderful poetry, but it's also psychologically fascinating because when you go through the theology of Dante, you get the sense of somebody who is simultaneously ingenious and thoughtful and in some ways very intellectually bold and open minded for his historical context. But in other ways Dante is also very limited and provincial and in a word, medieval, like the way you see him taking so much pleasure in designing horrific tortures for his enemies from these, you know, petty thirteenth century political struggles in Italy. Working with ancient religious texts, do you find yourself encountering this kind of irony embodied within the same author or tradition. A lot part of my book on Having the Hell is dealing with some of the earliest forerunners of dante. Um. Many people think that he was creative in coming up with this idea of a guided tour of the Inferno and the Paradiso and the and the Pratorium, but in fact he was borrowing from the motif of a guided tour of the realms of the dead from earlier authors and including in the Christian tradition. I think one thing that very seriously UH contrasts between uh Dante and his early for runners that I look at and the and about I look at basically from the second century up to maybe the fifth Christian century, so a very long time before Dante. But the main contrast is, uh, most of the authors of these works were not geniuses, and the works the works are they are. They can be very graphic in their descriptions, especially of Hell. Um uh there they are less uh, they're less attendant to what's going on in heaven, and so it's not like Dante, where you get basically equal coverage between Heaven, purgatory, and Hell. But you know, the ancient people are for some reason more interested in the torments of Hell. And my guess is that it's because it was easier to describe. Uh, you know, if you're trying to describe eternal bliss and everybody is like equally happy forever, you know what more, what are you say? You just got to talk about their bliss for a little while. Then there's whereas if you want to talk about eternal torment, well, you know, you can design all sorts of creative punishments and so you can let your your creative juices flow, and so that's what these ancient authors do. So there's nothing at the level of a Dante in these sources, but they are very interesting, many in many ways more interesting of course for understanding how Christianity developed than Dante's coming after, you know, centers and centuries of development. Well to ground the discussion, maybe it would help to look at a specific example. Could you talk for a second about some of the specifics of say, the apocaly lips of Peter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, the the earliest one we have with these, uh, these guided tours is the one you mentioned, the Apocalypse of Peter. We we had known, they had known for centuries that there was an Apocalypse of Peter, because it almost made it into the New Testament. Uh. There were church fathers uh from the fourth century the fifth century who thought the Apocalypse of Peter is part of the Bible, but he eventually didn't make it in and it got lost until it turned turned up in seven. When it turned up caused a big fere uproar. I mean, because oh my god, this is like, this is a guided tour. Peter, the apostle, Peter, jesus right hand man, is given a tour of heaven help by Jesus himself. And so it's a terrific text. I mean, it describes, as I was saying, in in fairly brief order, uh, the heaven, which is a great place. I mean, it's uh, you know, there are lush trees and vegetation everywhere, and it smells good and everybody's happy, and so you know, it's with you know, a nice summer breeze blowing through the whole time. So it's great, it's great. But then he sees the torments in hell, and uh, they are nasty and uh. And the interesting thing in this case is that many of the punishments match the crimes. And so if somebody is, say a habitual blasphemur that they blasphemed God, well they're they're sending Oregon is their mouth, and so they are. These are hanged by their tongues over eternal flames. Women who have braided their hair to make themselves more attractive so they can seduce men are hanged by their hair over eternal flames. Uh. The men they seduced are hanged by their genitals over neural flames. And they cry out, we didn't know it would come to this, and so so it kind of goes on. And unlike Dante, which is a very sophisticated number of political and religious points, the point here is pretty clear. There are a bunch of things you better or not do and yeah, if you do, you're a big trouble. So like, just don't do it. So basically the basically I don't say it. And so it's it's fairly fairly elementary, both theologically and politically. So already by this later, did you say the Apocalypse of Peter is probably a second century work? Yeah, so church fathers know about it, uh, in the second century, and they're good reasons for thinking that was written in the early part of the second century. So maybe just like twent or thirty years after some of the books of the New Testament. Wow, So already by this point we have some beliefs about heaven and Hell that look very much like beliefs that people still have today about heaven and hell. And I think maybe this should lead us to what I would say is probably the biggest single gut punch of the book, which is that these standard beliefs about the afterlife that you would find among probably most Christians today, the belief that when you die, your soul separates from your body and either travels to Heaven, which is a place of eternal bliss, or to Hell, which is a place of eternal torture. These teachings, you argue, are not found in the Hebrew Bible, which is what Christians would call the Old Testament. And they are not the teachings of the historical Jesus. And in fact, unless I'm wrong, you can barely find anything like them in the New Testament at all. Like maybe in a parable in the Gospel of Luke. Is that about right? That that is not just about right? That is right? Uh? The the the Old the Christian Old Testament, Uh, does not talk anywhere about souls dying and going to people dying and their souls going to reward in heaven or punishment and hell. It's not there at all. And so part of my book is explaining what you do find in the Hebrew Bible. You get a range of different views in the Hebrew Bible, but you don't get that view. And I try to show how that developed into a different view that Jesus had uh, And that Jesus himself did not believe that your body died and your soul went to one place or the other, and neither did the apostle Paul for most of his life. Uh. The book Revelation doesn't teach that. And so the question my book is. I try. I try to show that, But then the question is, well, then where to come from, because everybody simply assumes, of course that this is you know, they believe this because the Bible teaches it. No, actually, the Bible doesn't teach that. So h that's so it seems like a pretty important point to me, given the fact that there are two billion Christians in the world, most of whom believe in this, and they just assume it's in the Bible. But it's it's not. Yeah, it seems so hard to believe because I would say the belief in heaven and Hell basically along the lines I just described as not just a very common belief. I think too many people it is the defining or the characteristic belief when they conceive of their own faith. Oh yeah, no, absolutely, I mean, and I completely understand that. I mean when I you know, I grew up believing in heaven and Hell myself. I mean, I was raised in a Christian home, and I became an evangelical Christian as a teenager, and then I really believed in heaven and Hell, especially Hell, and uh, you know, and so I was I was gunning home about it and That's part of what really made me want to write the book was that I know there are a lot of people who are of course hopeful for heaven, and a lot of people who are just terrified of hell, and uh, you know, a lot of people just don't know. But uh, you know, it's worth knowing where these ideas came from, because people shouldn't believe them because they think they're in the Bible. That that is, because they're not, as you said, maybe like in one little passage like stucked away in the Gospel. Look, but I mean, but basically they're not there. They these authors had a different view, and it's worth knowing what these different views were because you simply shouldn't assume this is the standard view and always has been among Christians. Yeah, and it's um, it's remarkable how difficult these beliefs are to shake, even if you rationally know otherwise. I mean, I I personally, I grew up in East Tennessee surrounded by a lot of fundamentalist Christianity, and when I think about the way I conceive of Hell, I don't rationally believe in in a hell anymore. But I my mind sort of as a mansion where there's a room in the back, and occasionally the door opens and that belief just gets out and walks around. And I don't know when that's going to happen. Do you find the same thing, Does it sometimes just come out without seemingly unbidden? Not as much now as it did. You know, when I left, when I left the faith many years ago now twenty five years ago or whatever, a long time ago. When I left Christianity for a long time, one of the things that's holding me back to begin with. Before I left was the fear of hell. You know, I thinking, you know, like if I like, uh, you know, I really think that people are gonna be punished after death by God. But now I'm doubting my faith. And if I leave my faith, what if I was right in the first place and now you know it took took the wrong term, then I'm screwed me. It's like this is not gonna be good. Uh. And so but then when I did leave the faith, I just I became convinced that God is not going to be torturing people for trillions of years because they messed up for twenty or they didn't believe exactly the right thing. I just said just this implausible. And so over time what I did is I ended up becoming more of a rationalist and I became more of a materialist. And so you know, I'm a complete materialist now a naturalist. I mean, I just you know, I don't I don't think there is some kind of other realm Uh. This is it. Uh. And I don't think there's some of the life. This is it. And for me, um, maybe because I'm such a rationalist that uh, the thought that's really keep in my head too much anymore, that yeah, actually you know it might happen. Uh, I just don't think it is. I'm sure a lot of people are still reeling from the surprise of of you saying that that, in fact, the Hebrew Bible doesn't teach heaven and hell and that this was not the teaching of historical Jesus. That there are probably things running through their heads to say, like, wait a minute, that can't be right, can it. So I think maybe we should talk specifically a bit about the the evolution of beliefs about the afterlife that we see in the ancient Near East of the ancient Greco Roman world and then in the Bible. So uh, can we talk about beliefs about bodies, souls and what happens to them at the time of death. Uh, maybe starting among in the pre Christian ancient world, maybe among the ancient Jewish thought views that you would find in the Hebrew Bible. Yeah, yeah, this is you know, as you know, this is really what my book does. Is it traces these ideas all the way back as as early as we have records. Uh, you know, we have records going we have written text going back to the epic of Gilgamesh, which is it turns out, is a forerunner of Dante. Gilgamesh actually has a tour to the Actual and so and in the Old and So I go through the Old Testament all the way so that the ancient he What one reason that the Old Testament doesn't have this view that you die and your soul goes to heaven or hell while your body dies is because ancient Hebrews didn't have the idea that your soul and your body were two entities that could be distinguished from each other. Um. The idea that you've got a soul and a body, that you've got made up of two parts is a kind of dualism to to to fundamental components dualism um. Ancient Hebrews were not dualistic, and they're thinking about the human. The ancient Hebrews thought a human being was one thing, not two separable things. And it goes all the way back to Genesis where God creates the first human, Adam. He makes Adam out of the dirt. And so there's this kind of this dirt thing on the on the ground, and it's just lying, it's inert, it's not alive. God breathes life into Adam, and so he brings life into Adam's soul. He brings it, brings a soul in him, which is his breath. Adam now has his breath and that makes him alive. And Adam will be alive as long as he has his breath. But when he stops breathing, he's dead. Now we ourselves, we ourselves have a kind of we have an analogous thing about breath. You know, when when you stop breathing, your breath doesn't go anywhere. It's just God. And that's how they understood the soul. It wasn't something separable from the breath out or the body. When your soul, when it leaves the body, like the breath leaves, it's just gone. It doesn't go anywhere. And so Hebrews didn't have ancient Hebrews didn't have this idea that the soul would live on, because the soul is simply the thing that made you alive, and when you're not alive, it doesn't exist anymore. And so that's why in the Old Testament, Um, nobody talks about the soul living on after death. They there are places, um where uh, the Hebrew Bible offers will talk about a place. It sounds like a place uh that sometimes it's called sheel um, And so people mistake that as being like this area that everybody goes to when they die. They die and their souls go down to shield. And uh, when I try to show in my book, is it probably that's not what sheol means. Um. The worst shield itself is often part of the problem is that Bible translators really sometimes mess us up. And so often when English Bible translators will come across the worst shield, which occurs about sixty times in the Old It's not very common, but they'll translate it as hell. But what are you supposed to read? He was supposed to think when you read, yeah, you know, God saved me from Hell, or I don't want to go to Hell. But what it's it actually doesn't say hell. It says she all, and she all is not hell hell. What we think it was Hell is where your soul goes to get punished. But that's not found in Hebrew thought. And so when I showed my my book is that when when shield gets used in the Hebrew Bible, it is almost always set um as the synonym for grave or pit or the place your body is placed um when it dies. And so it looks like she all is simply where your remains are. It's not a place um. And so uh so there's no place in the Bible, in the Old Testament where there's a place that you go either for rewards or punishment. You just die. And that's why that's why the Hebrew authors, like in the Psalms, are so afraid of death, because they're not gonna have life anymore. There's not gonna be anything, They're not going to be able to enjoy anything. There'll be no physical pleasure. Um. They won't even be able to worship God. They say this, and God won't even remember them. He won't remember them because they won't exist, and so they won't even think about them. And so that's the situation with the Hebrew Bible, that people are made up of body and soul. When they die, their life is over and they get deposited somewhere and they want to get to They want to have a nice burial, because everybody does. But I mean they are gonna be around to enjoy it, they'll be dead. Yeah, I think that view is extremely clear in books, say like Ecclesiastes Um. I wonder though about people might be thinking about what about a passage like the Witch of Indoor story? Well, maybe can you talk for a moment about that story and how you would interpret that. Yeah, No, this is good because it's exactly the passage people are gonna be thinking of. And you get passages in the New Testament people are gonna be thinking of, and so obviously I have to talk about all these passages in my book. And I should stress that when I talk about these passages, I'm not coming up with some kind of creative, like weird new interpretation of these passages. The kinds of stuff I talked about in my book are things that biblical scholars have known for a very long time. This is most people, you know, they don't Most people don't talk to biblical scholars or good reasons, and so they don't know. But I mean, so I'm not I'm not saying anything unusual at all here for a biblical story. They would just all say, yeah, well, of course, um. So the Witch of Indoor is the story in the in the Book of First Samuel Um for Samuel's one of the main characters is a well, Samuel's the main characters since since the name Samuel is a prophet who is a the last of the great prophets, and he he is the counselor for King Saul, and King Saul is always getting in trouble and always messing up and doing things wrong, and God's always ticked off at him, and so and so. But Samuel dies and Saul gets himself into another mess. The the the opposing uh, the country next door. The the Philistines are out to attack the Israelite armies and they're surrounded and Saul doesn't know what to do, and his adviser is dead, and and so he decides he's going to get a medium like a It's called the Witch of Endor, but it's more like she performs necromancy. She raises his soul from the dead, uh, in order to ask what's going on. And so he commissions this woman who's afraid to do it because he comes to her in disguise because he himself, the king has passed a law against doing this kind of thing. You can't do this and so so, but she's a medium and she's gonna do it because and he she doesn't know his him and anyway, so it's great and it's a fantastic, fantastic, but she can. He convinces her she uh to raise Samuel from the dead so Saul will be instructured about what to do about this war. Uh. And and Samuel comes up out of the dead and he's and he's angry because Saul's brought him back uh. And he tells Saul, you know, you've just disobeyed God one too many times and so yes, there is gonna be a battle tomorrow and by the way, tomorrow you'll be down here too. So okay, so it's not good this and it's exactly what happens, okay, Well, is the last sounds like a soul is alive after death, and it's down someplace and it comes back. It can go back and forth. And it sure sounds like that, doesn't it. Yes, it does, It absolutely does until you start looking at it more closely. This passage never says that Samuel was in Shiel or in Hades, or in Hell or in Gehenna or anywhere else. He comes up, But why would a body, Why would somebody come up? They come up because they're buried in the ground. He comes up as a body, not as a spirit. The wayt. Saul recognizes him is he's wearing Samuel's clothes and so this isn't like, this isn't a ghost, this is this is like sam and and Samuel when he's upset, he doesn't say something like, you know, I guys have such a great time up there in heaven and now you bring me back. What are you doing? He we don't know why his angry, you know, was he enjoying a good sleep? We don't. But he doesn't say anything about being with anyone else. He just this is not something you're supposed to do. You're the kid, and you know this, and you passed this. You can't do this. And so God's really ticked off because God told you not to do this, and so um uh. And so it is not his um. It is not a soul separated from the body that comes back. Samuel actually comes back in bodily form fully clothed as an old man and uh. And he has there's nothing to indicate that he's been either in a place of torment or in a place of reward, and so he Previble scholars don't look on this as an instance of which somebody, you know, showing that when you die, your soul goes to one place or another. It's the only place, by the way, where um in the Hebrew Bible, where that kind of necromancy uh is performed. But we do know that some a lot of Israelite thought it could be performed because there are all these laws against it in the Bible. Don't don't make a bunch of laws. And the people are doing something, and so they at least think their seance is going on, and you know, something's happening, but you know what it was they were thinking is are to know? This is kind of a tangent. But that does make me wonder about this. So it's it's an example of this belief in the persecution of witchcraft or necromancy. Why do you think it is that monotheistic religions like Judaism Christianity would have been so opposed to people independently practicing magic or consulting the dead. Uh. In fact, I believe correct me if I'm wrong. But this is also sort of one of the horrors of the Book of first Enoch, right, where these evil heavenly creatures come down and they teach human women how to do magic spells. Is that right? Yeah, they don't mention necromacy there, but they do they do teach humans all sorts of practical things God doesn't like, and so that's kind of that's kind of what's going on with this necromancy thing. When you're raising somebody up in a seance or or however, you're doing it through magical rights. Um, the ancient thought was that this person, Um, it's it's not that the person's soul is living on is the person is temporarily come back to life again. Their soul has come back into their body, and because they have died and they've come back from the dead, they have these kind of powers. And in monotheistic religion, there's only supposed to be one superhuman power, and that's God, and so these other powers are threatening, and people usually turned to uh necromancy and other forms of magic precisely because the established religion wasn't working too well for them. Uh And so they weren't they weren't learning what they needed to learn, they weren't getting what they needed to get. They weren't, you know, it just wasn't and so they try an alternative means. And in these monotheistic religions, God is a jealous God and he doesn't like it when you go to some other divine force. And so that that's why it's like a form of cheating almost, well it's a form of cheating. It's like, um, you know, you go to your you go to your priest for advice, and then you go home and pull out your ouiji board. I mean, look like, just to what I said, don't pull out your weigi board? Right? Do people to use weigi boards? Anybody don't. Even when I was a kid, we use weigi boards. Oh yeah, always great, okay, okay, okay. So so that's the view of of the ancient Jews. They would have mostly believed and of course we should acknowledge that whenever we're talking about views and describing them to groups of people, there was probably some diversity, but we're talking about like the dominant views that are represented in the record, right. Well, it's it's a very important point because in my book I try to show there are in fact different views in the Hebrew Bible itself. I mean, you mentioned Ecclesiastes, and you know, the Book of Daniel has a very different kind of view, and so there there are varieties. The one variety you don't find in the Hebrew Bible is that you die in your soul goes to having our health. Right. Um, so then what about the uh to turn away from ancient Judaism. What about the influence of Greek philosophy and like the ideas of Socrates and Plato, uh and and how those came through in the pagan beliefs of the Roman Empire. Yeah, it's very important, far more important than most people realize. In the earliest Greek records we have, they come our earliest records come from Homer, from the Iliot in the Odyssey, and uh they're the earliest foreigner Dante in the Western tradition. So Gilgamash is in the ancient areas, but in the Western tradition, the earliest foreign Dante is a Homer Odyssey. The Odyssey book eleven is that Dyssey is going into the underworld uh and uh and visiting people there, including his mother and his former colleagues in the in the Drojan War, and and he meets all these people and and the point of this description is to show what it's like down there, and it's not good. It's not good for anybody, because everybody is just down there the same they've got they're like they're shadows. They're called shadows. They're not even people anywhere there, but they're kind of shadows of people. And they've got no strength and no power, no mind, they can't think, they can't remember, it's like they can't talk. It's like they just it's awful forever. Uh. By the time you get to Plato about four hundred years later, so Plato is riding at the early fourth century b c. E Um, so you know, four years before Jesus ministry Plato. By the time of Plato, Greeks has started thinking that this idea that like everybody goes to Hades and it's the same and it's boring for eternity, and there's no, that's not right. I mean, how can I you mean that somebody who is a valiant warrior, who is upright and who always does the good thing and helps other people. Uh, he dies and like that's it. He doesn't get any reward. And there's some schmuck over here like this tyrant who oppresses people and just cares about his own self and getting massively rich and powerful and doesn't care who he hurts in the process. He dies, and he's not going to get punished. No, that can't be. How it is as though Greeks came up with this idea that in fact, after death there are rewards and punishments. Um. We don't know if other people at the same time came up with this idea, but we find it most firmly in the Greeks, especially in Plato, who devoted a lot of time in his dialogue and her surviving dialogues to show that the soul and the body are two different things, and that the mistake people make in life is catering to their body when the important thing is their soul. And so Plato was pushing for philosophy the love of knowledge. That's what philosophy means, the love of wisdom, because he thought we needed to attend to the needs of our inner selves, especially our minds and our mental states, and our values and our views of what's right and wrong and our ethics and how we live, and those are the things we should be concerned about, not like, you know, getting drunk all the time and having parties and having sex randomly. He's like, players say, no, that's just caging to your body. And the problem is if you if you're giving your body's pleasures, then you're gonna not pay any attention to your soul. And when you die, your soul is gonna live on, but your body's gonna die. And so you don't even to make sure your soul is doing well when it dies, or it's gonna be bad news. And so Plato Plato tells these myths of the afterlive. He calls the myths. I don't think he means them literally, but he tells these kind of stories of people who die and they check out what it's like afterwards, and those who tend to their soul have very good afterlives, and those who are just you know licentious, ty rental bastards. They you know, they're tortured forever, and so you get rewards and punishments, and so Plato um Plato popularized this idea. It's not clear that he invented it, but it's found in a number of places in his dialogues, especially say in in Uh the Fate and in the Republic, And it ended up becoming hugely significant understanding of things for the history of the development of heaven and hell. So there's a curious fact from your book that caught my attention, which is that you mentioned several times how for many ancient people, the worst fade imaginable was to be denied a decent burial. Uh. And in a minute, when we talk about the beliefs of Jesus, we can talk about the meaning of Gehenna, this word that sometimes translated as hell in the New Testament. But before that, could you just help us understand this mindset of like, what what was it like and what were the causes of the mindset where you're obsessed with uh, not having a you know, a profane, disrespected burial. And I know this this shows up in lots of folk tales beyond just the Bible, like the grateful dead folk motif, where you know, uh, you know, a person on a journey comes across a corpse that's being denied a decent burial, and then pay the hero pays for the corpse to get a decent burial, and then later that spirit comes back to help the hero in disguise. In some way. I think this occurs in the Book of Tobit. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. In some ways it seems strange to the modern mentality, but in other ways it doesn't. But let me just state what you just said, and stated emphatically. In most cultures we know about, least in the Western world, Uh, not getting a decent burial was a horrible fate and people really were afraid of it because not that not that they're going to suffer in health or it or anything. It's just like there's something about getting a decent burial that closure to life. And if you don't have closure to life, it's like your life it just didn't end up well. Um. And you find this, you find it in the Hebrew Bible. Uh, you certainly find it in Greek understandings of things. You find it in Roman ideas. I mean it's just let's all throughout and in Judaism, and it's in Christianity. The modern analogy, I guess is people don't think about that so much because just about everybody gets a decent burial, though, you know, some people don't want to die at sea and kind of be thrown in there and me eating my fish, I mean, because you know, you know, yeah, I don't like that, or some people don't like the idea of of um uh you know, of how they're going to be buried or where they're gonna be buried, or you know they you know, no, I don't want to be creamingd No, that's spooky, you know. Or I don't want to bury their worms down there. That's so we do. We do think about that. But the other way we think about it is we think, you know, I wonder how many people are going to be at my funeral. You know you're worried about it. That you're worried about it, Well, what are you worried about. You're not gonna be there. It's like you don't even know, like so it doesn't make any sense, but we do. And it's like that only to like the hundred power in the ancil in the ancient world without a decent burial. You know, they're afraid of it. Uh, they and and it was a horrible way to Anguly. It's even weaponized sometimes. I believe it was in a book of yours I read. Uh again, correct me if I'm wrong. But you talked about how part of the fear of crucifixion in the Roman Empire was not just that it was painful, not just that you would die, but specifically that it was a humiliation of the corps, that the corpse would be left to the scavenging animals and exposed and not be given a decent burial. Yeah, no, it's one of the It's interesting, you know, when you when you read ancient documents on crucifixion. Every everybody gets their knowledge about crucifixion from what everybody else says. I mean modern people. The way you know what it's like to be crucified, somebody else has told you, and somebody else told them, somebody else told them, and nobody bothers actually to read what they say in the ancient sources about it. It's interesting there's no actual description of the process in the ancient source, Like there's no description of how they actually did it, but there are a number of references to what happens after they did it, when sometimes meant to be dark humor and sometimes very seriously. But you get these references to the bodies being on the cross for days and being eaten by the scavengers, especially the birds, and um uh, you know that's part of the punishment. You don't get a decent burial you you are, you're torn to shreds by the animals. And so like this was and people would watch this happening to somebody and so I mean in the Roman world, crucifixion was used as a deterrent to cry. Uh. You know, they didn't have the idea that developed in America that capital punishment is fine so long as you do it as privately and theoretically as painlessly as possible. Romans had the opposite idea, you do it publicly, and you make it as torturous as you can and as humiliating as can. So everybody seeing this thing says, oh my god, I'm not going to do that, because you know this is what's going to happen. As you know, I'm not going to steal a chariot boy and that's what they do. And so uh so, yes, but they did leave them. They apparently did leave them on the crosses, and that's part of it, because they couldn't get a decent burial. Okay, So even if we don't fully understand the causes of this difference and belief, we should always have it in mind that having your corpse desecrated or not getting a decent burial, it's just like the worst thing you can imagine in the ancient world. Yeah, that's why all these scenes, you know, you have if somebody like in like in a war narrative, you know, they desecrate the body of drag it around the city or something, this is just thought to be whore. Of course, it still it still is. Yeah, all right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. And we're back. So maybe we should talk now about the teachings of Jesus. I know there are several there are a lot of other things in your book that you cover about the you know, before we get to Jesus, you talk about the evolution of Jewish thought and some of the later Jewish writings, like like the Book of Daniel and mccabee's and maybe we can come back to that if you want. But Um, I'm sure a lot of people are wondering about something we teased earlier, which is that, Okay, if the historical Jesus did not preach modern beliefs about heaven and hell, what were the teachings of the historical Jesus with regards to the afterlife? And you may also need to talk a bit here about historical method like why why can't we just read the gospels to know what the historical Jesus taught. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna have to provide some background in the development of Jewish thought to make sense of this. So I'm going to go back to Daniel, because you can't understand jesus views without understanding the context that he's that he's in. Um, most of the Hebrew Bible thinks that, as I was saying things, when a person dies at the end of the story, they're dead. Uh, there's no no afterlife of any kind. You're just dead. And I pointed out that Greek's ended up had something similar to begin with, but then with Plato it started you've got to have rewards and punishments, and that same development happened within Judaism, but in a different way. It's not clear if they were influenced by Greek thought or or it's not clear how it happened exactly, but about I don't know. Two U fifty years before Jesus Um, a number of Jewish thinkers started thinking that, in fact, death cannot be the end of the story, and it can't be the end of the story for a very specific Jewish reason. Ancient Jews believed that God had called them, the Jews, to be his people. They were the chosen people. God had given them the law. If they kept the law, they'd keep up their end of the bargain, and God would keep up his end of the bargain and protect them and uh and be on their side and help them out when they were in need. As time went on, century after century went by and Jews were not helped, they were constantly being wiped out constant internal problems, uh economic problems. Problems I mean just various things of hunger and disease and UH crop failure, but also destruction in war, military disaster, not having possession of the land God had promised them. And often you know, the ancient people would say yeah, it's because we're disobeying God and God's punishing us. That was that was the view of the prophets in the Old Testament. Every prophet in the Old Testament says that, you know the reason of suffers. God's punishing you, and you just stopped doing that, and then he'll reward you. Well, at some point Jews started saying, you know, look, we're doing the best we can here. You know, we we may not be like the most perfect human beings on earth, but we're doing our best to follow God's law. We're eating kosher, we're keeping the Sabbath, were observing the festivals, were circumcising our babies, and these pagans over here are complete smucks and they are ruthless and they're destroying us. And surely there has to be an answer to that. Uh So what ended up happening in Judaism is the answer was that was this? The answer there rose about two or fifty years before Jesus, was that, yes, these things are happening now and God's people are suffering, but it's not just because God's punishing them. There are also forces in the world that are opposed to God and his people. They are against us, and they have power in this world and they are making us suffer. This is when Jews started developing the idea that there's a devil. Uh. There's Satan, a figure who is opposed to God gets imagined and and talked about, and Satan has henchmen, they call them demons, and there are other forces in this world and it's they're out to get us. So the question, well, why why is that? Well, they have different explanations. Why, Well, human sin and so these powers are led into the world. Or is because angels did this, or they have different explanations. They are a little bit fuzzy sometimes, but they But you have these evil forces. The good news is that God ultimately is sovereign and he ultimately is going to reward his people. Um. God is going to intervene in history and he will destroy these forces of evil who are ruining people's lives, who are running the kingdoms in charge now, and He's going to take them out of power, and he's going to bring in his own kingdom, the Kingdom of God that will be ruled by his representative, the Messiah, who will establish a utopian state. Uh. And so these Jews modern scholars called this view Jewish view apocalyptus schism, from the word apocalypse at the end of this a this age is bad, it's getting worse, but the apocalypse is coming. And when the apocalypse comes, then God will destroy these forces of evil and bringing his good kingdom on earth. The first place you find this in the Hebrew Bible is in the Book of Daniel. Daniel chapters seven through twelve, especially you start finding an apocalyptic view. H Daniel was written about two hundred years before Jesus was active in his ministry, a hundred eighty years, two hundred years before Jesus was active. By that time, this has become a very popular view in Judaism is a view that, so far as we can tell, was held by the majority of Jews. Um it's certainly written by the majority of Jewish authors that we have from the period uh that God was soon intervened and bringing this kingdom. The thing about this kingdom was that it was not that your soul was going to die and go to heaven. The kingdom was going to be here on earth and it was going to be lived in boy be Lee. People who were on God's side would be brought into this Kingdom of God here on earth in their bodies. But what about people who, like you, died already. So like, you know, suppose next year God does it and he wipes out all the wicked governments and all the people supporting them, and he brings in peace and unity and justice for all forever, and we have this great Kingdom of God. Well that's nice, But like one of my grandfather, I mean, he was a good guy. You mean, like he lost album And you know, my mom, really, are you kid to me? Of course she doesn't. And so Jews simultaneously developed the idea of the resurrection of the dead. This is a view you don't get in the vast majority of the Hebrew Bible, but you do get it in Daniel and you get into the teachings of Jesus and throughout the New Testament. The teaching of the resurrection of the dead is that even dead people are going to be brought back to life and they too can enter into the Kingdom. This, then, is Jesus teaching. Jesus teaches all the time I about the coming Kingdom of God. And he does not mean heaven where your soul goes when you die. He means the Kingdom that God is bringing back to Earth. God made this planet and he made it a paradise. Literally, God made the Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve. They sinned, they got kicked out. We lost the Garden of Eden. But God's going to bring it back. Just as Adam and Eve were in their bodies when they enjoyed it, will enjoy their bodies, not just us, but everybody is raised from the dead. If they've been on the right side, what if they've been in the wrong side, They're going to be punished, and it's going to be an eternal punishment, but it's not eternal torture. Jesus did not believe in the eternal torture. What Jesus believes is what other apocalypse is believed, which is that when the Kingdom arrives and people raised from the dead, those who are on God's side will enter the Kingdom, and that everybody else will realize they've been left out of the Kingdom, and they'll be horribly upset. They'll be weeping and gnashing their teeth, and then God will annihilateate them. It'll be complete destruction. Uh. And so the eternal punishment is not torment. It's death. It's eternal because it will never end. God will not reverse his decision. You will be dead forever and only those around God's side will live in the utopian kingdom of God. So that's that's Jesus teaching in a nutshell. Jesus never talked about this torment. He always talks about destruction, and so uh things that might come to people's mind in response to that would be okay. So, first of all, maybe you can deal with this. There's like a passage in Luke where where Jesus tells the parable of the of the rich man and Lazarus, and and it looks like in this parable there is some kind of existence right after you die, and it consists of rewards and punishments, rewards for the for the poor man, and punishments for the rich man. And it doesn't seem to be like a bodily resurrection at the end of time when God comes and conquers everything. So how would a how would a biblical scholar deal with a passage like that? Well, no, it's a great question, and it is for people who know their Bible. It's the first passage that comes to mind. Of course, well, yeah, well lazars in the rich man. So, um, maybe I should summarize the story, or do you think everybody you got that, you got this filthy rich man who's having sumptuous banquets every day and bringing fine clothes and lives in this mansion and uh. And there's this poor guy outside his gate named Lazarus who's like he's starving to death and he's covered with diseases, and the dogs and coming up to lick his wounds, and they both die. And the rich man ends up down in the place of torment and fire, and Lazar's ends up in Abraham's bosom, so he's which means he's up having a banquet with the forefathers of Israel, Abraham, the father of Israel, and the righteous. And the rich man wants. Rich man looks up, he sees lads or something, and he tells Abraham, look, said, would you send him down? Just put let him put his finger in the water and cool my tongue, because it's I've been fired down here. And and uh, Abraham says this, Sara can't. There's a chasm between us, a broadcasm, and nobody can go back and forth. And so you know, he can't come and help. And he said, well, at least send us, send them to my brothers. At least we're still living. I got these brothers, and like, they've got to know about this, because if they're they're in danger of coming here too. And Abraham says, no, I'm not gonna send him, because he said they should just read their bibles. If they don't believe the Law of Moses and the prophets, they're not going to believe it if somebody comes back from the dead. Okay, that's what he says. So even if someone is raised from the dead, they won't believe. So that's that all right. So um, that well, it sure sounds like Heaven done hell, and yes it does. So several things about it. Number one, it's a parable. A parable is not a historical statement. A parable is a as an imaginative story intended to make a point. Um. That's the first one. We know it's a parable because in Luke's Gospel it's in a stream. It's a lot of section that's just filled with parables, and a number of them begin with exactly the same words, there's a certain man who and that's how this one begins there's a certain man who uh so, so it's a parable. It's not nondescription of historical reality. Number one, number two. Um, there's nothing in that's parable about the rewards for punishment being eternal. We don't know if this is a temporary holding stage or if this is we don't know. It doesn't it doesn't say that's number two. Number three. Jesus almost certainly did not tell this parable. So this is this is where we get into what you were saying earlier about how do critical scholars go about understanding what Jesus said and did. The reality is we have we have four gospels in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We have other gospels not in the New Testament, lots lots of them, um. But these four are the are the main ones that people know about, and they're the four they're probably are four earliest gospels, our oldest gospels. These four gospels, though, are almost certainly not simply historical accounts of what really happened in Jesus life, what he what he actually said and did. As if somebody was down there with their cell phone recording it. Uh, you know, there were no cell phones recording anything. The Gospels are written in Greek. Jesus native language was Aramaic. Jesus didn't know Greek, and the authors of the Gospels did not know Aramaic. They lived outside of Israel. Jesus lived inside of Israel. They were writing forty fifty or sixty years later. So there's reasons for thinking all of that that I'm not going to go into unless you unless you want me to. I happy too. But these people are so where do they give their stories from? These people do not claim to be followers of Jesus. The authors the books are all anonymous, so they're written by so they don't claim to be written by followers of Jesus. The followers of Jesus were lower class, illiterate. They're called illiterate in the New Testament, illiterate Aramaic speaking peasants from some rural place in Galilee and places like that, didn't have schools. The disciples could not write. And so where these gospels come from. They came from authors living fourty or fifty years later, four or five decades later later, living somewhere else, who have heard stories about Jesus and they're writing them down. Okay, so stories have been in circulation for not just a month or two or a year or two or a decade. I mean they've been in circulation from forty to sixty years. Uh. Sometimes this gospels completely agree with each other, but that's because some of them used each other. Matthew Luke both used Mark for example. Again I could this takes a lot of time and a bit demonstrate um and so. And the big problem is these gospels not only are much later by people who didn't know but had heard stories in circulation like word of mouth. And you know what happens to the stories in the word of mouth. Even in the ancient world, stories got changed every time they got told. Well, uh right, so it's it's it's not only that, but these gospels contradict each other. All you gotta do is read two accounts in the Gospel and just to take the same story to take you know, take Jesus Birth and Matthew Luke. Just read them carefully and and just see exactly what each one says and compare them. You can't reconcile them. There are places that cannot be reconciled. Why because people are changing the stories. People are changing stories they're making up stories, they're putting things on jesus lips that they're saying he did things he didn't do. I mean, it's just that's just you know that that's been known by scholars are well over a century, and it's like standard stuff that gets taught in every critical biblical scholars class. The parable of Lass and the rich Man almost certainly was not one of the parables Jesus told. He certain he almost certainly did tell some parables. I think, Uh, you have to have ways of demonstrating these things, just like you've got to have ways of proving everything you know you've got. You've got history has to be proved. You can't just take somebody's word for it, as somebody says that, Uh. You know, by inauguration there are this number of people there. You know, you've got to check to see if that's true or not. Uh. And so there are certain things that you checked for. Uh. And historians have a way have checking ancient stuff, just as we have ways of checking modern stuff. If you check the story of Lasts Richmond, there are very good reasons for thinking that Jesus didn't tell the story. For one thing, of course, it has a different view of after ihypehim the one Jesus had, but that you can't use that because that's the question you're trying. So that's arguing in a circle. But there are other things about it. Um, it's all found only in Luke, So like there's no one else who tells the story that we know of. And so how do you know, like unless it's verified. Uh you know, it's not verified. You just got it on the loop. I'll just catch to the chase because this is going on too long. One reason for real annoing it wasn't wasn't a story of Jesus told is because the story presupposes that a man has already been raised from the dead. The end of the story is, if they don't believe Moses and the prophets, they won't believe even if a man is raised from the dead. That means that the reader, the Christian reader, these are Christian readers reading this, are going to say, yeah, that's right, boy, they didn't believe when a man got raised from the dead. Boy, you got that one right. Uh yeah, Well that's because the storyteller knows that Jesus been raised from the dead, and as Jewish listeners most of them are not accepting it, and so uh, it has marks of being a later composition. It also, by the way, does coincide with Luke's understanding of the afterlife. The author of Luke, his understanding the afterlife is different from the understanding put on that Jesus himself apparently had, and so they are all these reasons for him. It doesn't go back to the historical Jesus. Uh. This brings up an interesting another tangential thought I was wondering about. So when you consider what purpose the Gospels were supposed to serve as written documents, did they serve and originally were they intended by their authors to have an apologetic purpose, like as preaching documents to outsiders or do you think of them primarily as things that were written for Christians who were already convinced to be you know, read and to I don't know, further edify them in their faith. Right. Um. This is something that's been debated over the years, although it's not debated too much anymore. Just about everybody who is an expert on this stuff thinks these books were not used for evangelistic purposes. You know, this is it's not the sort of thing like you wouldn't hand the Gospel of Matthew to somebody say hey, read this so you can become a Christian. Then take a look and said, are you a kid? I know? And I gotta read this, come on, get out of here. And so uh so, there there are all sorts of hints within the books themselves that they're written by Christians and for Christians to promote Christian faith. Having said that, one of the secondary uses of these books would surely have been to tell Christians what to tell others when they were trying to convert them. Um. And so the books themselves would not be tools of conversion or evangelistic tools, but they would be informing Christians of information that they could give to others. And one of the reasons that Christians need to have some ammunition is because they were being opposed in the Roman world. Most people thought they were nuts, and Christians say, so, no, we're not nuts. Actually we have the truth. And um, I'm gonna I'm gonna explain why we have the truth. Well, you need you need to have some kind of things to tell people to show that you've got the truth of all the four gospels. Luke the one we were just talking about gives most evidence of having this function of trying to convince outsiders that Christianity is a good thing and that it's a harmless thing. It's interesting, you know, one of the problems that Christians had in the early Roman Empire was that the guy they worshiped was crucified for crimes against the state. He was he was a state criminal who was executed for it. And so like, if that's the guy you're following, h you know, that doesn't look too good in the eyes of the law. And so they had to explain, well, actually, yeah he was, but you know, Pilot didn't want to do it, and the Romans were actually at Jesus side. It's this damn Jews that made us do it. And so so they they're putting the fault on Jews uh and exonerating Romans to show that we're not a threat to Roman society. Uh. And Luke does that more than any of the others. It doesn't. Luke also repeatedly mentioned the fact that Jesus was innocent, Like it uses the word innocent. Yeah, so when he's on trial before ponscious Pilot, uh, Luke. Luke stresses three times, three times. Pilot actually declares that Jesus, he's innocent. He doesn't deserve this, and the Jews leaders forced him to crusifiment then at when he's being crucified. Uh, in Luke Scott only Luke Goffel. You know, you have the centurion who's crucified him. And in Mark Scoffel, the centurion looks up at him and he realizes that, oh my God, what will he say? Truly this man was the son of God. But in Luke's gospel, the same guys looks at him and then he said he says, this man was innocent, and so he said, well, yeah, if he's a son of God, he was in yeah, yeah. But the point is Luke is emphasizing he was innocent, and and so it's not you know, everybody, all the Romans knew it is the Jewish people didn't recognize it. So you're mentioning several uh different strains of thought that are developing after the life of Jesus. You think the consensus of biblical scholars today would be that Jesus, the real historical Jesus, was some type of apocalyptic prophet. He was preaching, you know, the imminent return of God who would destroy the enemies of Israel and and and bring about this good kingdom on earth. But obviously that changed. You're talk in the book about a process of de apocalypticizing the Christian faith over the following centuries. Can you, in brief terms, what does that process look like, what what motivates it, and how does it happen. Let me let me preface this by saying, but that you're the first person who's interviewed me who could say the apocalypticize drives by students nuts. I talked about the de apocalypticization of the tradition, and they don't They don't like that. So uh, sod apocalypticize. So if Jesus has this apocalyptic view that the apocalypse is coming and that God's gonna wipe out things and it's going to uh, it's gonna make everything right. The reason one of the functions of that kind of religious discourse, that kind of apocalyptic language, was to encourage people who were in the midst of suffering, because you're telling him, look, yes you are suffering. God is on your side. Is these powers of evil that are lined up against us, But God's on your side. And the point of this is that God is soon going to intervene and take out these forces of evil. So if you just hold on for a little while, it'll be okay. That's why the Book of Revelation says, you know, he's coming soon, and it's why the apostle Paul says, you need to be alert because it's coming soon. It's gonna be like a thief in the night, and you know, if you're not awake, you're gonna be robbed, and so you need to be alert. And that's why Jesus himself said, truly, I tell you this generation will not pass away before all these things take place. Jesus prediction that his own disciples would see it. Uh. And that's the nature of this kind of apocalyptic language, and it still is, by the way, people today who believe in the Left Behind series or who think Jesus is coming back, they invariably think, you know, it's gonna be in my lifetime. You know, maybe next time, sometime next Thursday. I don't know, it's gonna be pretty soon. And so that's that's all part of part of it. In early Christianity, it was a very firm belief it was going to come back right, It's gonna happen right away. Jesus said, it's what Paul taught. But then the weeks went by, and the months went by, and the years went by, then the decades went by, and people are saying, uh, yeah, well, you know, it's supposed to happen by now, and it hasn't happened. And people then had to come up with ways of explaining it, and they're all sorts of ways of explaining it. Some of the books of the New Testament are written to try to explain it. Second Peter's written to explain why it hasn't happened yet. Um. Second Peter is the book that says that with say, let you know, you say it's supposed to come, didn't come. But look, you're you're following a human calendar. Uh. In God's calendar, a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day. So when God says it's gonna happen soon, you know, if he means like in three days, that could be three thousand years, which makes you wonder why he said it's gonna be soon. I mean, like it's helping me much that it's gonna be through that. But anyway, so anyway, so part of what happens in the tradition is that the apocalyptic emphasis gets muted, and eventually it gets dissolved and eventually gets argued against Christianity becomes d apocalypticized, meaning that this apocalyptic emphasis at the end is going to come, the end of this world is gonna come in our lifetime, ends of disappearing, but something replaces it. The dual ism that you get an apocalypticism is a kind of a horizontal dualism that you can put it on like a timeline, just so you think, have a timeline that goes across the page horizontally, and you know you've got on the left side, you've got the time up to now, then there's a break, and then you got the time after now. So you draw this line with a horizontal line with the vertical line in the middle of it, and the vertical line is breaking this evil age that's going to be destroyed, and then there's gonna be the age to come with is good, and so utopia is going to come in suddenly and immediately when God destroys these forces of evil, brings in his kingdom, that horizontal timeline. The dualism. The horizontal dualism is re attained when people get rid of the apocalypticism. They keep the dualism, but what they do is they flip the horizontal line on its axis, so that now it's a vertical line of vertical dualism. It's no longer now and then ver horizontal. It is down here and up there, And so now it's not what's happening now and what's gonna happen, Then it's what happens here and there, and so it's it's and it's so it's a spatial line instead of a temporal line. The spacial line is uh that it's not going to be an act in the future is going to be to you when you die, You're gonna go up or down. And so rather than the Kingdom of God being here on earth, the Kingdom of God is with God up in heaven. And so people will go up to heaven to be to receive their eternal reward. It will not be life here on earth and to be life above with God in heaven. What about the people who don't make it, well, they go below. If the righteous are rewarded, what happens to them, they're punished. Uh really yeah, but now it's a lot of destruction anymore because God's not destroying the forces of evil. And so what people are what these de apocalyptus are doing, are they're changing the Jewish view into the Greek view. Let me give you a little bit. Sorry, I mean, this is kind of complicated. Let me give you just the background on this. When Christianity started, it was a Jewish religion. Jesus was a Jews followed the Jews. They tried to convert Jews. They didn't have much success. Paul comes along, he converts gentiles, non Jews. These people he converts are people who are trained in Greek circles. That means they were trained thinking like Plato, you've got a soul and you've got a body. They're they're not Jews, they're Greeks, the Greek Greek background. They believe that when you die, your soul gets rewarded or punished. They come into Christianity and they bring their beliefs with them. They don't simply adopt what Jesus taught. They understanding like what they already think. They already think body and soul two separate things. Rewards and punishments, and now as gets the apocalypticized, their views get confirmed in the new theology, which is not that there's a Kingdom of God coming to earth and some most people are gonna be destroyed, but that when you die, your soul that's now separable, is going to go up to heaven or it's going to go down to hell. The person God creates as eternal because God is eternal. That means heaven is eternal, and health is eternal, and so you have eternal reward and eternal punishment. And in a sense, it's taking the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Plato and smashing them together into an amalgam that neither one of them would recognize. That's that's where heaven and hell comes from. Wow. Yeah, that's interesting. So so on one hand, you've got the time elapsing is causing the sort of decay of the potential for apocalypticism, and then you have the influence of the Greek thought that's prevalent in the gentile world. But what role does political power and acceptance in culture have in the in the changing views of the afterlife? Because we know that originally um uh. You certainly point out in your book that this view that Christianity was illegal everywhere in the Roman Empire is not true. That's a myth. But it was sporadically persecuted in the Roman Empire. So over time, we know that Christianity becomes more popular, becomes more prevalent, and eventually becomes uh accepted and even the the you know, the official religion of the empire. How does that change views on the afterlife if at all? Yeah, No, it's a significant question because, um, what I argue in my book is that precisely Christian understandings of persecution and martyrdom were some of those understandings are things that actually drove this new view of heaven and hell related to the reason I just just gave. So explain it. It's as you said, it's not that you know, millions of Christians are getting thrown to the lions or tens of thousands, or even thousands. I mean, but we heard about it just just like today. You know, I've got all these students. I live in the South, I live in North Carolina, and these students are basically raised in Christian household who believes that they're persecuted as Christians and you kind of look our eyes. They really but Christianity has always had this kind of persecution thing, and it goes all the way back um. And so most of early Christians were not persecuted, certainly not martyred, but they heard about persecutions and martyrdoms. And when people were martyrred, when it did happen on occasion, you know, someone had to wonder, you mean, this person is going to die, and like that's it until like I mean, when is the incoming. It's gonna be another sixty years. That's not right that this person died. He's got a way around for sixty years. And so so that that helped facilitate the idea that at the moment of death, a martyr will be in the presence of God. Uh, the marty. First it was the martyrs. The martyrs are thought to be immediately to the presence of God until the resurrection. But as time went on and there wasn't any like future resurrection happening, then started thinking, well, everybody goes. And so the the opposition by Rome helped facilitate this idea that it's at death, uh, that it's going to happen, not in some distant future moment. So the Roman persecutions went on very sporadically, not uniformly, until the early fourth century when they became more consistent. There were some imperial decreased paths that were made more plausible persecution in a lot more places. Um. But then Constantine converted to Christianity and he brought an end to the persecution in the year three thirteen, and so what happened to the views of the afterlife? Basically what happened is the views got cemented. Uh. They weren't invented at that point, they were cemented at that point. Uh. They became uh stronger tools of conversion because now even the emperor believed in them, and they were used to convert people. And they became the dominant view of Western civilization because is now Rome was the dominant empire, and now Roman by the end of the fourth century into the fifth century was becoming almost predominantly Christian and Christianity and takes over the Roman world. It ends up becoming the religion of the Middle Ages in the West and becomes the religion of the Renaissance and the Reformation and modernity. And that's why everybody believes in heaven and hell, Because everybodys always believes in heaven and hell unless you go to the earliest times. All Right, it's time to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more. Thank you. Alright, we're back. One of the interesting little tidbits from your book that that stuck with me was when you're talking about the the political power and acceptance of Christianity over time, you talk about a later document called the Apocalypse of Paul that also includes a guided tour of heaven and Hell with the City of Christ and then the people outside it enduring eternal torment. And it struck me that in this document the worst tortures are saved, not for like the violent murderers or the torturers of Christian martyrs, or even they're not even for nonbelievers. The worst tortures are saved for Christian theologians who held a different view than the author on what would seem to us to be a relatively minor thing, like a minor dispute about the interpretation of Christ's incarnation. What's going on here with this this harsh punishment of minute differences in theology, And do you see other examples in in the history of religion like this that develop along these lines. Yeah, it's very interesting. This, this Apocalypse of Paul, is a very interesting book. So we're not sure exactly when it was written, but is certainly after the Conversion of Constantine, probably at the end of the fourth century, at the beginning of the fifth century. The form of this book that we now have, it's important for both what came after it and what came before it. The Apoxes of Paul was known to Dante. This was one of Dante's influences, the earliest influence he had, um, and so some of his ideas, uh come from that. And you'll notice that Christians get punished in Dante as well. Um. The predecessor of the Apocalypse of Paul was the Apocalypse of Peter that I talked about, And in the earliest one of these, we have the Apocalypse of Peter. As I was saying, people get tortured for blasphemy God, or you know, committing adultery or but it's always moral sins when you get to the Apocalypse of Paul. Uh. So now we're in a different period in in the apocalyp Peter, which is you know, like forty years after the New Testament was written, it's um, you know, it's it's warning Christians not to sin um. But the Apocalypse of Paul is really focused on Christians ut sinning in The point is not just don't like commit moral sins. It's not just about stealing and uh you know, you know, committing infanticide or striking your parents or whatever. It's not about just stuff you do wrong. It's also about what happens in the church. The people who are punished the worst are the church leaders in hell uh forever and um you know, so some of these are moral sins. Um. So that if you are a you know, if you're a bishop of a church, the leader of a church, and you um, and you perform in your duties of office, and then you go home and sneak out and go and commit adultery, Oh boy, you are gonna have a bad You're gonna be worse than it's gonna be worse for you than the run of mill adulterer. So and so and so the bishops are being punished and the deacons are being punished, and I you know, these people are like because they're they're supposed to be setting examples, and they're standing the wrong, so they're worse. But the very worst punishment is the one that you mentioned. It's called it's three times worse than any other punishment. Uh. And it comes to um Christians who think that when they think that Christ is not a full flesh and blood human being, but he's only God. In other words, they believed Christ was so much God that he wasn't completely human like the rest of us. Now, you can't say that you'll be tortured forever worse than anybody, you know, you'll be so uh yeah. And so this is being written in a context where most people are Christian, probably in the environment this person is in. He's not worried about Pagans. In the earlier practice of the Apopus of Peter idolaters are punished and persecutors and Christians are punished. Not in the Apops of Paul several hundred years later, because you don't have those people anymore. And it's this how moral sins, it sins in the church that really bother him more than anything, especially bad theology. I wonder if that's just an availability heuristic issue, like if this is somebody who's writing Christian literature in the name of Paul. They're probably thinking a lot about their enemies with theological minor theological disputes. It's just what's on their mind. It's it's on their mind, and it's who are the who are the big enemies of Christianity, and and you know they're the ones who get it the worst. So in the second century and the Apostle Cepeter wrote the worst Enemies where the persecutors uh those who were committed idolatry, worst vitals, and those who you know, committed sins of violations of God's law, those are enemies. By the time you get to Paul, the enemies are in the church, because the churches are split. You get bad theologians, you get people bleeding crazy things. You've got you know, and you've got immorality in the church. And so those are the ones being punished. Okay, Bart, I've got one more question. So in the Divine Comedy, people who Dante runs into in purgatory, I noticed are constantly begging Dante to go back and tell their relatives, especially female relatives, that they should be praying for them more. Where does this idea come from that the prayers of the living, especially the prayers of women, were useful and important to those in the afterlife and could affect their fate there. It does proceed the official Catholic doctrine of purgatory, right, no, it comes after Okay, so the okay, so yeah, let me get a little bit background on because the U I deal with this in my book. I have a section on purgatory, uh in my book, as well as a section by the way on the idea that everybody gets saved, which is you know, also interesting. But but with purgatory. Um. This is an important topic for a lot of Catholics because the Catholic Church continues to teach perigatory. And I'm surprised. I've talked with the number of Catholics after I wrote my book who didn't realize really what purgatory is. It didn't realize they'd have to suffer in there. I thought it was just like a holding pen. And I'm sorry I should ready it's not fun, you know, it's not fun. So um, So purgatory for for those of you who are are not Catholic, or those of you Catholic who aren't paying attention, uh, purgatory is is the doctrine that eventually developed. It says that there's not just heaven and hell. Um. The reason for purgatory developing is again, it's kind of the same as you of justice. I mean, it's not really fair that everybody dies and gets the same thing, and so rewards and punishments seem only fair. But on the other hand, you know, not everybody is deserving as a saint. You know, I'm going to go to heaven, but it's not fair for them to be tortured forever. And so there's so they come up with this middle place, uh, which is for it is it's specifically for people who are going to end up in heaven, but they have to pay for their sins first. There there their sins. They are not holy enough to go directly. They need to be purged of their sins. And that's why it's purgatory, because they're being purged of their sins and purging is painful, and so they have to go through a certain number of punishments. But uh, they can get out faster if living people intercede for them. Um, So what's that all about? Where's it come from? So? What do in my book is I don't talk at length about the later doctor in purgatory, except to say or do or Dante's Purgatorio, except to say that the official Catholic doctrine was not implemented until the thirteenth century. Um and so, uh So, you know Christianity around for since the first century, So it's twelve twelve centuries before purgatory becomes a standard doctor in the Catholic Church. The term purgatory was invented in the twelfth century. Uh And so there are people who claim that purgatory wasn't invented until the twelfth or thirteenth century. And so, in one kind of technical sense, I guess that's right. But what I try to do in my book is show that there were earlier forerunners of this very idea that some people who die are punished temporarily before allowed being allowed to enter their heavenly reward. And what I do is I look at the earliest examples of that, which are in texts that people, the general run of the mill person wouldn't know. If they don't know Dante, they don't know that probably the you know, the Martyrdom of Perpetua, or or the Acts of thecla or but there are these there are these books that that talk about um a saint and she's it's usually a woman, a living woman who has a special relationship with God. She's very holy. Who um who praise for either a relative or somebody that they're requested to pray for, who's being who's having a bad afterlife, and God hears their prayers, here's here's the person's prayers, and the person then is released from their punishment and is rewarded. Uh. And so there are several stories like this. They're fascinating stories in their own terms that we won't get into, but they're they're really interesting stories. They start out in the second century uh and go up into the third century and then and and onward. And so this idea that it's possible to kind of get out early, get out of punishment early, is an idea that's floating around. And so some people did have this idea that there's this other place somehow that where and so people have these various ideas, and um, you find them in Saint Augustine, for example, UH plays with this idea a little bit. Uh. He's not quite sure about it, but he affirms it didn't seems to affirm it in some places and so so it becomes a standard idea, but then only later in the thirteenth century doesn't become a doctrine. And there are very interesting books if you if you've got people among you your leader readers who are really interested in um kind of scholet of views of things. There's a guy named Jacques Lakoff who wrote to this whole book called The Birth of Purgatory that explains why in the twelfth or thirteenth century this became all became something. Uh, and it became and it wasn't just be for religious reasons, is because of the socio political context within which it developed. It's just called the Birth of Purgatin where they can look that up. And all right, Bart, I think we're running towards the end of our our time here, but I just want to thank you so much for joining us today again. I genuinely really loved the book, as I've enjoyed all your books before Heaven and Hell. I think if you enjoyed our conversation today, listeners, you should definitely check out the book, but you should also look up Bart's blog. Bart, do you want to talk about that for a moment, I do nothing. I like talking about more. Uh. So I have a blog, Um, I've had it for over eight years. UM started it in two thousand twelve. On this blog, I post, UM, I post five times a week. Most of my posts were between twelve hundred and four hundred words. And the post deal with everything having to do with all the stuff we're talking about now, and about anything about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the writings of Paul, Book of Revelation. It talked about martyrdoms in person, he talks about women in early Christianity, talks about Jews in relationship to Christians. But and I also talk about early Judaism and the Hebrew Bible and Roman religion and like the massive the thing. I've been doing this, you know, every week, five five posts. UM. There's a membership membership fee to join the blog. Uh. And the reason there's a membership fee is because I use the blog to raise money for charity. UM. The membership fees low. It's about you know, it's about fifty cents a week. I mean it's like right now we're gonna be we're instituting a new blog soon. We're launching a new blog. But but right now, a year membership is twenty four cents, and for that you get all of these hundreds and hundreds of pos plus archives going back eight years. UM. So I don't keep any of the money myself, and not a penny goes to operating expenses, UM, and so all of the money goes directly into charities. We have raised UH about nine fifty thou dollars over the years, and that amount is going up. It looks like this year we're hoping we're gonna hit two undred thousand dollars just for this year, UH from people joining the ball and so we also there's an option of like if you just want a one month membership for less or try it for three months, you can do that. But just go to the bar room my blog and check it out and UH, and you'll see all the money the charities all go to, actually, they all go to things dealing right now with the crisis, mainly charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, both UH locally and UH internationally. So I support five five charities and all the money goes out to them. Bart thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. Yeah, it's been great. Thank you so much. All right, so that does it. But thanks again to Bart for for sharing his expertise with us. I really had fun talking to him, and at the end there I just want to remind you yet again, Bart mentioned his blog. If you're interested in this sort of subject matter, his blog is a great place to go deep. Plus, as Bart mentioned, every penny of the subscription money goes to great causes, so you can check that out at ermine blog dot org. And Ermine is spelled e h r m a n, so that's e h r m a n blog dot org. And again, the book is Heaven and Hell History of the Afterlife by Bart Ermine. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. Just make sure that you rate, review, and subscribe. That really helps the show out huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows a lot. I think the mat four foot