Heaven And Hell - Live and Let Die PC: Download and Play the Game for Free

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When we originally scheduled the interview we're about to hear, we didn't realize how weirdly timely it would be. Let's face it - the pandemic has made death a presence on a scale most of us aren't used to. Your beliefs about what happens after death or if anything happens might shape how you're dealing with your fears and anxieties. In the new book, "Heaven And Hell: A History Of The Afterlife," my guest Bart Ehrman writes about where the ideas of heaven and hell came from. He examines the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, as well as writings from the Greek and Roman era.

EHRMAN: Yeah, that would absolutely be good. It's not that I wish I believed it; I wish that it were true. And as I say in my book, as we'll probably get to, it may be true that we will live after we die. But if we do, it'll be something pleasant like that. It's not going to be something awful. So I - you know, it's not that I wish I believed it so much as I wish that it were true.

Heaven And Hell - Live and Let Die PC

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Either we live on and we see those we knew before and those we didn't know before, and we spend all of our time being with them, which for him was absolute paradise because Socrates liked nothing better than conversing with people, and so now he could converse with Homer and with all the greats of the Greek past. So that would be great. And if it's not that, he said it would be like a deep sleep. Everybody loves a deep, dreamless sleep. Nobody frets about it or gets upset by having it. And so that's the alternative. And so it's either a deep sleep, or it's a good outcome, and either way it's going to be fine. And that's exactly what I think.

GROSS: One of the theses of your book about the history of heaven and how is that views of heaven and hell don't go back to the earliest stages of Christianity, and they're not in the Old Testament or in Jesus' teachings. They're not?

EHRMAN: (Laughter) I know, exactly. This is the big surprise of the book, and it's the one thing people probably wouldn't expect because, you know, when I was growing up, I just assumed. This is the view of Christianity. So this must be what Jesus taught. This is what the Old Testament taught. And in fact, it's not right. Our view that you die and your soul goes to heaven or hell is not found anywhere in the Old Testament, and it's not what Jesus preached. I have to show that in my book, and I lay it out and explain why it's absolutely not the case that Jesus believed you died and your soul went to heaven or hell. Jesus had a completely different understanding that people today don't have.

GROSS: Are there things in the Hebrew Bible that still support the idea of heaven and hell as people came to understand it, things that you can extract from the Old Testament that might not literally mention heaven and hell but still support the vision that emerged of it?

EHRMAN: I think one of the hardest things for people to get their minds around is that ancient Israelites and then Jews and then Jesus himself and his followers have a very different understanding of what the relationship between what we call body and soul. Our view is that we - you've got two things going on in the human parts. So you have your body, your physical being, and you have your soul, this invisible part of you that lives on after death, that you can separate the two and they can exist - the soul can exist outside of the body. That is not a view that was held by ancient Israelites and then Jews, and it's not even taught in the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament, what we would call the soul is really more like what we would call the breath. When God creates Adam, he creates him out of earth, and then he breathes life into him. The life is in the breath. When the breath leaves the body, the body no longer lives, but the breath doesn't exist. We agree with this. I mean, when you die, you stop breathing. Your breath doesn't go anywhere. And that was the ancient understanding, the ancient Hebrew understanding of the soul, is that it didn't go anywhere because it was simply the thing that made the body alive.

EHRMAN: Yeah, no, it's a good question. And people generally point to these passages in the Book of Psalms that talk about Sheol, or Sheol. It's a word that gets mistranslated into English. Sometimes Sheol is translated by the word hell, and it absolutely is not what people think of as hell. Sometimes Sheol is talked about by people today as a place that's kind of like the Greek Hades, a place where everybody goes after they die, and they aren't really physical beings down there; they're just kind of like souls, and they exist forever there, and there's nothing to do, and they do - they're all the same. And so Sheol is sometimes portrayed like that. The Bible does talk about this place Sheol, especially in poetry, especially in Psalms. And it's probably not a place that people go to, per se.

Just about the only place in the Hebrew Bible where you get an instance of somebody who has died who seems still to be alive afterwards is in this very strange and interesting passage in the book of 1 Samuel, where the king, Saul, is desperate for some advice from somebody who knows, and so he calls - he has a necromancer, a woman, this woman of Endor, who calls up his former adviser Samuel from the grave. And she holds a kind of seance. And Samuel comes up and is really upset that she's called him up from the grave, and he gets upset with Saul for doing this, and he predicts that Saul is going to die the next day in battle, which he does.

And so people often point to that as an instance that's - well, so people are alive after they're dead. And right, it kind of seems like that when you read it - when you just kind of simply read it. But if you actually read it carefully, it doesn't say that. What it says is that Samuel came up, but it doesn't say where he was, and it doesn't say if he was living at the time. It looks like what - before he was raised up, it looks like he was simply dead, and he was brought back to life temporarily, and he didn't appreciate that (laughter), and so he was upset.

GROSS: Why don't we take a short break here? And then we'll talk about the history of ideas of heaven and hell. If you're just joining us, my guest is Bart Ehrman. He's the author of the new book "Heaven And Hell: A History Of The Afterlife." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

But they - these apocalyptic thinkers came to think that God was soon going to destroy these forces of evil and get rid of them altogether, and the world would again return to a utopia. It'd be like paradise. It'd be like the Garden of Eden once more. The people who thought that maintained that this Garden of Eden would come not only to people who happened to be alive when it arrived; it was going to come to everybody. People who had been on the side of God throughout history would be personally raised from the dead and individually would be brought into this new era, this new kingdom that God would rule here on Earth.

GROSS: So this was all dependent on, like, the Messiah coming on the end of days, which some Jewish prophets predicted would be soon. When Jesus was alive, he thought the end of days would be soon. And of course, it kept not happening.

EHRMAN: Yeah. That became a view somewhat in Judaism, and it became a very pronounced view in Christianity. The - after Jesus. Jesus himself held to the apocalyptic view that I laid out. He taught - his main teaching is that the kingdom of God is coming. People today, when they read the phrase kingdom of God, they think he's talking about heaven, the place that your soul goes to when you die. But Jesus isn't talking about heaven because he doesn't believe - he's a Jew - he doesn't believe in the separation of soul and body.

He doesn't think the soul is going to live on in heaven. He thinks that there's going to be a resurrection of the dead at the end of time. God will destroy the forces of evil. He will raise the dead. And those who have been on God's side, especially those who follow Jesus' teachings, will enter the new kingdom here on Earth. They'll be physical. They'll be in bodies. And they will live here on Earth, and this is where the paradise will be. And so Jesus taught that the kingdom of God, this new physical place, was coming soon, and those who did not get into the kingdom were going to be annihilated.

What ends up happening is that, over time, this expectation that the kingdom was coming soon began to be questioned because it was supposed to come soon and it didn't come soon, and it's still not coming, and when is it going to come? And people started thinking, well, you know, surely I'm going to get rewarded, you know, not in some kingdom that's going to come in a few thousand years, but I'm going to get rewarded by God right away. And so they ended up shifting the thinking away from the idea that there'd be a kingdom here on Earth that was soon to come to thinking that the kingdom, in fact, is up with God above in heaven. And so they started thinking that it comes at death, and people started assuming then that, in fact, your soul would live on.

It's not an accident that that came into Christianity after the majority of people coming into the Christian church were raised in Greek circles rather than in Jewish circles because in Jewish circles, there is no separation of the soul and the body. The soul didn't exist separately. But in Greek circles, going way back to Plato and before him, that was absolutely the belief. The soul was immortal and would live forever in Greek thinking. And so these people who converted to Christianity were principally Greek thinkers, they thought there was a soul that live forever. They developed the idea, then, that the soul lived forever with God when it's rewarded.

GROSS: So you were saying there really isn't an explicit description of heaven and hell in the Hebrew Bible or even in the New Testament, but that Paul is important in understanding the history of heaven and hell. Tell us about what Paul wrote. 2ff7e9595c