Abstract
This is a disturbing book. ‘Disturbing’ not in the sense that it threatens the fundamentals of modern religious belief (though that is always possible) but in that it reveals a deeply unattractive side of early Christianity – the sadistic pleasure theologians took in describing the pains of hell for those who persecuted them, or, later, for non-believers in general. The irony, of course, is that the obvious lack of evidence, not to mention its completely metaphorical nature, only encouraged a greater degree of dogmatic theological certainty.
Early beliefs about an afterlife, among both the Ancient Greeks and the Old Testament Jews, were essentially collective. Divine judgement and retributive justice for individual sinners are late ideas. In life or death, the individual was part of a wider social unit, and the idea of personal survival emerges slowly only with the kind of individualism assumed by Plato or Socrates in Greece, or in some parts of the New Testament – the Sadducees, for instance, rejected post-mortem existence altogether. Jesus actually said remarkably little about it, and Ehrman insists that even those stories we have (such as that of Dives and Lazarus) are later additions. Similarly, the idea that Paul was the basis of later Christian teaching is completely false. His careful distinction between ‘the flesh’ (sarx), which epitomized all that was sinful in humanity and will decay, and ‘the spiritual body’ (pneuma), which (in Christ) would be resurrected was rapidly lost, even though Paul’s authority was commonly invoked by all sides in subsequent debates.
The problem for the early Church, as Ehrman sees it, was that the end of the world, confidently predicted by Jesus, had not happened before the deaths of the first generation. Realizing that no immediate apocalypse could be expected, theology perforce changed gear, debating whether judgement would come at the moment of individual deaths, or collectively at a grand final Last Judgement. Joys of heaven tended to lose out to the horrors of hell – despite inherent contradictions from tortures that would rapidly prove fatal on earth being apparently prolonged for eternity. The book of Revelation, which Ehrman examines in some detail, hardly helped.
Disappointingly, except for a brief discussion of Universalism in Origen, Ehrman does not pursue his exposition after those first few centuries. Beyond showing that the beliefs of most contemporary Americans would earlier have been ‘heresy’, he has little interest in later periods that contained very different constructions of heaven and hell. I would have expected a substantial section on Dante (controversial in his own time), not to mention Calvinists, Milton, early Methodists, nineteenth-century novelists (MacDonald, Kingsley?), even the well-named Father Furniss, or, in the twentieth, James Joyce or C. S. Lewis. Instead, he gives us his own disbelief in any future existence – again framed against what polls suggest contemporary Americans believe rather than British readers.
Overall, interesting, sometimes disturbing, but severely limited discussion – certainly not the full ‘history’ the title suggests. For those who wish to examine a later period, I would recommend Geoffrey Rowell’s Hell and the Victorians (1974).