New Body or New Soul
- The Birth of Christian Afterlife Judgement

 

Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife - Bart D. Ehrman

 

The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead at the end of time originated about two centuries before the life of Jesus, and by his day it had become a common feature of Jewish thought. Later, at the hands of Christians, it came to be transformed into a teaching of postmortem rewards and punishments, the ideas of heaven and hell.

  

The Birth of Apocalyptic Thinking

There developed within Jewish thinking the idea that even though God is sovereign, there are other powers in the world, superhuman beings who are responsible for persecuting and harming God’s people. It was in this period that some Jewish thinkers propounded the idea that God has a cosmic antagonist, the devil. The devil went by different names in the Jewish tradition—for example, Satan and Beelzebul. You will not find him in the Hebrew Bible.

Modern scholars use the term “apocalypticism” to describe the Jewish view that God has cosmic opponents creating havoc on earth, destined to be destroyed in the end through a cataclysmic act of divine judgment.

 

“Bodily”, not “Spiritual” Resurrection

In fact the Bible tells several instances of God’s prophets restoring life to those who had died, such as Elijah in 1 Kings 7:17–24 and his disciple Elisha in 2 Kings 4:18–37. If God’s prophets could do that, can’t God? Indeed, God allowed Elijah to ascend to heaven without dying (2 Kings 2:1–12), as he did much earlier with the mysterious figure Enoch, seven generations after Adam (Genesis 5:21–24). If these two live forever, why not others?

  

The Start Of “Good Vs Evil” In the Form of Afterlife Reward and Punishment

The Book of Enoch is ascribed by tradition to the patriarch Enoch who was the father of Methuselah and the great-grandfather of Noah. One of the sections in it, the “Book of Watchers” is our first known apocalyptic text, a book filled with cosmic battles between good and evil. God intervenes to destroy the evil embodied in the Watchers so that good can return to the earth. 

In a key passage, Enoch is taken by the angel Raphael and shown that the souls of those who have died are held until the Day of Judgment (chapter 22). He is brought to a high mountain containing four hollows, each holding a different kind of deceased soul, destined to experience a different eternal fate.

This basic apocalyptic view can be found in a number of early Jewish texts from outside the Bible, including others that together make up the collection found in 1 Enoch. 

 

Paul’s Belief of Physical Bodies Going to Heaven

And he maintains their actual bodies will come back to life. This is not some kind of “spiritual” resurrection in which people are granted eternal life as souls; it is a profoundly bodily experience. These people are “asleep,” a common euphemism for “death,” specifically “in the dust.” This shows he is talking about bodies returning to life: that which comes to life is in the soil. And what is in the soil? The corpse.

Upon death, they were believed to have been taken up to the heavenly realm to live like angels, shining “like the stars forever and ever.” A number of ancient Jewish and Christian sources talk about the resurrected faithful becoming like stars or even, actually, becoming stars. The idea is rooted in the notion that the stars in heaven are in fact angels (see, e.g., Job 38:6–7) and that righteous humans, after death, are made into angelic beings. That is true, for example, of some ancient Jewish traditions about Enoch.14 Daniel does not say the faithful will actually become stars, but they certainly become like them, shining in the heavens.

  

Plato and Paul’s Differences

In Plato’s view the soul is inherently immortal. It simply always will exist because it is its nature always to exist. Unlike the body, it cannot die. This entails a kind of dualistic anthropology: humans are made up of two competing entities, the mortal body and the immortal soul, which at death separate from each other. That is indeed different from most of the ancient Israelite and then later Jewish texts we have examined so far. These assume a unitary understanding of the human being. The soul is not a separate essence or substance that can exist independently of the body. The person is a body that can be alive, but when the breath of life leaves it, it is dead. At that point neither the body nor the breath is living. The body disintegrates and disappears and there is no soul to live on.

 Moreover, in these Jewish texts, the idea is not that people cannot die but precisely that they do die. God needs to raise them from the dead because they really are dead.

Indeed, it is fair to say that by the time of Christianity, most Jews held to some version of this doctrine, believing in a future restoration and resuscitation of the body that did not involve simply a temporary return to life but an entrance into life eternal, not lived as a disembodied soul but as a unified person, body and soul. That, as we will see, was also the view of Jesus and his followers, who, as a consequence, did not maintain that when a person died their soul separated from their body and went to heaven or hell. On the contrary, they were Jewish apocalypticists. They believed it was the body that would be raised on the Day of Judgment, when the righteous would be given eternal life and the wicked would be annihilated for all time.

 

What Jesus Taught The Evil Cease to Exist as a Thinking Person at Death

Jesus did not teach that when a person died they would go to heaven or hell. He taught that the Day of Judgment was soon to come, when God would destroy all that is evil and raise the dead, to punish the wicked and reward the faithful by bringing them into his eternal, utopian kingdom.

So too when Jesus teaches about Gehenna, he is thinking of annihilation, not torment. 

The non-apocalyptic Sadducees, as we have seen, did not believe in a future resurrection of the dead or, apparently, in any afterlife whatsoever. But since the core of Jesus’s teaching was an apocalyptic message, these naysayers thought they could publicly reveal the error of his ways.

Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God was coming to those who turned to God in repentance, living good lives of loving their neighbors as themselves. 

 

Paul Taught Dead Physical Bodies Would Go To Heaven In the Future 

Paul, however, preached that salvation came only in the death and resurrection of Jesus. These, at heart, are different messages.

Just as Christ was “buried” in death, so too the person goes “under the water” and is symbolically buried. This is a type call “Sympathetic Magic”, where one thing that resembles another has power to affect it.

For most Jews like Paul, “resurrection” always and incontrovertibly meant resurrection of the body. It involved bodies coming back to life. This Jewish notion of resurrection stood, therefore, in contrast to the Greek view of the immortality of the soul.

To Greeks, the body was made of coarse, gross stuff that had to be dispensed with so the more highly refined and immortal soul could live on. Paul, though, has a different idea. He does not at all believe in the immortality of the soul. But when he speaks of the future resurrection, he is also not referring to the simple revivification of the dead corpse, brought back to life from a near-death experience. For Paul there are bodies and then there are bodies. The resurrected body he imagines will be utterly and completely transformed. It will be a different kind of body.

For sinners, Paul appears to have thought they would face annihilation: possibly they would be raised from the dead just in order to see that they, unlike the saints, would not be inheriting the glories of God’s eternal kingdom, and then in the face of that awful realization they would be painfully destroyed. Their deaths would be eternal even if they did not undergo everlasting torment.

“The last enemy, death, is annihilated” (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death will be no more, and if that is so, then neither are the people who have gone to death. They simply don’t exist any longer. They aren’t tortured. They are taken out of existence, never to return.

 

Luke Taught The Greek Style of Spirit Going to Heaven Immediately Upon Death

Luke goes out of his way to stress that Jesus was actually, bodily raised from the dead. In fact, he insists that precisely the body that went into Jesus’s tomb is the one that came out of it—a view that actually contradicts Paul.

In the passage, after Jesus is raised. Jesus appears to his disciples who are understandably, terrified, mistakenly, thinking that they were seeing a “spirit” (ie: a ghost – Luke 22:37). The word Luke uses for spirit here, strikingly, is pneuma. That is the word Paul uses to describe the kind of body a person has at the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:44). But not Luke. He wants to deny that Jesus had a pneumatic body. And so, in his account, Jesus convinces his disciples that he is decidedly not pneuma but a fleshly being, the corpse brought back from the dead intact. And so he tells them to look at him closely and touch him, “for a spirit (pneuma) does not have flesh and bones as I have”. He is the same as it was before, a body made of flesh, physically returned from the dead, presumably with a digestive system, not a glorified spiritual body as Paul imagined.

Just as Jesus was physically raised from the dead, so to Luke, clearly believes there will be a future resurrection at the end. What is most significant is that I don’t like the historical Jesus himself. Luke maintains that eternity begins immediately at a person’s death. Like Paul, but even more emphatically, Luke thinks that when believers in Jesus die, they go straight to heaven.

Nowhere is this indicated more clearly than his in his account of Jesus is own crucifixion.  In Luke, while hanging on the cross, Jesus has a brief conversation with one of the two robbers crucified beside him who makes a request: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom. (Luke 23:42) This criminal is imagining that there will be a future event that could bring him salvation. But Jesus suddenly correction with his famous saying only found in Luke. “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43)  Remarkable words.  The man will enter paradise immediately at the point of death. He does not need to wait for some future apocalyptic event, the coming of Christ kingdom.

Another example is the martyrdom of Stephen. Just before he dies, Stephen cries out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59). Again, that last word is pneuma. Stephen’s pneuma now will go to heaven to reside with the Lord when his body perishes. This is Greek-influenced theology. Rewards come to the righteous immediately at death. One does not need to wait for the resurrection of the body at the end of time. 

Concerning the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, some readers have assumed that the parable is not about wealth per se but about being a good or bad person. In that reading, the rewarded Lazarus was righteous and the rich man a sinner. It is striking, however, that the story says nothing about that. What it emphasizes is their wealth and poverty, not their sin and righteousness.

We have seen that neither Jesus nor Paul appears to have taught anything about eternal punishment for the wicked. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke is the first time we find such a notion suggested anywhere in the Bible. In fact, it is the only place we find it.

 

 

Early Century Writers

Even though these canonical writings embrace the idea of some kind of spiritual resurrection of believers in the present, they also continue to hold on to the idea that at the end of time there will be a “new” event, a resurrection of the body. Not so the Letter to Rheginus. There will be no bodily resurrection. Only the living part of the person rises. And that happens immediately at death. Eternal life is in the spirit, not in the body. One historical irony is that even though this view was roundly denounced by orthodox Christians as absolute heresy, it appears to be the view held widely by Christians today.

The second and third century orthodox Christian authors insisted that there would be a resurrection of the flesh. Anyone who believed otherwise would not be a Christian whatever they may say.  As the philosopher, Justin Martyr urged in the middle of the second century. 

If you have ever encountered any so-called Christians who do not admit this doctrine, but dare to blaspheme… by asserting that there is no resurrection of the dead, but that their souls are taken up to heaven at the moment of their death, do not consider them to be real Christians. (Dialogue with Trypho 80)

  

Paul Disagreeing with Himself

Paul has contradicted himself by saying that flesh and blood will go to heaven, and other times it won’t go to heaven.  Nowhere is this irony more pronounced than in a second-century letter allegedly by Paul to the Christians of Corinth. Even though readers of the Bible know about 1 and 2 Corinthians, few realize there is a 3 Corinthians as well, one that did not make it into the canon of Scripture. It comes to us as a part of a legendary account of Paul’s missionary journeys called “The Acts of Paul.”

 The setup for Paul’s letter is a written query he has allegedly received, in an equally forged letter, from the Corinthians, who have been visited by two insidious false teachers named Simon and Cleobius, who “overthrow the faith of some through pernicious words.” Among other things, these Christian heretics teach that “there is no resurrection of the body. 

Despite the historical Paul’s own insistence that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom,” the forged response of 3 Corinthians argues that the resurrection will be a raising of “the flesh.” In the letter, “Paul” maintains that Christ came into the world for this very reason, “that he might raise us in the flesh from the dead” (v. 6). In fact, “those who say that there is no resurrection of the flesh shall have no resurrection, for they do not believe him who had thus risen” (vv. 24–25). 

The author supports his claim with various proofs. Just as a seed dies but then comes back to life again in a new plant, so will the human flesh: it dies but then will be raised. And just as Jonah was swallowed by a great fish and later, in a sense, ascended from “deepest hell,” with “nothing… corrupted, not even a hair or an eyelid,” so too will it be with humans. Their bodies will die but then be raised, entire, no part left behind. The very flesh itself will inherit eternal life. 

 

The Apocalypse of Paul

The book was wildly, read in the middle ages, and influenced the great Dante himself. It probably comes from the end of the fourth century or beginning of the fifth. One of its obvious sources was the second-century Apocalypse of Peter.

Being written after Christianity was a religion endorsed by the Roman imperial authorities, the afterlife tour no longer has a place in hell especially reserved for pagan persecutors and idolaters (who are no longer a threat). Instead we read of the horrific punishments reserved for slack Christians, unruly officers of the church, and heretics.

When Paul first arrives in the heavenly realm he sees the angelic tormentors of the damned: they are pitiless, with no compassion, with faces filled with wrath, teeth projecting from their mouths, and sparks of fire flashing from their heads. On the other hand, the faces of the blessed angels of the saved shine like the sun; these beneficent beings are dressed in golden girdles and have palms in their hands; they are filled with gentleness and pity, and on their raiment is written the name of the Son of God (Apocalypse of Paul 11–12).

Paul is then take him to a place called the “City of Christ”, the dwelling for those who have fully repented of their sins. The city is made of gold and is surrounded by twelve concentric walls, each as distant from the next as the earth is from heaven. It is a big place. Surrounding the city are rivers of honey, milk, wine, and oil (Apocalypse of Paul 23). Outside its gates Paul observes people mourning who are not allowed to enter. He learns from the angel that these are Christians who were highly zealous in their faith, fasting day and night, but who were proud at heart and praised themselves for the good deeds they did. God has mercy on them by permitting them to be close to the city of Christ but they cannot enter because of pride. Still, at the end of time, when Christ enters the city, they will finally be allowed in, even if they will not be on the same level of ecstasy as the other denizens of the place (Apocalypse of Paul 24).

All goes into the city, and Cesar each of the interior. Walls are higher than the one before it separating one part of the city off from the next. The further saints are destined to go to spend eternity, the greater the reward - based on their level of righteousness, 

Paul is then taken to the other side of things, outside the city, to see the torments of “the souls of the godless and sinners” (Apocalypse of Paul 31). What is most striking is that many of the worst punishments are not for wicked sinners from outside the church but for the ecclesiastical transgressors within. He first sees groups of believers punished in a river of boiling fire. Some stand in the torrent up to their knees; these are the ones who came out of church to engage in idle disputes. Others are up to their navels: they are those who committed sexual immorality even after receiving communion. Yet others are up to the lips: the slanderers of other Christians. Still, others are up to their eyeballs: believers who agreed together to harm their neighbors.

Sinful leaders of the church are treated with special severity. A presbyter who offered communion after committing fornication finds himself in a river of fire, tortured by angels vigorously piercing his intestines with a three-pronged iron instrument—for all time. A church officer responsible for liturgical reading but who didn’t himself follow God’s laws has his lips and tongue lacerated with a red hot razor forever, while standing up to his knees in a river of fire.

More common sins and punishments are on full display as well, with appropriate torments assigned to magicians, adulterers, the wealthy who loaned out money on interest, and girls who lost their virginity outside of marriage. But, interestingly enough, the worst punishment of all, “seven times greater” than all the others, comes to bad theologians, who are enclosed in a deep well with a completely unbearable stench. These are sinners who “do not confess that Christ has come in the flesh and that the Virgin Mary brought him forth in those who say that the bread and cup of the Eucharist of  blessing are not the body and blood of Christ (Apocalypse of Paul, 41)

Compared to earlier Christian books, the Apocalypse of Paul was written at a time when Christianity had grown into a massive movement populated by all sorts of people, some of them of dubious ethics and theology. The most important thing at that time was on what it means to be a “true Christian”. Faith in Christ is not enough. A Christian had better not fall short in any way. God’s demands are committed Christians, and especially Christian leaders are exacting