In a preface, this Chapel Hill scholar of everything related to Christianity relates his childhood indoctrination into evangelical Protestantism, and in an Afterword, he delivers the reasons for his current rational agnosticism, a path that I can certainly relate to. For him now, death is just reversion to the nothingness of everyone before their birth.
In between these personal notes, he provides a very erudite, detailed, scholarly analysis of the development of ideas related to what happens to individuals after life on earth, from the earliest writings of Gilgamesh through to Plato, Jesus, Paul, the Gnostics, and the early Christian communities around the Mediterranean. With careful analysis of the teachings of Jesus, complete with all the contradictions in the Gospels and ancillary ancient documents such as the Gospel of Thomas, he makes a convincing case that Jesus never taught anything about a life in paradise or hellfire after life on earth, predicting (erroneously) instead the eminent Day of Judgment upon the Second Coming and the last days of earth’s existence. This was modified by subsequent early Christians, most notably Paul, when the second coming of the Son Of God failed to materialize during their lifetimes. The integration of the evolving Christian beliefs with the imaginative and often gruesome mythologies of the ancient world was extensive, and the dating and authorship of the ancient texts, whether included in the Bible or not, is discussed extensively.
There is a lot of discussion of the controversies about rewards and punishments being doled out immediately on dying vs delayed to some later final Judgement, the duality of body and soul, and the lack of any proportionality for rewards and punishments in many belief systems, given our deeply imbedded yearning for justice. The early martyrs welcoming the anticipation of being pulled apart by wild animals in the Coliseum because of the greater reward in the hereafter is hard to comprehend, but is a bit akin to the beliefs of modern Muslim jihadist suicide bombers. It strikes me that taking any action in this life because you believe it will be rewarded in a hypothetical next life is ultimately a form of base selfishness founded on faulty logic. The concept of purgatory as a holding ground until some later date for final judgement was a late addition to Catholic Christian theology, added only in the 14th century.
I recall reading Ehrman’s When Jesus Became God several years ago, in which he shows that this transition from itinerant rabbi to God was largely due to Paul’s reinterpretation or misinterpretation of his teaching. I appreciated his scholarly approach in that tome. This book is equally well researched and detailed, but some of the details, such as extensive discussion of the bizarre beliefs of pre-Christian societies seemed to me to be a bit overdone and pedantic.
A good educational but hefty read.
The Passionate Reader 