Jesus Did Not Believe In Hell

…at least according to Bart Ehrman.

How many Christians know what Jesus’ own views of the afterlife actually were? My sense is: very few indeed.

Jesus is the most important figure for Christianity…but he did not leave us any writings. We do not have a word from his pen. If words attributed to him come to us only in the accounts written by others at a much later date—even if they are allegedly quoting him—how can we know they are things he really said?

You might think that people living in oral cultures would make sure that, when telling accounts of what famous teachers said, they would preserve those words accurately, without changing a thing. But research into both oral cultures today and ancient modes of telling stories shows that this in fact was not the case. Words change as they come to be transmitted—they always have changed and always will change.

There can be no doubt that as ancient Christian storytellers recounted the sayings of Jesus they sometimes altered them by shortening, expanding, modifying, and even inventing them. We know this for a fact because we have sources from outside the New Testament with sayings of Jesus that no one can seriously argue he said. Where did they come from? Someone made them up. Critical scholarship is unified in thinking that the same is true even for some sayings of Jesus in the New Testament. Not all of them, of course.

Scholars have devised a series of critical methods that can help us determine which sayings of Jesus in the Gospels (or in any other source) are ones that Jesus most likely said.

…A close reading of Jesus’ words shows that in fact that he had no idea of torment for sinners after death. Death, for them is irreversible, the end of the story. Their punishment is that they will be annihilated, never allowed to exist again, unlike the saved, who will live forever in God’s glorious kingdom.

Most of Jesus’ teachings about the coming judgment focus on this idea of ultimate and complete destruction. In this he was very much like his predecessor, John the Baptist, [who taught that] those who failed to bear good fruit would be “cut down and thrown into the fire”. What happens to trees that are felled and burned? They are consumed out of existence. They don’t keep burning forever.

Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna)

…So too when Jesus teaches of Gehenna, he is thinking of annihilation, not torment: “Fear the one who can annihilate both the soul and body in Gehenna.” Note that here Jesus does not merely say that God will “kill” a person’s soul: he will annihilate (or exterminate) it. After that it will not exist. Worse than that, the enemies of God would be cast, unburied into Gehenna (a cursed, desecrated valley at the edge of Jerusalem), infamous as a place of utter desolation, a place despised and abandoned by God. …Sinners would end up as cadavers, gnawed on by worms and burned by fire. For them there would never again be any hope of life.

[And for the righteous?]

The coming Kingdom of God will entail a fantastic banquet where the redeemed eat and drink at leisure with the greats of the Jewish past, the Patriarchs. This is a paradisal image of great joy.

…at the resurrection, no one will be married. Instead, those who are raised [from the dead] will be “like the angels in heaven”—unmarried and, presumably, eternally happy about it. The righteous will not be simply revivified and brought back from a very long near-death experience to eventually die a second death. They will be given a glorified, immortal existence comparable to that of the angels.

[And how does one attain eternal life, in Jesus’ view?]

One good reason for thinking some of the words [of the Parable of the Sheep and Goats] were actually spoken by Jesus involves the very point of the passage: People will enter the glorious Kingdom of God, or be painfully excluded from it, because of their ethical activities and nothing else. Living a good life by helping those in need will earn a person salvation. The earliest followers of Jesus after his death were firmly convinced that it was faith in him—in particular, his death and resurrection—that could make a person right with God. This was the belief not only of the Apostle Paul but of all the early Christians we know about, including, of course, the authors of the Gospels. This passage is unlikely, therefore, to have been invented by later Christians.

–excerpts from chapter eight of Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by NT scholar, Bart Ehrman

Gary: I for one am so relieved to hear that Jesus did not teach eternal torment in the flames of Hell, a torture pit at the center of the earth. It is such a comfort to know that Jesus taught that I and other nonbelievers like me will simply be burned alive…until dead. Annihilated. Like being burned at the stake. A few brief minutes, fifteen tops, of horrific pain and suffering, writhing and screaming in unimaginable agony, but then the peace and comfort of eternal non-existence.

You are a good guy, after all, Jesus! Thank you!

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End of post.