Ancient afterlife beliefs

Bart Ehrman on annihilationism and eternal torment in early Christian texts   " The History of Eternal Torment and Annihilation   In such debates Augustine was decidedly in the majority. Christian opinion from the beginning typically maintained that punishment against sinners would be “eternal.” Unlike Augustine, however, in the earliest Christian tradition postmortem punishment for sinners is not conscious torment but annihilation. Jesus himself regularly speaks of the “destruction” of sinners, not their torment (e.g., Matt 7:13–14), and often, like his predecessor the Baptist, in terms of sinners being judged by “fire” (Matt 3:10, 25:41). He sometimes states that the fire is eternal, but he never indicates that the people cast into it eternally suffer. Instead, they appear to be destroyed in the apocalyptic furnace, just as “weeds” that are cast into a fire (Matt 13: 36–43) or “fish” (Matt 13:47–50): once weeds and fish are burned, they cease to exist; they don’t burn foreve...

Bart Ehrman on the forms of early Christian universalism "Augustine’s discussion confirms what we find from other sources, that universalism could come in different guises and with sundry perspectives in the early Christian tradition, even if there is some overlap among them: • The Pauline texts that embrace the incredible scope of salvation: the work of Christ cannot possibly be less extensive than the work of Adam and so (apparently) must be universal. [Note 66: Paul does not always lean toward a universalistic salvation; he clearly states, for example, that at the return of Christ, unbelievers will experience “destruction . . . and they will not escape” (1 Thess 5:3).]  • Origen’s view, related to Paul’s but rooted less in the scope of salvation than in the sovereignty of God. God is the Lord God Almighty who cannot be resisted by those he created, who, to a person, will return to him as he wills.  • The Harrowing of Hell tradition as embodied in the Gospel of Nicodemus (as...

  Bart Ehrman on 4 Ezra/2 Esdras, 2 Baruch and 1 Enoch "We do, of course, have narratives that describe postmortem salvation for some of those suffering in the world to come, through the intercessory power of saints pleading for mercy for some individuals—most notably Thecla’s prayer for Falconilla and Perpetua’s for her brother Dinocrates (Acts of Thecla 28; Mart. Perp. 7–8). These are rare moments and they involve only particular people, but they do show that Christians imagined that God sometimes listened to pleas for mercy from those he especially cherished [Note 59: See Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead.]. In most instances, however, throughout both the Jewish and Christian traditions, such pleas are to no avail; on the contrary, they typically highlight the opposite view—that God is just and cannot or will not bestow mercy on anyone who deserves to be punished [Note 60: See the discussion of Bauckham, Fate of the Dead, pp. 136–48, “The Conflict of Justice and Mercy.”]. The poin...

  Is God’s salvific will universal? The answers of Augustine of Hippo and John Chrysostom Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) and John Chrysostom (d. 407) were two massively influential Christian theologians, venerated as saints in many Christian traditions, including Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Both seemed to agree that a portion of human beings will be forever lost and will experience some kind of post-mortem unending torments. As I will show, however, despite these agreements, the two theologians disagreed on how to answer a very important question: is God’s salvific will universal?   This is evident if one reads how they handled a specific Biblical passage that seems to explicitly say that God’s salvific will is universal (i.e. that God wants the salvation of all human beings): 1 Timothy 2:(3-)4. Augustine of Hippo’s exegesis of 1 Timothy 2:4 “103. Accordingly, when we hear and read in sacred Scripture that God "willeth that all men should be saved,"221 althou...

  The problem of free will and salvation “97. Accordingly, we must now inquire about the meaning of what was said most truly by the apostle concerning God, "Who willeth that all men should be saved." 203  For since not all--not even a majority-- are  saved, it would indeed appear that the fact that what God willeth to happen does not happen is due to an embargo on God's will by the human will. Now, when we ask for the reason why not all are saved, the customary answer is: "Because they themselves have not willed it." But this cannot be said of infants, who have not yet come to the power of willing or not willing. For, if we could attribute to their wills the infant squirmings they make at baptism, when they resist as hard as they can, we would then have to say that they were saved against their will. But the Lord's language is clearer when, in the Gospel, he reproveth the unrighteous city: "How often," he saith, "would I have gathered your...

On the duration of Gehenna: 'controverted judgment passages' in the New Testament It is goes without saying that there are many passages in the New Testament of the Christian Bible that, at face value, do support the notion that eschatological punishment are definitive and that the separation between the ‘righteous’ and the ‘wicked’ will be irrevocable. Some of these passages include (the list is not meant to be exhaustive): Gospel of Matthew: Mt 5:21-2, Mt 5:29-30, Mt 13:40-2, Mt 13:47-50, Mt 24:36-9, Mt 24:45-51, Mt 25:10-11, Mt 25:31-46, Mt 26:24 Gospel of Mark: Mk 9:43-8, Mk 14:21 (parallel to Mt 26:24) Gospel of Luke: Lk 12:5, Lk 16:19-31, Lk 17:26-31, Lk 19:11-27 Gospel of John: Jn 3:5 (which has a parallel in the longer ending of the Gospel of Mark, in Mk 16:16), Jn 5:28-9, Jn 15:5-6 Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: 1 Cor 6:9-10 Paul's Epistle to the Romans: Rm 6:23 Second Epistle to the Thessalonians: 2 Thess 1:8-9 Second Epistle of Peter 2:6 and Jude 7 I co...

  The Buddhacarita and the Arakasutta on the suffering and finiteness of human life Buddhacarita, book 3 (written by Ashvaghosa): Here is how the Buddhist poet Ashvaghosa retold the story of the Buddha’s (the ‘prince’ in the story) encounter with old age, illness and death: “26. But then the gods, dwelling in pure abodes, having beheld that city thus rejoicing like heaven itself, created an old man to walk along on purpose to stir the heart of the king’s son. 27. The prince having beheld him thus overcome with decrepitude and different in form from other men, with his gaze intently fixed on him, thus addressed his driver with simple confidence: 28. ‘Who is this man that has come here, O charioteer, with white hair and his hand resting on a staff, his eyes hidden beneath his brows, his limbs bent down and hanging loose, — is this a change produced in him or his natural state or an accident?’ 29. Thus addressed, the charioteer revealed to the king’s son the secret that sh...

  Possible problem for theistic universalism By 'universalism' I mean the view that all human beings or all rational beings will be saved in the end and will experience some sort of unending state of blessedness even if reaching that state for some will require a long period of conscious affliction. By 'theism', I mean a world view that posits as the ontological foundation of all beings a personal God. I'll discuss the case of an universalism that includes all rational beings, which might be defined as sentient beings that can have rational faculties and have some understanding of the 'infinite' nature of God and, therefore, be in communion with God. Personally, I lean towards theism (while I sympathetic to various theistic religious traditions, I'm still an agnostic about them, so my position might be called 'philosophical theism') - although I have some doubts about the meaning of terms like 'omniscient' and 'omnipotent' when ap...

Omniscience and free will I'm struggling with the notion of 'omniscience' of God, at least in the stronger and usually accepted meaning of the term, i.e. that God knows all future contingents, i.e. all events that will happen. The problem I have is that it seems to imply a strict determinism. However, if one accepts the notion that our choices are not determined ('free will'), determinism would be a problem. To appreciate the problem, one has to consider the fact that if determinism in any form is true all our choices are inevitable. Hence, all bad deeds that human beings made in the history of humanity were actually inevitable. But if they were inevitable, it doesn't make any sense to me to think that those who did those bad deeds are responsible. They couldn't do otherwise.    Notice that this problem doesn't arise in a 'weaker' notion of 'omniscience', in which God knows all possible future events, rather than which events will indeed ...

  Annihilationism in Arnobius of Sicca and other Ancient Jewish and Christians texts Arnobius of Sicca (255 – 327 AD) was a early Christian that is often interpreted as being an annihilationist (or a conditionalist), i.e. someone who believed that immortality is only given to the saved and the lost will be annihilated (and it is not hard to see why in the case of Arnobius):  "Do you dare to laugh at us when we speak of hell, and fires which cannot be quenched, into which we have learned that souls are cast by their foes and enemies? What, does not your Plato also, in the book which he wrote on the immortality of the soul, name the rivers Acheron, Styx, Cocytus, and Pyriphlegethon, and assert that in them souls are rolled along, engulphed, and burned up? But though a man of no little wisdom, and of accurate judgment and discernment, he essays a problem which cannot be solved; so that, while he says that the soul is immortal, everlasting, and without bodily substance, he vet say...