Ancient afterlife beliefs

  Hope vs justice XII: the hope of post-mortem salvation via intercessions, a survey That there were ‘many’ who, even ancient times, didn’t accept the idea of ‘endless torments’ even in Antiquity is something that we can even learn from the writings of those who opposed them [1] . The doctrine of ‘universal salvation’ or at least, a possibility of salvation for some of the damned after their death is most famously associated with the third century theologian Origen of Alexandria. In this text, however, I won’t discuss the case of the form of universalism that was advocated by Origen (and others) but I’ll discuss a different kind of universalism that we might call intercessory universalism . The main features of intercessory universalism are the following ones: 1.        Unrepentant sinners fully deserve unending punishment 2.        Unrepentant sinners are saved by the intercessions of those who belong to the Church...

  Bart Ehrman on 'Jewish' and 'Greek' views of the afterlife "It is often said that the key difference between ancient pagan and Jewish views of the afterlife is that Greeks developed the notion of the immortality of the soul but Jews came to believe in the resurrection of the body. Even though there is an element of truth in this characterization, it is far too simple and, in fact, demonstrably problematic. To be sure, there are differences between Plato’s view of immortality and, say, Daniel’s view of resurrection. 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 unit...

  Hope vs justice XI: Christian tales about the prayers on behalf of the dead In what follows, I’ll report three tales of presumably efficacious prayers on behalf of the dead: the tale of Thecla and Falconilla present in the Acts of Paul and Thecla , the story of Gregory the Great’s prayer on behalf of Emperor Trajan and a commentary on this tale by Thomas Aquinas and, finally, the tale of Perpetua’s prayer for her deceased brother Dinocrates.     Acts of Paul and Thecla “And when the beasts were exhibited, they bound her to a fierce lioness; and Tryphæna accompanied her. But the lioness, with Thecla sitting upon her, licked her feet; and all the multitude was astonished. And the charge on her inscription was: Sacrilegious. And the women cried out from above: An impious sentence has been passed in this city! And after the exhibition, Tryphæna again receives her. For her daughter Falconilla had died, and said to her in a dream: Mother, you shall have this stranger Th...

Bart Ehrman on the fate of souls in Homer's Odissey "The broader lessons of Homer’s katabasis are clear. Most important: the nature of death puts into perspective the value of life. The world of mortals may be hard and full of suffering; but whether it is the constant dangers confronted by heroes desperately trying to return home or the daily grind of field hands enduring a life of poverty, the suffering of the present cannot be compared to the perpetual banality of what lies ahead. The miserable existence of the living, on any terms, is better than anything on offer in the realms of the dead, where there is literally nothing to live for, since no one is alive. Existence there is a mere shadow. There are no pleasures to appreciate, no goals to achieve, no strength to enjoy, no memories to relish, and no future to anticipate. It is a life of flitting shadows. In the moving words of Erwin Rohde from more than a century ago, in the Homeric picture, “Nothing is so hateful to man a...

  Tertullian of Carthage on Eternal punishments in hell “But He also teaches us, that He is rather to be feared, who is able to destroy both body and  soul  in  hell , that is, the Lord alone; not those which kill the body, but are not able to hurt the  soul ,  Matthew 10:28  that is to say, all  human  powers. Here, then, we have a recognition of the natural  immortality  of the  soul , which cannot be killed by men; and of the mortality of the body, which may be killed:  whence we learn  that the resurrection of the dead is a resurrection of the flesh; for unless it were raised again, it would be impossible for the flesh to be killed in  hell . But as a question may be here captiously raised about the meaning of the body (or the flesh), I will at once state that I understand by the  human  body nothing else than that fabric of the flesh which, whatever be...