The Field is The World

In teasers for an upcoming book on Heaven and Hell, Bart Erhman asserts the following:

Could Bart Ehrman be correct in his understanding of the text? How could the entire history of the church have fallen prey to this imagined corruption of the pure teaching of Christ and the Old Testament? Let’s briefly examine some key statements of Jesus about the final judgment and afterlife.

• In John 5:21-19, Jesus claims to be the One Who raises the dead, either to the “resurrection of life” or to the “resurrection of judgment.”
• Jesus pronounces woe on Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, who had witnessed many of His miracles. (Matthew 11:21-24) He says they will be brought down to hades, and it will be more tolerable for Sodom in the day of judgment than for them. If both are to be utterly destroyed, how is the destruction of one more “tolerable” than the other?
• In Mark 12:18-27, Jesus is challenged by the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection. Jesus’ answer to them is interesting. “And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.’” (Mark 12:26–27) The insinuation is that while awaiting the Resurrection, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are yet alive.
• In Matthew 17:3, at the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah appear and speak to Jesus. Although Elijah may have been taken to heaven without a physical death, Scripture plainly says Moses died, (Deut.34:5), and yet he appears, conscious and talking with Jesus, before the end-times general resurrection.
• In Luke 16:19-31, Jesus tells a story about a man named Lazarus who goes to be with Abraham, who himsefl is conscious, while the rich man in the story goes to hades and is in torment, begging for water and for someone to warn his brothers away from the place. He’s in full possession of his emotions, memories and senses. He expresses unmet desires separately from the torment of flames.
• Jesus cautions against fear of man, warning that we should instead fear God, “who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matthew 10:28) At first, this passage might seem like utter destruction, a contradiction of the story He told in Luke 16, but the word’s meaning can include ruin and is related to Revelation 9:11’s angel of the bottomless pit. (“Hell and abaddon” are a common idiom in the Old Testament.)
• In Mark 9:42-48, Jesus warns that we should not let anything persist in our lives that cause us to sin. It is better, He says, to enter life crippled or blinded than to enter hell with all our members, “where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.” (A quote of Isa. 66:24.)
• In a parallel passage to the one above, a warning about being angry or considering our brother a fool is appended, in which the threat is “a hell of fire” or the Greek word “gehenna,” relating to the eternal state of unbelievers. (Matthew 5:22-23)
• In Luke 23:43, Jesus assures the repentant thief that he will be in paradise with Jesus that very day, not simply in Christ’s Kingdom at some later date as he had requested.
• Matthew 25:31-46 is Jesus’ teaching on the Final Judgment. In it, there’s a glorious appearance, a gathering of nations and a separation of “sheep” from “goats.” He judges the nations based on how they have treated His people, accounted as having been done to Him. The “sheep” inherit the Kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world (v. 34) and eternal life (v. 46), while the “goats” are commanded to depart from Him as cursed, “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” (v. 41) which is “eternal punishment.” While a simplistic and generous reading might deem “eternal fire” as annihilation, it’s difficult to interpret “eternal punishment” that way, (especially without also interpreting “eternal life” as something other than eternal).
• Jesus certainly had the authority to make new revelations, (Matthew 5:21-26, 27-30, 31-32, 33-37, 38-42, 43-48), but was He doing so in His teaching on judgment and the afterlife? His use of “if it were not so, I would have told you” when speaking of His Father’s house John 14:2 indicates His confirmation of Psalm 23’s statement, “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” an existing understanding about a heavenly dwelling place for His followers that, in order to harmonize with His understanding of Abraham’s eternal conscious comfort and the thief on the cross’ immediate presence in paradise, preceded the resurrection.

“Only the uninformed”, says Lewis Sperry Chafer, “will… ignore the fact that the greatest Greek scholars of all generations—who have given the Church the true translation and interpretation of the original Greek text—have not modified the eternal feature of retribution.”[1]

But how about the Old Testament? The concept of judgment and condemnation is less clear without the light of the New Testament, so could we have misunderstood passages intended to simply convey the agony of death and shame of a dishonorable life to mean eternal, conscious torment?

Instead of being explicit, most depictions of hell in the Old Testament are figurative and poetic. Can they be dismissed because of this? Let’s examine several of these descriptions.

• One of the first mentions of the Hebrew word sheol that hints at more than burial is found in Deuteronomy 32:22: “For a fire is kindled by my anger, and it burns to the depths of Sheol, devours the earth and its increase, and sets on fire the foundations of the mountains.” Does God’s anger against the idolatrous continue after their physical death? What are the implications of this?
• In Proverbs 9:18, “folly” is personified as a seductive woman who entices the unwary individual who ”…does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of Sheol.” The word used for “dead” here is “rapha,” a word distinguished from “muth,” the word for simple bodily death. It’s sometimes used to describe immaterial beings, and was so interpreted in Rabbinic literature.
• Isaiah 26:19 makes the distinction more explicit. In the Amplified Bible it is rendered, “Your dead shall live [O Lord]; the bodies of our dead [saints] shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For Your dew [O Lord] is a dew of [sparkling] light [heavenly, supernatural dew]; and the earth shall cast forth the dead [to life again; for on the land of the shades of the dead You will let Your dew fall].”
• Isaiah reveals that God will create a new heavens and new earth, which will cause the old to be forgotten. (Isa. 65:17) Daniel received revelation that some people would be resurrected to everlasting life and some to everlasting contempt. (Daniel 12:1-3) Taken with Isaiah's message about the old earth being forgotten, how could contempt for those who are resurrected and destroyed be “everlasting?” Woudn't they be forgotten also?
• In Ezekiel 32:19-31, God commands Ezekiel to wail over Egypt and to describe their fate as joining other nations outside God’s covenant relationship, being dragged away, and discussed by the mighty chiefs already in sheol, including multiple nations.
• God commands Isaiah to taunt the king of Babylon and a being called “Day Star, son of Dawn” (Lucifer in the King James Version) with a description of sheol including “the shades,” who are conscious and greet them with mockery, reminding them of their oppression and rebellion. (Isaiah 14:9-11)
• Jonah himself may have cried out to God our of sheol, depending on how literally we should take Jonah 2:2. (He might have been swallowed alive and remained alive in the sea creature as most have assumed, but Jesus’ comparison in Matthew 12:40 would be even more fitting if he died and was resurrected.)

Finally, written by early disciples of Jesus, within mere decades of His ascension, the Epistles present a different picture of judgment and the afterlife than the one Ehrman claims.

• In 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Paul gives the Thessalonian believers a picture of Christ’s return to judge unbelievers: “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” Like Jesus’ warning in Matthew 10:28, the meaning of the word can include “ruin” rather than obliteration; otherwise “eternal destruction” would be self-contradictory.
• In Revelation 19:20 the end-times leaders called the “beast” and the “false prophet” are “thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur.” A few verses later, in chapter 20:10, the devil is thrown into the same lake of fire, “where the beast and the false prophet are (present tense in the narrative, 1,000 years after the events of the previous chapter) and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” If, as verses 11-15, depict, everyone who has died is resurrected and, if not found in the Book of Life, is thrown into the same lake of fire meant for tormenting the devil, the beast and the false prophet forever and ever, is it safe to allow anyone to believe that judgment is merely annihilation?

It seems Ehrman’s soothing “nothing to be afraid of” assertion could really only come from a great distance from the souce material, and accompanied by many undisclosed assumptions and rationalizations. In order for it to already be declared a “best seller” on the eve of its release, there must be many people hoping for just such a message without going to the trouble of reading all that biblical text to discover the truth for themselves. If today’s readers were more familiar with the Scriptures, would such statements find so many eager hearers?

Ehrman capitalizes on the fact that we are in a day in which what Jesus believed and taught, and especially the full Old Testament picture of the God He came to declare, (John 1:18), is not well-known. If today’s generation were more familiar with the Old Testament’s depiction of an all-powerful God who frequently exercised His right to judge people, would the final judgment of mankind seem more in harmony with His nature?