Bart D. Ehrman - Heaven And Hell - A History Of The Afterlife (OneWorld, 2020) ****

One of the weird aspects of having received a catholic education and weekly mass, is the amount of fabulation you are being served by the myths of the religion that have actually no real presence in the Bible, be it the Old or New Testament. And then especially about what most people would consider the core beliefs of the religion: there is such a thing like heaven and hell where life after death awaits us, the former for the good people, the latter for the bad. There is even no mention of the "devil" or "satan" in the Bible either. 

Several years ago I read Alan F. Segal's "Life After Death", a very erudite book that gives a history of the concept of heaven and hell, of resurrection and the way they were build up over the centuries after christianity started to get traction. The Church had endless discussions about the form and shape of our eternal soul, material or immaterial, with senses or without senses, recognisable or not. One question was not addressed by Segal, namely at what precise moment the dead would go to heaven, immediately after their death, or at the end of times, when the Final Judgment happens. 

Theologian Bart Ehrman answers this question luckily in his new book "Heaven And Hell". Like Segal, he gives a sweeping and well-documented overview of what the Bible actually says about the afterlife, and how the notions we know today have come into existence. He starts very early on, with the Gilgamesh epos, the ancient Greeks, the Hebrew Bible, the gospels, including all the apocryphical gospels that were eventually not included in the canon, as well as later versions that show the various thoughts about what life after death could mean, including by Church fathers such as Augustinus and Tertullianus. 

Thanks to the digital availability of the ancient books on internet, I once made my own calculations based on semantic analysis of the Old & New Testament. Words like "hell" or "purgatory" are never used in the bible, and the concept of "eternal life" gets zero mentions in the Old Testament and 33 in the New, of which 16 in the gospel of John, but he primarily referred to the end times, when the kingdom of god came to earth, and not the other way round that we would go to heaven.  It must be clear that if these are really core beliefs of original christianity, they would appear much more often than is the case now. Ehrman manages to explain all this with the source material at hand. 

This is obligatory reading for anybody interested in religion, both believers and non-believers.