Bart D. Ehrman - Armageddon - What the Bible Really Says About the End (Simon & Schuster, 2024) ****

Few things are more intriguing than religious beliefs. Texts written in ancient cultures have received over the years a status of divine truth, regardless of their factual accuracy, their physical possibilities, their internal contradictions and their lack of morals. Bart Ehrman studied religion when still a strong evangelical believer. His knowledge of the ancient languages and ancient history helped him understand the reality behind the texts. I can recommend many of his thirty books, half of which I have read. In the New Testament, the latest book, called "Revelation", written by a certain John of Patmos, describes Armageddon, the End Time, when Jesus returns and the Good will be separated from the Evil. This Book stands in stark contrast to the other books in the New Testament, in that it shows a return of the god of the Old Testament: it's no longer a loving and caring god, but a god full of wrath, vindictive, violent, powerful. A god who demands full submission and slavelike obedience. 

The imagery is strong violent, hallucinatory, excessive, with symbols and signs that are sometimes hard to interpret for modern day readers, but even in the earliest centuries scholars expressed their lack of understanding and there was a lot of discussion whether or not to include it in the New Testament. Eventually it was, but people like Martin Luther put them in the annex to his translation of the book. 

The most amazing thing is that this text is still a very lively prospect among evangelical christians, especially in the United States, and a strong part of Donald Trump's followers. They believe that Jesus will only come back to earth for the end times, when the jews reconquer the Mount of the Rock, and restore the original Temple that was destroyed in 40 CE. That explains the strong support for Israel and the sometimes inexplicable disregard for the human suffering of the Palestines. 

That people actually believe this, and actually build their life around this possibility is astonishing: 

"We are talking about a wide-ranging cultural phenomenon. One fairly recent poll indicates that 79 percent of Christians in America believe Jesus will be returning to earth at some point. Another poll taken in 2010 shows that 47 percent of the Christians in the country believe Jesus will return by 2050 (27 percent definitely and 20 percent probably)." (p. 15)

Many Christian sects have even determined with precision when exactly this would happen. Ehrman gives a great overview of all the wrong calculations by recent Christian sects, but being demonstrably wrong did not deter them from believing. The downside is that because a precise date for the end time was presented, the cult's followers often sold their farms, or did not harvest, or even gave all their belongings away, in the hope of buying their ticket to heaven. 

"Instead of admitting they were wrong, however, the group buoys itself by explaining to one another what really happened, jus­tifying themselves in face of the disconfirmation by pointing out a slight error in their calculations or claiming the event was inten­tionally delayed and then resetting the date. But most interesting, the group further resolves the dissonance by becoming more evan­gelistic, going out to win more converts to their views. Why would a mistake make someone missionary? The theory behind cognitive dissonance is that if more people acknowledge you are right, it eases the psychological trauma of knowing that you are probably wrong. So you set out to win over other devotees. Thus, the Millerites and their resetting of dates. Each time the expectation is disconfirmed, the group gets larger and more fervent, until the Final Disappointment takes effect. But even then, the idea does not necessarily go away, nor do the groups themselves. Various American religious groups emerged from the Millerites' Great Disappointment-"at least 33," accord­ing to sociologists of religion Rodney Stark and William Sims Bain­bridge. Hope springs eternal, and these groups thrive among us today, holding strong eschatological views about the coming end­normally, now, without setting dates. The two break-off groups most familiar to modern readers are the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists" (82-83)

Another major distinction between this Book and the Gospels, is the future vision of life after the final judgment. The followers of the Lamb or the Lord, will live in absolute power and absolute opulence: all infidels will be violently tortured and destroyed and the followers will live in a city of gold with all the riches and wealth one can imagine. Whereas the Gospels advocate for humility, service, caring, love, even for people of other groups, the Revelation is a brutal tale of reconquering power from Rome, and doing with other peoples exactly what was being done to them in the first place. After the End Times, the oppressed will be the oppressors, the poor will be massively wealthy. Instead of inspiring with new insights, spirituality and brotherhood, the Book of Revelation continues the ancient power narrative, with only a shift in power. 

"We have already seen that the book is massively violent. (...) I want to stress that the violence of the book is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The ultimate goal is revenge. But more than that, it is limitless possessions and power. In the end, the right people will get what the wrong people have now. As New Testament scholar Christopher Frilingos has so succinctly expressed, the book is all about who will dominate the world: ''A frankly imperialist nar­rative, Revelation predicts the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of a Christian one." Revelation does not adopt a new Christian attitude toward wealth and domination. It instead affirms the attitude promoted by Roman culture, the same view held by most people who choose not to follow the teachings of Jesus: wealth and domination can be ultimate goods." (172) 

This text that at first reading appears to have been written by a madman, and that for sure no publisher would even think of publishing today if anyone came with this manuscript, is still today a text that determines the thinking of millions of gullible people, even to the extent that it plays a role in the power politics of the Middle-East. 

 

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. 

Bart Ehrman - The Triumph Of Christianity (Oneworld, 2018) ***

One of the most mysterious things to me is why people believe in the existense of a supernatural being, call it god, who has created and who governs all things. As such, I have been an avid reader of all the books by Bart Ehrman, a former believer and theologian, who has written some of the most insightful books on early christianity.

In "The Triumph Of Christianity", he takes a few centuries further in history, covering the expansion of the early views of a jewish eschatological sect. He explains how the sect grew under the guidance of (saint) Paul, the man who was responsible for expanding the sect among non-jews until the time of Theodiosius in the fourth century, when christianity became the state religion.

The history of christianity is a bloody one, full of intolerance against the christians in the early days, with torture and martyrdom being inherent in the way people looked at other groups. The Romans were usually tolerant towards other religions of conquered nations, as long as they showed respect for their own Roman gods, which was of course inacceptable to the christians. Once christianity became the state religion in the 4th century, they became as intolerant against other religions as what they had experienced themselves. Theodosius at first issued legislative measures that proscribed pagan sacrifices, worship in temples and such other religious rituals, then later also in the privacy of the home.

Even if christianity was still the religion of the minority of the population in the regions ruled by the Romans, the number of christians quickly increased significantly across the entire region, not because  people believed it, but because they had no choice.

Even if not his best book, Ehrman writes well, with the many historical facts not disrupting the narrative. He gives a good insight in the religious and political thinking in those times, also demonstrating that things could have been completely different today if some individuals had not made the choices they made then.