ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations in the notes and parenthetically in the text for the books of the Bible; Old and New Testament Apocrypha; Old and New Testament Pseudepigrapha; Dead Sea Scrolls and other texts from the Judean Desert; versions of the Taludic tractates; Targumic texts and other Rabbinic works; and Ancient and Classical Christian writings are those given in the SBL Handbook of Style (Ed. Alexander, Kutsko, Ernest, and Decker-Lucke, Hendrickson, 1999). Abbreviations for secondary sources are listed below.

AB	Anchor Bible
AGJU	Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judenthums und des Urchristentums
ANET	Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Ed. J. B. Pritchard. 3d ed. Princeton, 1969.
ANRW	Aufstieg und Niedergang der rómischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung. 1972-.
BJS	Brown Judaic Studies
CAH	Cambridge Ancient History
CANE	Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. Ed. J. Sasson. 4 vols. New York, 1995.
CBQ	Catholic Biblical Quarterly
DJD	Discoveries in the Judaean Desert
EncJud	Encyclopedia Judaic. 16 vols. Jerusalem, 1972.
EPRO	Etudes preliminaries aux religions orientales dans l’empire romain
ER	The Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. M. Eliade. 16 vols. New York.
HR	History of Religions
HTR	Harvard Theological Review
HUCA	Hebrew Union College Annual
IDE	The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Ed. G. A. Buttrick. 4 vols. Nashville, 1962.
JAOS	Journal of American Oriental Studies
JBL	Journal of Biblical Literature
JE	The Jewish Encyclopedia. Ed. I. Singer. 12 vols. New York,1925.
JJS	Journal of Jewish Studies
JQR	Jewish Quarterly Review
JSJ	Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods
JSNT	Journal for the Study of the New Testament
JSOT	Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSPSup	Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Supplement Series
JSS	Journal of Semitic Studies
JTS	Journal of Theological Studies
KTU	Die keilalphabetischen Texten aus Ugarit. Ed. M. Dietrich, O. Loretz, and J. Sanmartin. AOAT 24:1. Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1976.
NHL	Nag Hammadi Library in English. Ed. J. M. Robinson. 4th rev. ed. Leiden, 1996.
NovT	Novum Testamentum
NRSV	New Revised Standard Version
NTS	New Testament Studies
PGM	Papyri graecae magicae: Die griechischen Zauberpapyri. Ed. K. Priesendanz. Berlin, 1928.
RB	Revue Biblique
RHR	Revue de l’histoire des religions
RSV	Revised Standard Version SBL Society of Biblical Literature
SBLSCS	Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint Cognate Studies
SRSup	Studies in Religion, Supplement
TDNT	Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Ed. G. Kittel and G. Friedrich. Trans. G. W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids, 1964-1976.
TWNT	Theologische Wórterbuch zum Neuen Testament. Ed. G. Kittel and G. Friedrich. Stuttgart, 1932-1979.
VC	Vigliae christianae
VTSup	Supplement to Vetus Testamentum
WUNT	Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament

Introduction

The Vndiscover’d Country

THE DREAD of something after death,

The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will …

(Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, lines 78-80)

Shakespeare, Suicide, and Martyrdom

FEW OF US contemplate revenge or suicide as seriously as Hamlet did. Yet, Hamlet’s words go far beyond his own predicament. They speak eloquently to us about the human situation, which seems as adamantine now as it was in 1602 when the play appeared. For good reason, it has become the most famous speech in the English language. To mention that the soliloquy begins with the words: “To be or not to be” is to identify it worldwide.

Hamlet ponders life at its hardest moments. But for the dread of death and fear of what may come afterwards, he would end his life, avoiding the troubles he has inherited. His decision against suicide, and for revenge, is made reluctantly, in full knowledge of the terrors of death that his ghostly father has intimated for him. He now has a supernatural reason to believe the spirit’s message, both about posthumous punishment and about his father’s murderer.

Hamlet’s solitary revenge has been sharpened to a fine point by the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, 2001, a mass murder evidently also motivated out of revenge and driven by supernatural justifications. Nineteen extremist Muslims, indoctrinated with a caricature of Muslim martyrdom, perpetrated one of the most callous slaughters of innocent civilians in human history, not in spite of divine retribution but convinced that their deed would ensure their resurrection and bring them additional eternal rewards before the Day Of Judgment. The horrible waste of more than 2,800 innocent lives was directly driven by notions of sexual felicity after death: A group of virgin, dark-eyed beauties awaited each of the suicidal murderers. “You cannot kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue.”¹ Surely such desperate men, intelligent, sophisticated, and coordinated enough to have planned a global outrage, would not be persuaded by such a naive and adolescent vision of heaven? Every significant public commentator has stressed that there were more important political, economic, social, and personal motivations for the attack. But, in the end, the visions of an afterlife quite different from our own have awakened us to the original meaning for our phrase “holy terror.”

In the minds of Israeli settlers, those religiously motivated few among the Israelis who want to live in the land designated for a projected Palestinian state, pious Jews who have died at the hands of Arabs are also martyrs whose special reward will commence in heaven. To their loved ones, these Jewish martyrs look down on their surviving families from the heavenly Talmudic academy (the Yeshiva shel Ma’ala), encouraging the pioneers of a new nation to continue to settle and live in the occupied territories. While these Jewish views of the afterlife are considerably less sensual than the Muslim ones, the faith of the religious settlers is no less intense. Like the Islamic extremists in this respect, the settlers have innovated on traditional views of the afterlife to give meaning to their own political purposes.²

This book will attempt to put these modern tragedies into historical context. I had already researched the sociology of the afterlife for a decade when the World Trade Center disaster focused our national attention on jihad. The tragedy convinced me that this study of the relationship between heaven and social agendas had an importance beyond the scholarly community. This book has become a study of Western Religions.

Shakespeare called death and the afterlife “the undiscover’d country” from which no one returns, a sensible metaphor to Shakespeare’s own “Age of Discovery,” as the New World, still largely unexplored, was not yet completely mapped. Taking my cue from Hamlet, this study will attempt to see the relationship between “being” and “not being,” between “sleeping” and “dreaming perchance,” between the undiscovered land of the afterlife and those who imagine what lies within it.

This book is not a study of death, how to cope with it, what the process of dying is, nor how we may best accomplish the work of grieving. A great many books have recently focused on these ultimate moments of life, and, where relevant, I will rely on their conclusions with a reference. What I propose to do is sign on for “the long voyage,” just as a ship’s crew did in Shakespeare’s “Age of Discovery,” to penetrate the darkness of death and map the new day of the afterlife as it is depicted in western culture. I want to show the connection between visions of the afterlife and the early scriptural communities who produced them. I want to study the early, traditional maps of the afterlife that we find in our foundational Western religious texts and the territory they inscribe in the religious life of the vibrant societies that produced them. I want to not only ask what was believed, but to ask why people wanted an afterlife of a particular kind and how those beliefs changed over time. It will be a long and arduous trip, mostly through strange, half familiar, and fascinating landscapes. We will return with treasure, knowledge, and understanding of beliefs quite different from our own, yet reassurance that religious visions are not inexplicably beyond our abilities to mediate or change. This book is the logbook of that voyage.

We can easily answer the question of why Shakespeare used an explorer’s metaphor to describe the afterlife: The discovery of the Americas was the great news of his day. But, why did the Egyptians insist on an afterlife in heaven while the body was embalmed in a pyramid on earth? Why did the Babylonians view the dead as living underground in a prison? Why did the Hebrews refuse to talk about the afterlife in First Temple times (1000-586 BCE) and then begin to do so in Second Temple times (539 BCE-70 CE)? Why did the Persians envision the afterlife as bodily resurrection while many Greeks narrated the flight of a soul back to heaven? How can a single culture contain different and conflicting views of the afterlife at the same time? Since all these cultures told stories of people who went to heaven, what did people find when they went there while yet alive, and why was it important to make the journey? These questions are much more complicated and more interesting than understanding the use of a casual metaphor, even by an author as gifted as Shakespeare. However, they can be investigated in the same way, through the study of texts and contexts as well as the religions and societies that produced them.

Intimations of Immortality

WE SURELY KNOW instinctively that every religious tradition uses the afterlife to speak of the ultimate reward of the good, just as we instinctively know that stories of “heaven” will describe the most wonderful perfections imaginable in any one time and place, even as stories of “hell” will describe the most terrible and fearful punishments imaginable. A book that catalogues the history of surfeit in each culture would be an interesting cultural history in itself, but it would avoid the hard questions.

Jerry L. Walls begins his serious and quite sophisticated inquiry into heaven in Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy³ with a crucial incident in the life of St. Augustine, as narrated in his Confessions. Augustine is with his famous mother, Monica, who is but a few days from her death. She has just convinced Augustine to be baptized as a Christian. At this tender and intimate moment, the two have a conversation that leads to the conclusion that no bodily pleasure can compare with the happiness of the martyred saints in heaven. For a moment, they feel that heaven is so close to them in life that they can almost touch it. Walls uses this scene as the starting point for his philosophical inquiry into the validity of notions of heaven. I would ask, instead, how the martyrs came to be envisioned as living eternally in heaven, why this discourse was so closely associated with the nearing death of Monica, and how closely it cohered with Christian doctrines of proselytization and mission. For Walls, it is the beginning of a description of what awaits us; for me, it is an example of how we as humans symbolize what of us is stronger than death in ways that are congruent with our lives in culture and society. The hardest questions are part of a historian’s task. This book will attempt to outline a social history. We will not ask theological questions so much as the basic question of a historian: “cui bono”? To whose benefit is this belief in the afterlife?

American Afterlife: Resurrection Versus Immortality of the Soul

WE WILL HAVE to take a very hard look at some cherished aspects of Judaism and Christianity. The church father Tertullian equated Christianity with a belief in the resurrection: “By believing in resurrection, we are what we claim to be.”⁴ By “resurrection,” he opined, “orthodox” Christians should believe in literal, fleshly resurrection, with its attendant end-of-time and judgment of sinners. Even though Tertullian was a churchman, his opinion was not unchallenged. Many Christians of his day believed with the Platonists that the soul was immortal but the body perished forever. It will become clear to us later that Tertullian’s view of this phenomenon is itself governed by his personal dispositions and the historical context in which he lived. For now, it should be important for us to know that in the Christianity that Tertullian prescribed, bodily resurrection was something he devoutly wished for, nay prayed for, preached, and held other Christians heretical because they did not believe it literally.

Today, most American Christians of all denominations continue to assent to a belief in resurrection. But closer scrutiny shows that many do not believe that the physical body will be resurrected, as Tertullian preached, but that the soul will dwell in heaven after death. What they call “resurrection of the body” actually refers technically to “immortality of the soul.” The notion of resurrection is only strongly characteristic of a sizeable minority of Americans. A traditional, strong, and literal view in a resurrection of the body is, in fact, a very strong indicator that the person is on the evangelical, fundamentalist, or Orthodox Jewish side of the line.⁵

Religious belief is a gradient. But that distinct line three-quarters of the way toward the right of the religious spectrum is the big story in American religion at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Americans on the left of that line-let us call them the liberal, mainline religions for lack of a better term-have more in common with each other than they do with their coreligionists across the line. Liberal Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, and the great Asian faiths actually have more in common with each other, in terms of attitudes towards politics and economic and moral questions, than they do with their own coreligionists in the fundamentalist camp. Fundamentalists of all religions in the United States also have more in common with each other in terms of moral, political, and economic views, than they do with their coreligionists in the liberal camp.⁶

Gallup Poll Findings

IN THEIR EXTREMELY interesting and provocative book, George Gallup Jr. and James Castelli note that there is a fundamental difference between the liberal and mainline churches in the United States on the one hand and the fundamentalist and evangelical churches on the other. Asking people whether they believe in immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body (when the terms have been clarified) is probably the simplest way to discover this basic rift in American life, even in our secular society.

We already know that religion is much more significant on average to Americans than it is to Europeans or even to Canadians, our closest neighbors. Since the time of De Tocqueville, Europeans have noted American’s special interest in religion.⁷ More recently, Gerhard Lenski showed that our religious choices are statistically as important for predicting our other attitudes as is anything else that can be measured or named in our lives.⁸ We know a great deal about what a person is likely to think politically, how she will spend money or vote, what kind of occupations she will seek, what kind of recipes he will bake, what kind of organizations she will join, what kind of child-rearing practices they will practice and advocate, and a myriad of other things, when we have some specificity about that person’s religious beliefs and community. The very notion of which pronouns are appropriate to each of these activities is governed as significantly by religious values as by anything else.

Asking about an afterlife still defines a crucial and very conflicted battlefield in American life, one that challenges our political as well as religious convictions. It separates liberal from conservative, Republican from Democrat, northerner from southerner, rich from poor, educated from uneducated, and pious from impious. But it is more fundamental than any of these. It cuts to the very quick of what we Americans think is important in life. Americans still answer “yes” to the question: “Do you believe in God?” far more often and more enthusiastically than most other western countries, upwards to a level of 94 percent in one poll,⁹ on a level equal to Ireland and India and far higher than Scandinavia, England, France, Spain, or Italy.

Competition in the Religious Marketplace

ONE INTERESTING result of that history is enshrined in the First Amendment, absolutely forbidding the establishment of any state religion, and arguably guaranteeing the separation of church and state. Not only does every other country previously named sponsor a religion as an instrument of the state, but by doing so, they also provide a protected market for one religion to live. Our society, on the contrary, encourages competition among religions within the marketplace of ideas, though fundamentalist Christianity continues to lobby the government for more support while criticizing Jews and Catholics for trying to subvert the government. Although we accuse ourselves of being unfair to religious organizations and superficial in our beliefs,¹⁰ we have also inadvertently created a competitive environment for healthy religious life. Competition in the marketplace of religious ideas has produced a very important set of religious organizations in our society. Like anything else that has been massmarketed, our religion comes to us in sound-bites and slogans, making it seem trivial and superficial by comparison to religious discussions in the past. But it is designed to be marketed.

Our religious vibrancy, then, is a double-edged sword. Whatever we think of religion, we must admit that religion is still an important part of our lives, in spite of the once-touted, enormous secularization of American society after the Vietnam War. By the seventies, the opinion polls indicated that we were growing more secular. By the early nineties these numbers had decisively turned around. We forgot that when the baby boomers all entered young adulthood together, their numbers would skew our statistics toward the secular, unless we also controlled for age. Adolescents and young adults are very much less likely to take doctrines of religion or fear of mortality seriously in American life. Questions of career and family predominate in the early adult years. But, as we age, we Americans apparently still return to these more perennial and more ultimate human questions.

The effect of age on interest in the afterlife is easy enough to see. I once had the experience of giving a series of classes on the Bible to a group made up of adolescents and retirees exclusively, a classic “bimodal distribution.” When it came time to study the Bible’s doctrines of the afterlife, I asked them if they believed in one. All the retirees in the audience answered affirmatively-no surprise given their age and that the course was being held in front of children in a Conservative synagogue. (What they would have said more privately is anyone’s guess.) But even in that context none of the twenty or so teenagers would answer “yes” to the question. Age is an important factor in the articulation and interest in beliefs in an afterlife. Older people characteristically show more recognition of mortality and, at the same time, lower anxiety about death. Church membership and high commitment also correlates with low death anxiety. Conventional religiosity-church membership with low commitment-has so far not shown any measurable effects on fear of death.¹¹

Religion Returns When the Afterlife Beckons

WHEN THE BABY BOOMERS began to return to religion and church membership in the eighties, their return dramatically corresponded to an upswing in the political action of conservative religious groups. As a result, no one today would question the importance of religion as an indicator of political and economic values in American life. The correlation is much higher in international affairs where Islam led the way into the political arena. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, we realized we had to factor religion into the our international political policies; after 9/11, we realized that we are no longer an island fortress. Being part of the globalization process means that we are deeply affected by extremist religious beliefs and movements brewing elsewhere in the world.

Because of all these reasons, our stated beliefs in the afterlife are increasing significantly, according to studies done by Andrew M. Greeley and Michael Hout.¹² A significantly greater fraction of American adults believe in life after death in the 1990s than in the 1970s. According to data from the General Social Survey (hereafter GSS) there has been a marked change in some groups’ beliefs in life after death. Although Protestants who say that they believe in life after death have remained stable at about 85 percent (very high to begin with, anyway), Catholics, Jews, and people of no religious affiliation have become more likely to report beliefs in the afterlife. For instance, the percentage of Catholics believing in an afterlife rose from 67 percent to 85 percent for those born between 1900 and 1970. When the variables were analyzed, one important factor to Greely and Hout was their contact with Irish clergy, who communicated their commitment to the Catholic population in general.

Among Jews the percentage was even more interesting but puzzling. Jews who report important and stable notions of life after death have always been significantly fewer statistically than Christians, presumably due to the lower emphasis on afterlife in most varieties of American Judaism. Nevertheless, Jewish belief in the afterlife rose from 17 percent amongst the cohort born in 1900-1910 to 74 percent amongst the 1970 cohort, a very significant jump. Perhaps Jews have understood that our culture asks us to answer “yes” to that question but not to spend much time thinking about it. In any event, Jews are still twice as likely as Christians to say that they don’t know if there is life after death.

The reasons for this change are not as easy to discern. Contact with Protestants was not a measurable factor (among those Jews who did not later convert). Immigrant status seems to be an important factor in rejecting notions of the afterlife for both Catholics and Jews. Perhaps the experience of immigration is itself so disruptive that it seriously affects notions of afterlife felicity for the immigrant generation. Among Jews this may be because those most likely to leave Europe at the turn of the century were the ones least impressed with Rabbinic exhortations to stay within the European religious community and not go the United States, which they called “the treyfer (non-kosher) land.” Those who immigrated to the United States, and later Canada, called it “der goldener Land,” the Golden Land, showing that the Jews who came to the United States came more to better their economic opportunities than to gain religious freedom. Reform Jews are only about 10 percent less likely to report beliefs in life after death than Orthodox Jews. What differs is the kind of afterlife they envision. Mainline Jews are close to Protestants in their adoption of a spiritual afterlife; Orthodox Jews report a belief in bodily resurrection. In the second and third generation of immigrants, perhaps acculturation itself accounts for the higher correlation with Protestant views of heaven.

Greeley and Hout did not systematically test the hypothesis that American First Amendment rights promote competition in religion and thus are more successful at raising people’s religious consciousness, but their findings are in consonance with this “supply-side” theory of American religious life. They strongly endorse a “supply-side” notion of American religious life, and it does make a certain amount of sense.

Nearly all Christians think that union with God, peace and tranquility, and reunion with relatives are likely to await them as well as many of the other descriptions of the afterlife previously mentioned. Yet, few are explicitly part of the official Christian doctrine of resurrection. Many of these beliefs correlate highly with immortality of the soul, which has been synthesized with resurrection in Christianity since the fourth century but is not a significant New Testament doctrine. Americans do seem to agree more or less about these criteria, but some differences do exist: Jews are slightly more likely than Christians to imagine a nonpersonal existence; one half of Jews, but only one fifth of Christians, see a “vague” existence as likely. This finding seems intriguingly tied to Jewish ethnicity. It would be interesting to compare other groups segregated by ethnicity and questioned in an “ethnically aware” environment.

The Demise of the Devil¹³

ANOTHER INTERESTING phenomenon in American life is the gradual disappearance of any notion of hell in the liberal and mainline churches.¹⁴ Many have seen this “demise of the devil” as a sign that we are losing our moral bearings-our sense of evil. On the other hand, one might just as easily argue that the demise of the devil is an indication that the United States is coming to terms with itself as a culturally-plural country, and as a result many of us have lost our desire to carry religious vengeance out on our fellow-countrymen in the next world, ironically just at the moment when so many fundamentalist extremists around the world are preaching our damnation.¹⁵

Jonathan Edwards, one of the founders of the Great Awakening and President of Princeton University, several times described the horrors of hell for Americans in his justly famous sermons. The one quoted below is from “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”:

That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone, is extended abroad under you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God; there is Hell’s wide gaping mouth open; and you have nothing to stand upon, nor anything to take hold of; there is nothing between you and Hell but air; ’tis only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up.¹⁶

Eighteenth-century Americans were impressed with these images and motivated to strive even more fervently towards the good and eschew evil, though Edwards’ own theology was based on the premise that God’s will for each of us individually was unknowable. His Great Awakening was enormously successful. This vision of hell affected American’s social behavior just as much as the desire for a just society stimulated Edwards to this vision. Visions of heaven and hell serve evangelization.

Indeed, there is some evidence that the spike of interest in “gothic” or “supernatural” worldviews (for example, “vampires and vampire slayers,” the “occult,” and “space aliens”) among teenagers is not so much lack of religious guidance as rebellion against previously strict fundamentalist or evangelical upbringing. These phenomena are common enough among teenagers and frequent subjects of teen-oriented entertainment. But they appear especially often among teens rejecting their own family’s fundamentalism and evangelicalism.¹⁷ There are even attempts by evangelical churches to capitalize on this teenage interest for evangelization and confirmation of teen faith with such evangelical tools as a “Hell-house,” a Halloween walk-through depiction of the evils of non-evangelical moral codes, presenting evangelical religion as the solution to demonically controlled lives.¹⁸

Whatever the cause, there is a palpable change in American notions of the afterlife: very few of us think we are going to hell or even that we are in danger of going to hell. In fact, very few of us outside of the right wing conservatives take hell’s existence seriously at all. We must never forget that the lines of causation between our current lives and our hopes for the future are bidirectional. Our current lives affect our notions of the afterlife; our notions of the afterlife affect our behavior in this one. In most of our permissive society, a vision of hell would probably be greeted with disbelief by most Americans and even by derisive laughter by some. Our desire to do away with hell is natural enough, but it may not be because we want to sin with impunity. It may just as easily be due to our loss of a sure sense that our individual religions are the only right ones. Because we feel our society’s notions of equality are divinely endowed, we may be losing the easy surety that any American whose religion differs from us is automatically damned. That could be indicative that an incipiently multicultural society is forming in the United States as old parochialisms fade.

What Americans Actually Think about Heaven

FOR THE MAJORITY of Americans, heaven has become a virtual democratic entitlement. Surely we tend to project on our view of a happy afterlife those things that we think are best, most lasting, virtuous, and meaningful in this life while eliminating those things we think are the most difficult, frustrating, evil, and inessential. The data are mostly from Christians, but the description of heaven is in some ways a projective test for all Americans, with adjustment for the specifically Christian doctrines. Here is a basic list of talking points, taken from Gallup and Castelli:

·         The afterlife will be a better life and a good life.

·         There will be no more problems or troubles. “No trials and tribulations … worries and cares will vanish … no worries, no cares, no sorrows. I think to be worried all the time would really be awful.”

·         There will be no more sickness or pain.

·         The afterlife will be a spiritual, not a physical realm. “Totally spiritual … lack of physical limitations … there’s not going to be a three dimensional experience.”

·         It will be peaceful. “I think we’ we’ll be more peaceful because you really live your hell on earth.”

·         The afterlife will be happy and joyful, no sorrow.

·         Those who make it to heaven will be happy.

·         They will be in the presence of God or Jesus Christ.

·         There will be love between people.

·         God’s love will be the center of life after death.

·         Crippled people will be whole.

·         People in heaven will grow spiritually.

·         They will see friends, relatives, or spouses.

·         They will live forever.

·         There will be humor….

·         People in heaven will grow intellectually.

·         They will have responsibilities.

·         They will minister to the spiritual needs of others.

·         Those in heaven will be recognizable as the same people that they were on earth.

·         There will be angels in heaven.¹⁹

It is significant that few of the descriptions of heaven contain depictions of explicitly Christian doctrines. We see in these descriptions a significant ranking of values in American life this side of eternity. The first series of points deal with personal and familial happiness. The second express the importance of work, accomplishment, and looking after others, some of which would be very unusual priorities in past European visions of heaven and incomprehensible in ancient ones. Significantly among Americans, humor is often cited as an important component of heavenly life, arguably because we use humor to dispel tension over ethnic and regional differences. Indeed, our American notions of a competitive economy-positive growth, positive development, continuous education-are deeply enshrined in our contemporary notions of heaven.

These points are a litmus test of American goals and values, “transcendent” and ultimate values as seen from our perspective in the early twenty-first century, even as it is a filter to leave out those things that most keep us from achieving them.²⁰ If we also had a description of hell then we could see more clearly all the things which Americans feel are contrary to these values, and how given a heavenly economy, they should be punished. It is just as significant that we no longer excel in descriptions of hell or damnation. If we look at earlier conceptions of heaven and hell, we may be able to perceive similar correlations with earlier social structures and policy. Dealing with other cultures’ concepts of the afterlife historically will yield the same important information, but will involve historical attention to details that are not nearly so well known or easy to discover.

We have seen that Americans-liberal or conservative, mainline church, sectarian or even unchurched-have significant beliefs about an afterlife. Indeed, more Americans believe in an afterlife than believe in God. These beliefs range from literal resurrection of the body to immortality of the soul, to deathless existence with flying saucers in the stars, to nothing specific beyond the confidence that we will have something to enjoy. Immortality of the soul, as opposed to the resurrection of the body, is inherent in most of our descriptions. Individuals within the mainline churches believe in an afterlife but they tend to feel comfortable with a range of individual opinions. They normally feel that their more conservative confrères have mistaken the literal Biblical formulations for the underlying truths behind it. Conservative churches believe in immortality of the soul in addition to belief in the literal resurrection of the body. They report that they believe it with certainty and that their liberal coreligionists are dangerously incorrect.

So in spite of our sophistication, pragmatism, and economic dominance of the world, American culture is full of significant depictions of an afterlife everywhere. We seem to live with these depictions and the attendant contradictions that come with them without difficulty, as have cultures everywhere in the past. Although some of us forcefully maintain that there is no afterlife, most of us take at least an agnostic and, more likely, a positive view towards our survival of death.

Is fear the source of contemplation of the end? Even the elderly see that the saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” is not true. Approaching death sometimes makes some people more convinced of the falsity of religious teaching about the afterlife. What seems to be universally true is that atheists are likely to keep their beliefs quiet at religious funerals. Their comments might appear impolite and cruel to the mourners. Even the doubtful or disbelieving bereaved can find comfort in the rites of the occasion. Most people find the familiar language and ritual of funerals to be themselves consoling, if not immediately, then after their grief has receded. In general, we have a good social understanding of where we should use the language of departed souls, of resurrection and millennial expectations, of ghosts and goblins, or of nothing at all. Society teaches us to keep these notions from contradicting each other.

Our mass media culture has only made these differing beliefs more available to us and has given us pictorial representations of them that would have been impossible only a few years ago. In my seminar on afterlife, we annually list all the recent films which have been significantly concerned with afterlife or depicted it in some graphic way. We usually fill the board with over a hundred movie titles in minutes. Children’s cartoons are full of violence as well as depictions of ghosts and spirits, together with visual images of cartoon characters surviving their comic and very frequent deaths. Books, films, and TV talk shows are replete with depictions of Near Death Experiences (hereafter NDEs) and endlessly discuss whether or not they are demonstrations of the truths of the afterlife, as they appear to be. Sincere and seemingly sane persons of impeccable credibility relate them to us with conviction. Popular TV programs like The X-Files or Touched by an Angel and popular films like Ghost or The Sixth Sense so successfully affected teenage as well as adult markets that these productions have spawned many imitators and have had a significant effect on American teen identity concepts, whether the teens reported that they were “Conservative,” “mystical,” “experimenters,” “resisters,” “marginal,” or “irreligious.”²¹

Near Death Experiences

NO TOPIC HAS occupied American discussions of the afterlife as much as Near Death Experiences (NDEs), which have a number of common themes beyond the fearful emergencies that cause them-bright light, a feeling of warmth, a long tunnel, possibly a meeting with deceased family members, a reluctant return to painful existence. Those who have experienced them usually find their faith strengthened or confirmed, and have left the American public significantly impressed.²² The gift of their faith confirmed is also a revelation to us all because the survivors seem to demonstrate life after death in a scientific setting. Even non-Christians have taken a significant interest in them.²³

But can these NDEs really tell us scientifically what we want to know? Can there be any true scientific confirmation of a life after death if no one can actually visit the abode of the dead and come back with a verifiable traveler’s report? This book will take the position that the important issues about God and the afterlife are beyond confirmation or disconfirmation in the scientific sense. The questions posed here are more like: “What makes an action just or a sunset beautiful?” than they are like the question: “Is there sodium in table salt?” The presence of an afterlife, like the existence of God, is not amenable to scientific analysis. Nevertheless, we are still required by science and by use of our reason to eliminate unlikelihoods or impossibilities from our faith discourse. Because we cannot prove the existence of God scientifically, we are not thereby empowered to believe that the earth is flat or that the moon is made out of green cheese. Nor are we free to ignore the question because a great many of the most important questions in life are impossible to confirm or refute.

Some of us have achieved certainty about these issues. Those who have evangelical faith and many who have experienced an NDE have consequently received an additional gift of confidence in the face of universal and ultimate fears. But, given the enormous amount of discussion and literature that exists on these experiences, one unexpected finding that George Gallup has disclosed in his book, Adventures in Immortality, is how rare they actually are, compared to the population at large and how rare is the typical experience of “confirmation” among the relatively rare NDE itself.²⁴ Even the argument that the occasional NDE in children proves that it is a real experience and not just a mirror of our social beliefs in a natural experience or hallucination of some sort cannot be maintained.²⁵ Once one looks at a selection of cartoon depictions of the afterlife and their presence in movies and books of all types, there can be no doubt about how the young can be socialized to expect an NDE so easily.

Although we cannot take just any report as proof of the afterlife, we should take these experiences seriously. Throughout this book, the authenticity of confirming religious experiences will be championed, especially in the chapters concerning religious experience in ancient Israel. Belief in life after death is virtually universal in human experience. Very often, these notions come together with symbols of rebirth or regeneration.²⁶ Though a relatively small percentage of Americans experience NDEs, a mere fraction of one percent, this yields a rather large number in absolute terms-more than a million Americans. Furthermore, the notion that we can visit the dead or cause them to visit us, that we can go to heaven and see what is there, the notion that this visit will confirm our cherished earthly beliefs, is an extremely important and constant theme in world literature. In one sense all these experiences seem to promise verification but so far they have not met scientific criteria. Ultimately, we need to study why people undertake these trips and how their means-whether they be NDEs travel or altered states of consciousness-affect the meaning discovered from the trip itself. Which afterlife do they validate? There are many different views of the afterlife available to us as Americans and citizens of the world.

What History Can Tell Us

A BELIEF IN an afterlife is older than the human race if Neanderthal burials are to be trusted. We see many pieces of evidence of Neanderthal religion in sites of Mousterian culture. In particular, the Mousterians left flowers, grain, and other grave goods in their interments, suggesting that they believed the departed could use the implements they provided for them.²⁷ Assuming for a moment that we are justified in concluding that the Neanderthals were not our species exactly but a closely associated one (an assumption that is still hotly debated), the notion of an afterlife would precede humanity. Belief in spirits, both benevolent (as in departed ancestors, for example) and malicious (as in ghosts) are virtually omnipresent in human culture, though they sometimes share the stage with more sophisticated notions of a beatific afterlife.

“Sharing the stage” is an appropriate phrase for how we reconcile our impressions of an afterlife. We have only to look at Shakespeare’s Hamlet to realize how easily we accept the combination of traditional Christianity with belief in spirits and ghosts. The New Testament itself contains the belief in spirits and demons. The belief in spirits and ghosts functions in a number of ways in a society-including enforcing moral standards, upholding various institutions, and guaranteeing appropriate burial of corpses.

The Bible, viewed historically, shows us how varied our views are, even within Western traditions. These variations are made even more evident by studying the Quran as scripture. Even if we look at only one tradition-either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam-we find that the view of the afterlife is fascinatingly varied. For example, we will see that the Bible itself at first zealously ignores the afterlife. When the Bible does discuss the afterlife, it does so to resolve very specific questions within its own culture. In fact, all the notions of life after death in the Hebrew Bible as well as those formed afterward seem to be borrowed to some degree or another. None of these notions were borrowed early nor without prejudice.

Previous, shorter studies of the subject have shown the dichotomy between resurrection of the body and immortality of the soul. Scholarship clearly understands immortality of the soul to be a Platonic Greek notion. Opinion about where the notion of resurrection of the body comes from is mixed. Many scholars, as we shall see, think it comes from Persia. Others think that it is a native Israelite belief, derived from specific experiences of tragedy. Many have thought that the two beliefs-resurrection of the body and immortality of the soul-are logically mutually exclusive. More recently scholars have shown they combine easily and quiet thoroughly rendering the old distinctions obsolete. This study, which examines the data a bit more carefully, will show that there is partial evidence for each of these opinions and evidence of the converse as well. The important factor for understanding the belief in the hereafter is not so much the origin of the notions but how the notions are used within a specific society at a specific time-what the metaphors are being used to express about our human predicament. Biblical notions of the afterlife in Biblical times were just as changeable, conflicting, and revealing as our own in this time. They existed in an exceptionally rich and very complex mythical polemic and equilibrium with their neighboring cultures.

First of all, study of notions of afterlife in the Bible will demonstrate the goals and interests of the culture that produced them, just as it shows us something about the origin of North American values. Secondly, this study will give us a very important clue as to the value of religion in our lives. The function, structure, role, and solace of religion are problems almost as puzzling as death itself, but unlike what awaits us after death, they are phenomena that can be verified with a variety of ordinary data. However we must be careful not to equate religion with the notion of life after death. It is logical for us in the West to assume that a belief in life after death, if not the explicit Christian one, is close to the essence of religion because a specific notion of the afterlife is so central to Christianity’s master narrative. We must therefore examine whether that perception holds across all the world’s religions.

Afterlife: The Essence of Religion?

PRIMARY INTEREST in the afterlife simply does not hold true across all human culture. Many religions-such as contemporary Judaism and Confucianism-give far less attention to notions of the afterlife than does Christianity. In what must surely be a parody of Jewish views, David Sloan Wilson reported in the New York Times: “A scholar at a religious conference told me that what little Judaism has to say about the afterlife is only there because Christians asked them.”²⁸ The point David Sloan Wilson was making is that an afterlife belief is not necessarily the essence of religion. That seems correct.

But his statement about Judaism is entirely wrong. We shall discover that Judaism did indeed have quite vibrant views of the hereafter and those views flow quite naturally into Christianity where they are featured much more strongly. At a certain point, Jews began to desensitize themselves to discussions of the afterlife. The fact that mainline denominations of Judaism today de-emphasize notions of the afterlife has as much to do with their strategy for modern life-emphasizing that Judaism is a “religion of reason.” Some mainline American Protestant denominations do not give much attention to afterlife either, emphasizing social action and spiritual experience instead.

Every religion has an answer to the inquiry of an afterlife, even though it may borrow that answer from another source and adherents to that particular religion may want to criticize or correct it from within. Although not all religions put afterlife in the center of their beliefs, as does Christianity (at least in Tertullian’s estimation), the afterlife is one of the fundamental building blocks of religion. If we look at how the West constructed its notion of life after death, we shall gain some notion of the historical stages that conceptions of heaven went through, as well as the reasons for those conceptions and how they have changed. In looking at a particular religion’s afterlife belief, we will be looking at a society’s notion of transcendence, its ideas about what is most important in human life.

Scholars of religion have become skeptical of any of the suggested “essences” of religion-even such an obvious one as a doctrine of the continuity of life beyond the grave. It would be unwise to adopt as the essence of religion the very thing that most characterizes Christianity-the very religion that has most ruled the consciousness of the West for two millennia. Yet, if the net is thrown wide enough, if any kind of belief in the survival of personality is included in our search, all human societies contain at least the rudiments of a belief in life after death.

The Pygmies of Africa were once held up as a religionless culture because they have few dogmas, and they think that religion is a kind of intellectual slavery to their putative political masters. But even they hold certain beliefs about pygmy survival in a life after death that is much at one with the forest. Or take another example: Although some Chinese religions may easily be categorized philosophies (for example, contemporary Neo-Confucianists on the island of Taiwan), the Chinese continue to perform rituals, build temples, and venerate ancestors, assuming they survive to become close watchers and protectors of life in the family. Although notions of the afterlife are present in Chinese religion, they are not always central to its doctrines. Sometimes it is evidenced primarily in ritual.

We must also consider the history of European misperceptions about the religions of the world. Europeans misperceived the religion of native Africans in South Africa for centuries, thinking that the Hottentots, Bechuana, and Besuto, for example, had no religion because they had no churches, religious hierarchy, liturgy, nor exact dogmas about salvation and the afterlife.²⁹ They often felt these cultures practiced a degraded form of Islam or Judaism because they circumcised and followed food laws. This gave the Europeans an excuse to impose their own religion upon the Africans. The European standard for religion was deeply involved in notions of afterlife and tended to judge all others by their own notions.

Most, if not all, of the world’s cultures maintain some sort of belief in life after death. Perhaps this is simply because no one can escape the difficult question of what happens to our loved ones when they die. However strong religious faith is, it can never fully overcome the feeling of loss of those who loved the departed. In some societies these beliefs have a guardian and intercessary role. In other societies the ancestors, ghosts, and spirits of the dead are malevolent creatures. But almost every society uses these practices as a way of enforcing proper funeral and postmortem proprieties. The rites must not be left undone, lest the children prove unworthy of the love the parents and grandparents bore them when they were young. The transformed dead may support a system of justice; they may help support a particular priesthood, class of prophets, healers, or kingship; or the dead may help support the integrity of the family.

Because notions of life after death help us conquer our ultimate fears of mortality in important ways, they also help society or culture organize and maintain itself. The same results can be attained whether the dead are malevolent or benevolent, though the kind of rite necessary and the kind of offices to perform them will differ markedly. We all know that notions of life after death differ widely from culture to culture and from major religion to major religion. Indeed, even a quick study of the major religions of the world reveals differing and sometimes conflicting or contradictory notions of life after death. But the fact that these views differ radically does not mean that they are invalid or ridiculous. Behind these notions lie a limited number of functions and structures. Beneath the visions of paradise expressed in countless different cultural idioms, there are a certain number of universal functions: Primary among them are the reification and legitimation of a society’s moral and social system; but one could just as easily argue that there is something fundamental to human life in them and that without them we would be totally lost in the world.

The Afterlife Is Sacred

THERE IS ONE more issue that needs to be addressed. That is the sensitivity many people feel when their notions of the afterlife are challenged. Professor Krister Stendahl reflects on his earlier work on resurrection and immortality, stating that he received more unhappy letters on this subject than on any other subject that he has ever undertaken.³⁰ If his edited and circumspect work-an admirable volume created under the supervision of both a well-educated, rational man and a man of faith-was subject to unfair and sometimes hateful criticism, perhaps I should expect a torrent for my more unorthodox treatment of the subject. But I will not broach the issue of religious truth and certainty until the very end of this project and hope the reader will have the patience to wait until then for my conclusions.

We are in a field where both the faithful and the disbelieving legitimately have their doubts and where strong argumentation is often used as a goad to dispel them. Ferocious emotional tirades on both sides are nothing but bad faith. We must be careful to allow ourselves to live with the ambiguity, not to try to impress ourselves with the rationality of our faith because of the strength of our emotions, when there are no sure claims to make. The justification for this is not just to preserve dispassionate or disinterested inquiry. We live in a marketplace of ideas, where people are constantly trying to sell something expensive to us with extravagent claims. The American critical stance should be: “Let the buyer beware.” We have frequent recent examples of televangelists convicted of preying on our innocence and our legitimate religious hopes and fears for their own enormous financial gain. Some of our recent films are, without doubt, just as surely pandering to our hopes. We have witnessed firsthand the scurrilous use of Muslim notions of the afterlife to motivate murder, resulting in a national tragedy of unprecedented proportions.

Even academic research has fallen victim to this temptation, for far less reward, if far less damage. I think of the example of Elizabeth KüblerRoss, who wrote On Death and Dying, as a salutary example.³¹ This famous and justly praised book on the grieving process was a passionate defense of giving the dying the opportunity to face their own deaths in a constructive way. The book came out of a clinical setting, the result of a study of persons dying of cancer, and concluded that our medical procedures were designed to protect the feelings of doctors and caregivers rather than to allow the dying the dignity to deal with their impending deaths. The study maintained that when those who know that they will die soon are given the opportunity to grieve for themselves, some experienced more honest, meaningful, and less painful deaths. Kübler-Ross described the grieving process as a healing one, going from anger and denial through depression to somber acceptance. Her observations struck a chord with everyone. Her analysis of the treatment of the dying in hospitals, with the attendant later techniques to encourage the dying through the grieving process, significantly changed hospital attitudes and therapeutic techniques, among both physicians and other caregivers. Kübler-Ross’s first book concerned only the process of dying and grieving; quite soon, however, her books began to propound that she had found sure evidence of life after death in her clinical settings, mostly in Near Death Experiences.

Then Kübler-Ross personally experienced yet another turn of events: a series of strokes, the last being as late as 1995, which left her facing the prospect of her own slow and debilitating death. Don Lattin in a report for the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed her in 1997 and found her very unhappy about her situation, recanting her previous, more religious, philosophy. She described her current state: “It’s neither living nor dying. It’s stuck in the middle. My only regret is that for 40 years I spoke of a good God who helps people, who knows what you need and how all you have to do is ask for it. Well that’s baloney. I want to tell the world that it’s a bunch of bull. Don’t believe a word of it.”³²

It is bad enough that the person who had done most in the twentieth century to define the successful grieving process should herself fall victim to one of its most obvious pitfalls: “stage 2: anger” as she called it. Kübler-Ross was widely reported to have recanted her observations about the afterlife, and worse still, to have admitted that she cynically invented her surety both to enrich herself and to benefit her clinical work. Some say her religious belief was a kind of “stage 1: denial.” Others say that her cynicism and admissions of fraud were the result of her depression, from which she has now recovered. Maybe so, but what does it say of her later reaffirmations? Perhaps Kübler-Ross’s experience means that we all harbor affirmations as well as doubts in our mind about an afterlife and that both can be helpful as well as destructive.

But wherever the truth lies-if indeed, it can be put into the simple sentences that journalists require-the story is a clear example of both our collective need for surety where none obtains and for individuals’ ability to hold a series of conflicting ideas simultaneously. Let’s be frank: Both the faithful and disbelieving rightfully have doubts and should have them. Faith without doubt is merely intolerance, ultimately fanaticism. Without doubt, faith turns to rabid zealotry and inspires tragedies such as the World Trade Center attack. Death anxiety is a strong and important reality with important adaptive uses in human life. Doubt is the one thing that helps keep faith from becoming fanaticism.

Death Anxiety

SHAKESPEARE himself portrays death anxiety in Measure for Measure:

’Tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

Can lay on nature is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

(Measure for Measure, Act 3, Scene 1, lines 127-131)

Poor Claudio says these abject lines in the same scene that he begins with heroic words about sacrificing himself to save his sister’s honor: “If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms” (lines 81-83). In this briefest moment, Shakespeare risks our respect by portraying his character suddenly turn cowardly in contemplating the horrors of death and hell. The greater risk provides us with a deeper truth about our humanity.

Modern idiom is much poorer than Shakespeare’s. He shows us that death anxiety infects everything we do as humans, even when we are trying to be brave. It is part of the human condition; indeed it seems a consequence of self-consciousness itself. It is a price we pay for being aware of ourselves as beings. Whether it is better to face this cold end without the benefit of religious understanding or to adopt religious views of the afterlife is still very much an open question, which is where Shakespeare leaves it. Which is the true denial of death? This book will attempt to answer that question by looking at the development of our notions of the afterlife. We shall also see that notions of life after death are themselves important and helpful tools in the development of our self-consciousness.

An Outline of the Study

FIRST, WE WILL look at the concept of afterlife in Egypt, a considerable amount of data. We can use the opportunity of studying a culture with such elaborate notions of the afterlife and heavy use of social resources to defend them to ask some general questions about human notions of the afterlife.

Then we will research the notions of Mesopotamia and Canaan, more and more important respectively for the study of Israel. In contrast to Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt, the Hebrew Bible is almost entirely silent about life after death. This silence is in pointed opposition to the rich description of the afterlife of Egypt and the surrounding cultures. Israelite First Temple religion, which is highly independent and highly polemical against these three cultures in the form we have in the Bible, is also deeply dependent upon them for its more basic concepts. We shall have to ask how characteristic of Israelite culture is the Bible’s perspective. Is it the dominant ancient position or a small minority imposing a “YHWH only” perspective on the culture?

We then turn to ancient Iran, Persia, which is crucially important for the rise of notions of bodily resurrection in Second Temple Judaism but next to impossible at this juncture to evaluate historically. Then, we will look at Greek culture, whose notion of the immortality of the soul was also to change Israelite culture and Western notions of afterlife forever. We will next look at the Biblical literary productions of the Persian and Hellenistic periods, ending with the book of Daniel, in which resurrection is predicted for the first time unambiguously and the equally important Greek notion of immortality of the soul, which enters Judaism by another means and with another social background. In addition we will look at the reports of the various sects and forces in Judea and Diaspora from the point of view of the major historians of the day. We will also review the issue of religiously altered and religiously interpreted states of consciousness.

Armed with these social and methodological tools, we will investigate the Jesus movement, the apostle Paul, and the Gospels. Then we will move on to the noncanonical gospels, the apocrypha of the Jewish and Christian communities, the Church Fathers and their major opponents, the Gnostics. Subsequently, we will consider the notions of life after death in the Mishnah, Talmud, and Rabbinic Judaism generally. The final chapter will explore Islam. The order of chapters is therefore roughly chronological throughout, although the chronology in each chapter will necessarily overlap with the others. It will be necessary to synchronize them from time to time so we can be aware of parallel beliefs in different religious traditions. At the end, after we have examined these early and foundational traditions in detail, we will look at later Jewish, Christian, and Muslim views.

To conclude, we will return to the issue of the matter of meaning and truth in the notion of afterlife. The enormous quantity of material does not yield easily either to a strictly historical or to a strictly topical approach. Our study will at least attempt to show that there are organic, historical relationships between the texts of the various literary genres and communities of belief. In every case, I try to ask the questions we have so far asked-what do these notions of the afterlife suggest about the ultimate meaning of life to these people? Why do they change over time? What social and historical issues lie behind these changes? How do the doctrines themselves condition further discussion and conflict within the various communities as they relate to other communities who value the same traditions? Why do we insist that life continues beyond the grave and why do we give credence to those who have experienced it and return to tell us about it?