please clarify
While I havenât read his new book yet, Bart Ehrman recently wrote an article for Time.
I donât know if anyone had comments?
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Thanks for that link, James.
Ehrman gives a lot of interesting and plausible-sounding history there. Iâve heard those explanations from others too - about âHellâ really being âGehennaâ - the trash heap outside the city gates, that does indeed continually have smoke rising, but would not involve continued torment for any individual tossed there to die.
The Christian would probably dispute Ehrmanâs final conclusion, though, that nobody has anything to fear after death. Even if Jesus wasnât speaking of unending torture, he still was quite emphatic about the resurrection ⌠of the righteous to life and everybody else to judgment. If nobody is to have any fear whatsoever of judgment after death, then many of Jesus teachings would be reduced to nonsense ⌠e.g. we would be so desperate to avoid wickedness that we would rather forego even a hand or an eye if it took such action to keep us on the right way. Such a thing as regrets still very much existed as far as Jesus was concerned, even if the Greek concept of the immortal, disembodied soul was yet to be merged into later Christian thought.
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Isnt Erhman the man who i made a thread about his views on the afterlife? If you are interested @JES10 here is the link Afterlife and The Old Testament - #82 by Klax
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Well - sure. Iâm certain that nobody among recent scholars was suggesting that this place must look actually like a modern land fill, even if we use that for our nearest comparison at hand. The O.T. descriptions of the place where bodies would be found sounds pretty much like what has been described - so ⌠yes. Even from your own link, it looks very much like it actually did happen.
It was nee a rubbish dump Mervin. There was no such thing as everything was recycled apart from potsherds.
Yeah - I already agreed with that correction. What Iâm saying is that itâs immaterial to me whether we now refer to it (symbolically) as a ârubbish heapâ or whether it was actually a âdesecratedâ spot of ill repute where corpses or bones might be unceremoniously dumped as a final and loathsome insult. It seems to me that such a place really existed, whether or not it looked like what we moderns think of as a ârubbish heapâ. References to ârising smoke and firesâ or âundying wormsâ may still be a bit mysterious and opaque to me (probably something of a cultural remove), but the whole concept of being âon the outside - and desecratingly soâ seems to have been a very real thing to their culture.
Aye, sorry, there would have been no fires. Itâs all symbolic, fed by Tophet.
Well - apparently there were to the Hebrew mind of the time (or at least on the strength of the O.T. passages quoted that speak of bodies - sacrifices - that had been burned there.) Jesus probably wouldnât have been referencing stuff that had no connectivity with the cultural knowledge of the day.
Aye, the fires of Tophet were extinguished over 600 years before.
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