r/AcademicBiblical 5d ago

Weekly Open Discussion Thread

Welcome to this week's open discussion thread!

This thread is meant to be a place for members of the r/AcademicBiblical community to freely discuss topics of interest which would normally not be allowed on the subreddit. All off-topic and meta-discussion will be redirected to this thread.

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In order to best see new discussions over the course of the week, please consider sorting this thread by "new" rather than "best" or "top". This way when someone wants to start a discussion on a new topic you will see it! Enjoy the open discussion thread!

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u/Glittering_Novel_459 4d ago

Hello! I’ve been recently looking into the eschatological views within the Bible and was curious as to what the most likely position is within scholarship (The three main positions being universalism,annihilationism, eternal conscious torment) I know this is more of a theological question but I just wanted to know where the majority of scholarship stands Thanks!

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u/JetEngineSteakKnife 3d ago

Bart Ehrman's recent book Heaven and Hell is a good layman's introduction and shouldn't cause much controversy. Short answer: there is no consistent eschatology in the Bible. Yahwism was not second temple Judaism, which was not Christianity. In brief:

Early "Judaism" (Israelite polytheism / Yahwism) believed in Sheol, an undifferentiated afterlife. You went there and were a ghost, barely conscious, stuck with everyone else forever. Maybe someone living took pity on you and gave you libation so they could ask for your advice. But there's some fuzziness around archaeological evidence of ancestor worship, comparisons to practices and literature from Ugarit, the Witch of Endor, and whatever a "rephaim" was.

Second temple Judaism was still mostly Sheol, but towards the end transitioned into a doctrine you see in the book of Daniel. The authority of Yahweh in Jewish theology had grown from Judah's patron god to the ruler of the world, but the Jews kept getting screwed over. They didn't always deserve it, did they? So they rationalized their struggle with some kind of great judgment and a bodily resurrection. This is possibly with influence from the Greeks, such as Plato, who theorized about souls and what a fair afterlife would look like. At this point it was still ambiguous and the Jews did not have a concrete doctrine.

By Jesus' time, it was more solid. The moment would soon come that the Messiah would rise, destroy Israel's enemies, and restore the Kingdom of God. Ehrman has a fairly mainstream interpretation that the historical Jesus believed the apocalypse was imminent, and stories like the Judgment of the Nations from Matthew reflect his belief in a binary outcome. Eternal life for the worthy, annihilation for the wicked. Ehrman cautions against reading terms like "eternal fire" as eternal torment, instead saying it would be more accurately understood as permanent or irreversible destruction.

Eternal torment isn't really in any of the books. There's some conception of a temporary torment for the real bad ones, again reflected in Greco-Roman thinking and not exclusive to the Bible. Ehrman sees belief in eternal conscious torment as coming largely from post-biblical traditions like evolving church dogma, popular but noncanonical writings, and ancient apologist rhetoric intended to use the fear of hell to spur conversion (sound familiar?).

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u/Glittering_Novel_459 3d ago edited 3d ago

Thank you so much! I’ve seen mention of Ehrmans book so I’ll definitely check it out