I was asked this question some time ago by the pastor of a small church we were visiting. He and I were visiting after the service and he asked me that question, I’m sure out of concern for me and my future. I know that the vast majority of Christians would reply with a resounding “yes” to both parts of that question. I only answered part of his question. I told him, that, yes, I believed I was born again. I didn’t respond to the second part, “going to heaven when you die?” I don’t know if he realized that I only partially answered his two part question.
But, why didn’t I give him an answer to the last part of his question? “Everyone” it seems within the Christian faith, church, community believes that heaven is their destination upon death. The reason I didn’t give him a “yes” answer is because I don’t see that promised anywhere in Scripture. I know that virtually every preacher, minister, Bible teacher that I listen to or watch teaches and states frequently that all saved are “going to be with Jesus” when they die. But, I have yet to find any teaching, article, booklet that they have presented to demonstrate the doctrine of going to heaven from the Bible.
You may in your mind, maybe out loud even, be shouting that I’m wrong, a false teacher, a heretic. I understand your thinking. Most of us have been taught from childhood, even if we weren’t Christians, that the reward of the saved was life in heaven for all eternity. But, I ask, did your teachers ever give you an in depth and detailed message or study from Scripture “proving” that? Or, did they occasionally refer to or quote a passage somewhere that they told you was saying that? As I said earlier, I can’t find any such teaching or message. Why? Because, frankly, if one studies the Bible with an open mind and without a predetermined premise the doctrine of going to heaven can’t be demonstrated.
So, then, where did we get this doctrine, this teaching, that seems to be “universal” within the Church? Thankfully there are some who have asked this question, who have researched and have presented the answer in various publications, articles, etc. that we can access on the internet. I, in the next few paragraphs, will share just a few quotations with you.
One of the first articles I came across as I spent a little time searching was entitled “Judaism Originated the Idea of Heaven, Hell.” This piece was written by Rabbi Marc Gellman, the senior rabbi of Temple Beth Torah in Melville, New York, where he has served since 1981. He has answered many questions in his newspaper column “The God Squad” and on his TV and radio broadcasts of the same name.
Here are a few quotes from this article. “Judaism actually originated the ideas of heaven and hell, which were absorbed (and modified) by Christianity and later Islam.” Then just a few sentences later he says, “In fact, it was not even Judaism, but the Greek philosophers like Aristotle who introduced the ideas of matter and form that led to the religious doctrines of heaven and hell. The Hebrew Bible is silent on the subject, but during the period following Alexander the Great’s conquest of Israel in 333 BCE, the period called Hellenism, Greek thought penetrated deep into the new and emerging thought of the rabbis.”
In a second article by Rabbi Gellman, “Answering Questions on the Afterlife,” he states, “The Judaism that made the case for heaven was rabbinic Judaism not biblical Judaism, where the idea of a soul and of heaven is either underdeveloped or nonexistent depending on the scholarly opinion you endorse. However, after the rabbis encountered Greek philosophy through Aristotle, who was the tutor of Alexander the Great, who conquered Israel in 333 BCE, the philosophical dualism of matter and form was transposed into the religious duality of body and soul.” In the next paragraph he says, “This enabled Judaism, and later Christianity, to enthusiastically teach that our souls survive in ‘the world to come’”
Rabbi Gellman has addressed this question in various articles for “The God Squad.” In yet another piece, “You Can Thank Aristotle for the Concept of the Soul’s Life After Death,” he states the following. “The pre-greek Bible had Hebrew names that are translated as soul (nefesh), but the nefesh was not an immaterial essence that survived death. The nefesh was more like the life within us that ended with death. In the Bible, death is considered to be the end of us. There is a biblical idea of the resurrection of the dead at the end of time, but it’s not a developed doctrine. After Aristotle, however, Judaism became a religion that taught the existence of bodies that die and souls that live on after death in the world to come (what Christians came to call heaven).” A bit later in the article he says, “No single theological change even approaches the significance of the Jewish/Christian adaptation of the Greek philosophical notions of matter and form into the body and soul.”
I came across an excerpt from a book written by Lisa Miller, a staff writer at New York Magazine, former religion columnist for the Washington Post, former senior editor of Newsweek Magazine. The excerpt was entitled “How Jews Invented Heaven.” Here is one paragraph. “It may astonish readers to know, then, that it was Jews that invented our idea of heaven. They did not invent the idea of an afterlife, or the idea of heaven as the home of God – those ideas had been around for thousands of yeas, long before the Jews ever existed as a people. But the idea of heaven as we understand it – a place in the sky where the righteous go after death to live forever with God – that concept born to Jews sometime during the second century before the birth of Jesus. It was, if you will, a theological miracle. Heaven, at its root, is a Jewish idea.”
On the website answers.com the question was asked, “Where did heaven and hell teaching originate?” Here are a couple of points made. “The Christian concepts of heaven and hell have their origins in several regional religions of the time including Zoroastrianism and the various religions found among the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians.” “The idea of heaven and hell came from the Zoroastrian religion. In 586 BCE, Judah was annexed by Babylonia and many of its people deported to Babylon, with no expectation of ever being able to return....The Jews had a high regard for the Persians, so it is natural that they would have been receptive to ideas from the Persian religion. Zoroastrianism.” In the next paragraph we read, “Heaven and hell, as places of reward and punishment, had always been part of Zoroastrian belief. However, prior to the Babylonian Exile, the Hebrew did not believe in heaven and hell.”
These quotations I have shared all came from short articles, many were newspaper columns. However, longer pieces with more detail can also be located. I’ll share a few quotes from a couple of these as well.
On the website truthortradion.com under the title of “The Origin of Orthodoxy” is an article entitled “Where Did the Idea Originate that Believers Would Live Forever in Heaven?”written by David Rogers. There is much in this article but I will only pull out a few sentences. “The idea that the soul or spirit is like a ghost that can separate from the body and still have consciousness and movement without the body was introduced into Judaism after the Babylonian captivity and came from there and other religions into Christianity. The idea of a disembodied living soul did not come from the text of Scripture.” Dropping down a couple of paragraphs we read, “Once the religions of the world accepted the idea that the “soul” or “spirit” did not die when the body died, the next step was to determine its post-mortem address, in other words, where does the soul live after the body dies? The answers vary from religion to religion, but there are some similarities. A study of the various religions of the world shows that it was, and still is, very common to believe that “good” people go either to the abode of the gods (sometimes called “heaven”), or to some wonderful place on earth, while evil people go to a place of punishment or torment. These beliefs eventually found their way into both Judaism and Christianity.”
Here are another quotation or two from this article. “The impact of Greek religion and the Greek language on the doctrine of life after death among the Jews cannot be overstated. Alexander the Great conquered Israel in 332 BC. As a result, by 250 BC there were so many Jews speaking Greek (many of whom could not read Hebrew) that it became necessary to develop a Greek translation of the Old Testament. This translation is called the Septuagint. It is significant that the translators chose the Greek word “Hades” to translate the Hebrew word “Sheol” in the Hebrew text. This choice had a very powerful impact because the souls in Sheol, according to Scripture, are all dead, but the souls in Hades, according to Homer and other Greek and Roman writers, are all alive. Thus, by the stroke of a translator’s pen, everyone throughout the Old Testament who had died was granted life in the grave.”
There is much more in this article but let us move on to one more article. This one entitled “Origins of the Heavenly Destiny Concept” is written by Pastor Tim Warner of the Oasis Christian Church in Tampa, Florida and founder of the Pristine Faith Restoration Society. A sub-title of this article is “Greek Mysticism & Gnosticism.” Here are a few quotes. “Where did the idea of an eternity in heaven come from? Certainly not from Judaism, from which Christianity sprang! There is no such concept in the Old Testament. It definitely did not come from Jesus’ teaching,...” “The idea of a heavenly destiny was common in the first century among pagans schooled in Greek philosophy. It entered Christianity gradually.” “Justin Martyr was an orthodox Christian writer who lived in the early second century. He strongly opposed the ‘heretics’ who promoted the ‘heavenly destiny’ concept.” “Irenaeus was the pastor of the church in Lyons, Gaul, a student of Polycarp the disciple of John, and a martyr for the Faith. He made it his life’s work to refute the Gnostic sects, with their ‘heavenly destiny’ ideas, and denial of the resurrection of the body.”
I could go on quoting these writers and the writers of many other articles but I think it is clear that the entrenched Christian teaching regarding the spirit or soul of the dead going immediately to heaven came from Greek philosophy, most likely through the Babylonians into rabbinical Judaism and from there it was absorbed by the early Christian church. As many of these quotes state, the concept of a soul or spirit departing the body and going to heaven is not found in the Bible. Many passages that speak of a resurrection are misinterpreted by many to fit this false teaching.
What does the Bible teach about death and the afterlife? I’ll refer you to an earlier study that I did, “What Is Death – According To The Bible?
Dec. 9, 2019
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