Early Christian tours of heaven/hell (video)

Mitch Jeserich, Letters & Politics, KPFA, Berkeley; CC Liu, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Stories of "hells" predate Judaism and Christianity. India's Dharmic religions speak of them.

Early Christian texts and the making of hell

(Letters and Politics) Guest: Prof. Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition.

A New York Times best-selling scholar's illuminating exploration of the earliest Christian narrated journeys to heaven and hell “[An] illuminating deep dive...An edifying origin story for contemporary Christian conceptions of the afterlife.”

—Publishers Weekly

Journeys to Heaven n Hell: Tours of the Afterlife

From classics such as Homer's the Odyssey and the Aeneid to fifth-century Christian apocrypha [texts of questionable origin], narratives that described guided tours of the afterlife played a major role in shaping ancient notions of morality and ethics.

In this new account, acclaimed author Prof. Bart Ehrman contextualizes early Christian narratives of heaven and hell within the broader intellectual and cultural worlds from which they emerged.

He examines how fundamental social experiences of the early Christian communities molded the conceptions of the afterlife that eventuated into the accepted doctrines of heaven, hell, and purgatory.