This morning while scrolling through Yahoo’s newsfeed I came across the article “What Jesus Really Said About Heaven and Hell,” a blurb from Bart Ehrman’s new book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. In the burb, Ehrman argues that the the popular notion notion among Christians of heaven and hell is wrong because Jesus and the Jews didn’t teach it. Instead, Ehrman argues, Jesus taught that the wicked would be totally destroyed while the righteous would be resurrected and live on earth. But Jesus and the Jews did not believe in a soul that that could live apart from the body. That was a Greek idea.

I leave aside the legitimacy of Ehrman’s argument–not surprisingly, a whole lot of people took exception in the comments–and I’ll only note that Ehrman’s idea was argued by a number of Anabaptist and other radicals in the early modern period (called psychopannychism, mortalism, or soul sleep, see N. T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyldale to Milton [1972]). It’s currently taught by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Christians have debated these points for two thousand years, but that’s not what this post is about. Instead, I want to look at what Ehrman said about Socrates. Ehrman argues that Christian notion of the soul came from the Greeks, and that “later Christians who came out of gentile circles adopted this view for themselves, and reasoned that if souls are built to last forever, their ultimate fates will do so as well.” Such a notion of heaven and hell, argues Ehrman, was “a strange hybrid, a view held neither by the original Christians nor by ancient Greek intelligentsia before them.”

Ehrman then refers to Socrates’s statement from Plato’s Apology, about possibilities what what will happen to him after he is executed: either sleep of eternal life, and argues that this is what Jesus had in mind. Yet this leaves out all of Socrates’s other statements about the afterlife, calling into question his claim of heaven and hell being “a strange hybrid.” Here I just quote from my dissertation.

Plato taught that [after death] for the wicked, “Their benefit comes to them, both here and in Hades, by way of pain and suffering, for there is no other possible way to get rid of injustice.” For most of the wicked, these punishments were temporary and curative; only those who had committed particularly heinous acts and were thus incurable would suffer forever.[1]  Plato went into more detail in book ten of the Republic where he described the near-death experience of one Er. While dead, Er said he saw judges divide the just from the unjust: the just were sent up to heaven and the unjust down into the earth. He also saw people coming out of those places who reported what they had experienced. Those who came out of the earth were “weeping as they recalled all they had suffered and seen on their journey below the earth, which lasted a thousand years, while the latter, who had come from heaven, told about how well they had fared and about the inconceivably fine and beautiful sights they had seen.” The unjust explained that in the underworld they had to suffer for every unjust thing they had done once every hundred years. Since they spent a thousand years in the underworld, they suffered ten times for all their injustices. At the same time, tyrants and a few others who were “incurably wicked” were never allowed out of hell, just like Plato had said in the Gorgias. When such individuals tried to leave after their thousand years were over, “Savage men, all fiery to look at … grabbed some of the criminals and led them away.” The fiery men then bound the incurably wicked and “dragged them out of the way … telling every passer-by that they were to be thrown into Tartarus.”[2] Smith similarly taught that a certain group of particularly wicked people would suffer forever (see below).

[I discuss similar Mormon ideas later in the dissertation but not here]

So Socrates, based on Er’s near-death experience, explicitly said that the dead were divided into two categories in the afterlife: the righteous experienced bliss while the wicked were severely punished. It would only last a thousand years though, which inspired universalist ideas in Origen other other Christian universalists. So Ehrman’s claim that this heaven-and-hell notion was not taught by Socrates, but was a later hybrid of Christian and Greek ideas is incorrect. (It should be noted that Socrates is always speculative, he always puts forth these claims as possibilities and does present a number of ideas, but the Er claim fits his general conception).

What this has to do with Christianity comes in my next paragraph in my dissertation:

The reference to a thousand years was similar to a reference in the Revelation 20 (later universalists seemingly combined themes from Er’s vision and Revelation 20 in ways that sounded similar to Smith’s visions, see below). In Revelation 20, the visionary saw an angel cast the devil “into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him … till the thousand years should be fulfilled.” In the meantime, “I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God … and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.”  However, “the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished….  Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection … they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.” As in the Republic, different types of people were given their different rewards for a thousand years: the righteous were blessed, the devil was cast “into the bottomless pit,” and “the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished.” “And when the thousand years are expired,” the visionary continued, “Satan shall be loosed out of his prison,” which brings on the battle of Gog and Magog, after which “the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” All people are then resurrected and “judged out of those things which were written in the books…. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” Similar to the Republic, there are those that are cast into a tortuous place (the dragon, the beast, the false prophet, and “whosoever was not found written in the book of life”) where they will stay forever.

“The Fulness of the Gospel: Christian Platonism and the Origins of Mormonism,” (PhD Diss. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014), 254-55.

So what happened in Christianity, I’ll leave to the endless debate of Christian theologians, but Socrates did say there was an afterlife judgment and suffering for the wicked.

[1] Plato, Gorgias, 525b-c.

[2] Plato, Republic, 614b-615b.