Heaven and Hell (Unabridged‪)‬

Don’t get discouraged by the other written reviews.

I’m also someone who left Christianity and came back and left again and this is a great historical look at the Christian afterlife. I don’t know about half truths the other written reviews, but it’s just pieces of evidence that are used to support his theory of the evolution of the concept of Christian Afterlife.

Great and easy to listen to as the arguments are well thought out and full of excerpts from other texts and sociopolitical context. If that’s what you’re looking for in your Biblical scholarship, I would recommend. If not, check your local parish for more faith based conversations.

I agree with the Author of “Inconsistencies” you and this writings reek of sulfur.

I am puzzled as to how we can be assured by Bart that “we surely have nothing to fear” in the afterlife, while he says just shortly before that as a historian he cannot definitively tell us what happens in the afterlife. As Ehrman demonstrates by his constant drumbeat of bashing the Bible and ridiculing classical Christian beliefs, he is not interested in presenting the facts in a truthful or honest way. For instance, if you are skeptical of what I am charging Dr. Ehrman with watch his debate with Dr. James White on the reliability of the NT manuscripts, and watch how again and again, Bart will make partially-true statements, while construing them in such a way as to intentionally mislead the hearers. For instance, “the Bible we have today is just a copy of a copy of a copy...” by this true-ish statement he is communicating that the way the text was handed down to us was akin to the children’s game “telephone” where one child whispers an original message into the next child’s ear and he whispers it into the next child’s ear, and so on, until it is helplessly mangled by the time it reaches the last child. But that is not how textual transmission works! When a copy was made of a book of Scripture, the original didn’t just magically *poof* into thin air! No, now you had two copies. Then you copy those and have four. Along the way, you can cross reference them with each other to ensure accuracy, and eventually they become very numerous. Then Bart will say, “there are thousands of textual variants!” Which would lead us to believe we can’t know what was originally written. But, this is misleading and he knows it. Sure errors can creep in, such as homoiteluton (seeing two words with a similar ending and missing a line accidentally), or swapping The order of Christ Jesus to Jesus Christ, or misspelling a word. And mind you, every one of these is counted as a “textual variant.” Silly accidental mistakes like these are far and away the huge, huge majority of errors. Only a tiny fraction of a percent are substantial and debatable points, and in all cases we don’t lose anything that was written, but sometimes have a few words or a sentence, or sometimes a story (such as the woman caught in adultery) added into the text, but these are all well noted in all reputable Bible translations and we know about all of them. So the accusations that Bart makes are really molehills and not the mountains he makes them out to be. From his perspective, he can’t know anything for certain from more than about 200 years ago, because it is too far removed to prove conclusively that those things really happened the way they were recorded. If you can’t believe the best attested ancient writing to be reliable about anything, then you can’t believe any writings before the printing press or photo-copier. These things cause me to be extremely wary of anything he says or writes, because he has an agenda— and it reeks of sulfur.