Are People Treated Equally in the Age to Come?

[00:00:01] Are people treated equally in the age to come by Bart Ehrman for nearly all my life, until a few months ago, actually, I assumed that Jesus favored and promoted equality. Everyone deserves equal treatment and will receive equal rewards from God if they are on his side and survive the coming Day of Judgment. [00:00:21] This really was a pure assumption on my part. I never thought much about it and I didn't realize I was simply assuming it. Hey, I believe that everyone deserves to be treated equally and if that's what makes sense to me, well, obviously all right minded people would think like that. And who was more right minded than Jesus? [00:00:40] But now I've come to put some thought into it, I'm not sure Jesus would agree. [00:00:45] Certainly I'd say Jesus thought everyone was free to accept and follow his teachings and could equally receive God's gracious gift of salvation. [00:00:54] For Jesus, salvation meant surviving the coming onslaught that was to appear soon on the Day of Judgment, when God would intervene in history by sending a cosmic judge who destroys all of God's enemies. The evil powers in the world, including evil governments and the people who endorsed and followed them. [00:01:09] Those who followed the teachings of Jesus, which he took simply to be the teachings of God as found in scripture. Those would be saved. [00:01:17] Not partially saved, but entirely saved. They would all enter into the kingdom. [00:01:23] But did entrance into the kingdom mean the same, or at least equal treatment and experience in the Kingdom? I always assumed so. I assumed so because it was more or less the view I inherited growing up. [00:01:36] It's not that we knew what Jesus actually taught, based on some kind of historical analysis, that he was an apocalypticist who believed the kingdom would be here on earth when God returned the world to the Paradise. A word taken from the Persian term for garden that he had originally created for Adam and then Eve, and that they, alas, mucked up to provide us with this world of horrible suffering that we now and always have inhabited. [00:01:58] God wanted humans to live in paradise, and by God he was going to make it happen. [00:02:04] As I indicated, we certainly didn't learn that Jesus preached this apocalyptic message. It wasn't how the afterlife was talked about at home, in Sunday school, in church or anywhere else. We believed in heaven. When we die, our souls, if we are believers and or good people, will go to heaven to live in a spiritual existence there forever. And since heaven is perfect, it didn't occur to us that some of us might have it better than others. It will be heavenly for all of us. [00:02:30] I don't want to say that every Christian believes that. [00:02:33] In my book Armageddon I tell an amusing little anecdote. [00:02:38] One of our blog donors told me that he had recently been in an upscale restaurant and was sitting next to a table of Christians who were talking about their hopes for the coming afterlife, saying how much they were looking forward to the day when each would be awarded multiple mansions and golf courses. Seriously, golf courses. But one of them did graciously concede, of course my golf course won't be as nice as Billy Graham's. [00:03:00] So there it is. Differentiated Experiences of Glory in the World to Come before getting to what Jesus himself appears to have taught, I need to point out that the idea of differentiated levels of glory and ecstasy in heaven and has been around for a remarkably long time in the Christian tradition. [00:03:18] I came to realize that path already as a young scholar, even though I've only recently come to ponder Jesus own views. [00:03:26] The notion of high post mortem differentiation can be seen with particular clarity in an apocryphal text that was hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages, but that, alas, today is principally known only among scholars of early Christianity and those few noble and proud non scholars like you who are open to reading about such things. [00:03:46] I will briefly explain what this book is in the next post before explaining its strikingly differentiated view of the levels of glory in the world to come in the next post. [00:03:57] Brief Summary the Apocalypse of Paul is a fictional narrative of a personal tour granted to the apostle, written sometime toward the end of the 4th century or the beginning of the 5th. [00:04:08] To understand its perspective, it's useful to note that its unknown author, claiming to be Paul, to some extent modeled his story on the much earlier second century Apocalypse of Peter. [00:04:21] I've talked about this earlier apocalypse on the blog before, in part because in its first three centuries of existence, significant numbers of churches and church leaders considered it to be part of the New Testament. [00:04:32] The Apocalypse of Peter is our earliest surviving Christian version of a trip to heaven and hell. [00:04:39] I've always been fascinated by the fact that it describes the glories of heaven in rather banal and generalized terms. Great sights and smells and everyone's happy but the torments of the damned in strikingly graphic and gruesome terms, the torments in the Apocalypse of Peter vary depending on a person's most pronounced characteristic sin, adultery, murder, disobedience to a parent or to a master. If you're a slave, it's not clear which punishments are seen to be as the most horrific. I mean, I suppose it depends on personal preference. [00:05:12] Some of us would rather be forced to stand in excrement up to our necks for all eternity than to have red hot rods of iron poke continuously in our eyes forever. [00:05:22] Neither, though, would be my top choice for the world to come. [00:05:25] But even though hellish torments are differentiated depending on how a person lived or rather mislived, that's not the same for the heavenly rewards. The righteous who dwell forever in the realms above are described in highly glorious terms. They are incredibly gorgeous, arrayed in brilliant dress, living among many abundant fruit trees and plants that exude brilliant odors for all eternity. [00:05:48] We're not told what the saints are doing up there exactly, apart from praising God and rejoicing, but they appear entirely ecstatic. And in one version of the text we are told that the glory of those who dwelt there was equal. [00:06:02] That will not be the case when we come to the Apocalypse of Paul, as I'll explain in the next post, before moving on to talk about what Jesus thought, which, as I indicated, is none of the above but mutatis mutandis. Did he believe in equality in the age to come.