Peter Stanford - Heaven - A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country

By including that striking final sentence about the God of the living, Jesus was moreover making an intriguing proposal. Jewish theology assumed that, save for a tiny number of favoured individuals, all others would have to wait until the day of final judgement to get their exam results and find out if they had gained their place with God in heaven. Yet Jesus seemed to be saying that no such delay was necessary. The three patriarchs he quoted were not kicking their heels in sheol but were already with God in heaven. If God is the God of the living, not the dead, then the righteous dead will have already risen to be fully alive with him. However, it would be dangerous to push this too far – for, given the confusion over the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven, it may simply be that Jesus was talking about those who followed God’s commands while on earth being with him already in spirit. In this hint of separating heaven from the day of judgement, and allowing for a fast track for entrants, rather than admission at one fell swoop come the last day, Jesus was creating a picture of heaven coexisting with earthly life that had hitherto been little known in Judaism.

Jesus’ questioning of conventional wisdom on the afterlife was taken a step further by another passage in Luke’s Gospel which contrasted the fate of a rich man and Lazarus, the beggar at his gates. Lazarus, covered with sores that dogs licked, was taken up to heaven by the Old Testament figure of Abraham. The rich man by contrast went to hell from where he looked up, saw Lazarus, and begged him to dip his finger in water to cool his tongue:

‘My son,’ Abraham replied, ‘remember that during your life good things came your way, just as bad things came the way of Lazarus. Now he is being comforted here while you are in agony. But that is not all: between us and you a great gulf has been fixed, to stop anyone, if he wanted to, crossing from our side to yours, and to stop any crossing from your side to ours.’

The rich man replied, ‘Father, I beg you then to send Lazarus to my father’s house since I have five brothers, to give them warning so that they do not come to this place of torment too.’

‘They have Moses and the prophets,’ said Abraham, ‘let them listen to them.’ (Luke 16:19–31)

This was another unambiguous rejection of any notion that the dead could communicate with the living, but in this story the reports of Jesus added more detail about heaven. Once you’re in, you’re in for ever, Abraham says. By the same token, once you’re consigned to hell, there’s no way back into God’s favour. It’s all very final: there are two tracks for immortality and you can’t switch midstream. Though the idea of judgement on the basis of what you have done in life was already well-established in Judaism, here Jesus was refining the criteria by which those judgements would be made. The poor, it seems, would enjoy positive discrimination while the rich would have to work doubly hard to earn their passage. Heaven’s standards would not be, he was saying, the same as earth’s.

Taken together, the two passages debunked another long-standing concept – that only a select few could attain heaven. Lazarus was there, along with the oft-married widow and her various spouses. At his crucifixion, Jesus also promised the thief who died next to him: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ (Luke 23:43) Clearly this would be no exclusive club for the great and good with lesser mortals blackballed – quite the opposite, in fact. Whether it would take a literal, physical shape, however, Jesus didn’t specify. In these accounts, he demonstrated almost no interest in the question of bodily resurrection – though his comments about heaven being entirely separate from this world would seem to show a coolness on the subject. Heaven for Jesus was only one thing – oneness with God. That oneness might be spiritual, mental, physical, or all three. He offered few clues, save in the vaguest of terms. According to John’s Gospel, at the Last Supper Jesus promised his apostles life everlasting with the words ‘there are many rooms in my father’s house’. (John 14:2)

In reading the Gospels, it is tempting to see Jesus self-consciously setting out to influence and recast the Jewish canon on the afterlife. This may indeed have been the case, for he was certainly an iconoclast, but these accounts cannot be taken too literally. Jesus certainly did not write them. As documentation on his words and actions, they are at best second-hand. They may reflect the kernel of a central argument Jesus made, but more likely than not they give more of an insight into the particular preoccupations of individuals who were offering their own interpretation of what he reportedly said. The Gospels are, crudely put, not to be taken as gospel, but rather as evidence of a heated, ongoing debate within the leadership of the early church as it separated from Judaism. With regard to the afterlife, the last judgement, the immortal soul and the question of bodily resurrection, there were many conflicting threads to this debate – all of them owing something to Judaism and all of them presenting the next generation of Christians with a hazy, confused picture of heaven.

Alongside the words ascribed to Jesus must be considered those of St Paul. In his biography of Paul ( Paul: The Mind of the Apostle ), the historian and polemicist A. N. Wilson holds that it is impossible to underestimate the importance of this saint in shaping Christian thought. Jesus was, Wilson states bluntly, a minor ‘Galilean exorcist’ interested in Jewish matters and one of many messiahs who two thousand years ago attracted the attention of a people desperate for divine assistance in overthrowing their Roman overlords. The tiny cult that surrounded him after his death would, he says, have petered out like all the rest had it not attracted the attention of Paul of Tarsus who is, for Wilson, ‘a richly imaginative but confused religious genius who was able to draw out a mythological and archetypical significance from the death of a Jewish hero’.

Wilson is certainly right to note how little Paul’s writings owe to any recorded words or deeds of Jesus, save for the overriding inspiration of the image of the crucified Christ. Paul, a Greek-speaker, borrowed as liberally from Greco-Roman culture as from Judaism and as a missionary was always alert in fashioning his teachings to the need to create something that would have resonance in the Gentile world rather than simply satisfy an already fragmented Israel. In this sense, today’s Christians are not Christians at all, but Paulians.

Another important factor in weighing Paul’s writings is that most of them predate the Gospel accounts. His are the earliest records of the Jesus cult. Rather than see Paul as refining Jesus’ message and words, as set out in the Gospels, it is more accurate to see the Gospel accounts as offering another take on stories that may have been in the oral tradition, and that may have been adopted as a counterpoint to Paul within the disharmonious and scattered early Church.

Paul differed from Jesus on several points about afterlife. Certainly there was nothing in Paul’s writings that suggested that the dead would rise again with God before the last judgement, though Paul fervently believed that this event was near at hand. His view on resurrection came, as with all else in his writing, from the symbol of the risen Christ.

We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and that it will be the same for those who have died in Jesus: God will bring them with him. We can tell you this from the Lord’s own teaching, that any of us who are left alive until the Lord’s coming will not have any advantage over those who have died. At the trumpet of God, the voice of the archangel will call out the command and the Lord himself will come down from heaven; those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise, and then those of us who are still alive will be taken up in the clouds, together with them, to meet the Lord in the air. So we shall stay with the Lord for ever. (I Thess 4:14–17)