Journeys to Heaven and Hell


Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition is a 2022 monograph by New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman. The study situates early Christian katabasis and anabasis narratives within Greco-Roman and Second Temple Jewish afterlife discourse, then analyzes how tours of heaven and hell functioned as moral pedagogy, evangelistic rhetoric, and theological argument in late antique Christianity.

Background and publication

The volume follows Ehrman's trade book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife and extends that project with a source-critical and historical analysis of narrated visits to the realm of the dead. Ehrman frames the work as a scholarly investigation into how such accounts articulate communal ethics, conversional aims, and christological claims within early Christian discourse. Yale University Press issued the e-book and hardcover on 5 April 2022 and a paperback on 7 March 2023. The Yale Press also released the audiobook edition in its Yale Press Audio catalog.

Contents

Ehrman organizes the study around exemplary journeys and their reception, moving from Homer and Virgil to Jewish apocalypses and early Christian apocrypha.
ChapterTitleFocus and principal texts
IntroThe Well-Trodden PathsDefines tour-of-the-afterlife narratives and method, situates Christian cases within Greco-Roman and Jewish precedents.
1The Realities of Death and the Meaning of Life I: Journeys to Hades in Homer and VirgilOdysseus in Odyssey 11 and Aeneas in Aeneid 6, comparative analysis of afterlife geography and purgative motifs used for ethical instruction.
2The Realities of Death and the Meaning of Life II: Jewish and Christian JourneysJewish apocalypses including the Book of Watchers and the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, transition to early Christian tours and their eschatological claims.
3Incentives from the World Beyond: Christian Ethics and EvangelismHow visionary punishments and rewards function as paraenesis and conversional rhetoric, with attention to wealth, asceticism, and community discipline.
4The Afterlife of Afterlives: Editorial Interventions and ChristologyRedactional and textual interventions that amplify christological agency within tour narratives, with attention to apocryphal traditions.
5The Justice and Mercy of God in Textual ConflictCompeting depictions of divine justice and mercy across related recensions, analysis of punishment fitting the crime and universalist tendencies.
6The Power of Christ and the Harrowing of HellDevelopment of Christ's descent motif and its narrative uses, including the Gospel of Nicodemus and related materials.
—AfterwordSynthesis of literary, social, and theological functions of afterlife tours in early Christianity.

Synopsis and argument

Ehrman reads narrated tours as cultural work that instructs communities about conduct and identity, not as ethnographies of the beyond. Progenitors in Homer and Virgil supply narrative structures and evaluative frameworks. Jewish apocalyptic literature contributes judgment scenarios and visionary mediation. Early Christian narratives appropriate those frameworks to model ethics, to warn opponents, and to construe Christ's authority over death. The analysis foregrounds four noncanonical Christian texts in particular, including the Apocalypse of Peter, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Acts of Thomas near-death narrative, and the Gospel of Nicodemus, while also attending to textual redaction and reception across centuries.

Reception

Ehrman's book was well received and described as a substantive reframing of afterlife tours within their ancient contexts. Publishers Weekly called the study an illuminating deep dive that both broadens and details early Christian notions of heaven, hell, and purgatory, highlighting the pedagogical claim that these stories emphasize what matters in life. The New Yorker praised the reconstruction of a trajectory from Homer's egalitarian afterlife to Virgil's rewards and punishments, then to early Christian elaborations, and it included the book in its Best Books of 2022 list. An academic review for Reading Religion commended the historical surveys and manuscript discussions, then argued that treatment of the devil and the development of Satan traditions was underdeveloped relative to the significance of those motifs in reception history.