DR. CUMMINGS: Oh for heaven’s sake!

Last month I gave a talk to a group of wonderful Christian men. Afterward one of the men asked me: “How do we get to heaven?” I guessed that he didn’t want the standard Christian answer: “Just believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.” I felt he was really trying to question the concept of an afterlife. That is an old, unresolved question that has plagued mankind since death was first experienced and has created more myths than King Arthur’s knights. So I began talking about the history of the “heavenly myths.”

Our Bible (the Jewish Tanakh and the New Testament) uses the term “the heavens” (ha shamaim in Hebrew and uranos in Greek) 657 times. This concept changes as you flip through the pages; in the beginning Elohim (one of God’s names) lives above the heavens because he creates the heavens as a barrier between himself and the world. Later on (like the book of Job) Yahweh (another name for God) sits in that heaven itself, but men don’t die and join him, except for Elijah and Elias, who goes up in a whirlwind. (4k.2:11)

So where do the rest of us go when we die?

Sheol (often incorrectly translated as hell) is the place where everybody goes after death according to the Hebrew and Babylonian myths (Psalms 89:49) It’s mentioned 65 times in the Hebrew bible and then becomes Hades and Gehenna in the New Testament. This concept later morphs into two distinct places where Lazarus gets the preferred space in Abraham’s bosom and the rich man is left in torment, but both are in different sections of Sheol. (Luke 16:22)

So where does our modern concept of heaven come from?

I think it grew out of the Pharisaical belief in a general resurrection. The Pharisees believed that when the “end time” came, Yahweh would bring his people back to life and start a “New Israel.” Paul, who was a Pharisee himself, carried on this tradition, and we see him writing this idea to his Greek converts in Thessalonica — who had their own Zeus and Thor myths — around the year 50. (1 Thess. 4:17) Now, however, it was the “Christos” who would be returning and the Christians would be rising up “to the clouds.”

But the important cog in this wheel, which is often forgotten, is the fact that the end of this world was coming in their lifetime. Whether heaven was going to be a new kingdom here on this new earth, or some kind of cloud-like existence “up there” was secondary. The important fact was that it’s coming now.

Obviously, it didn't come.

It didn’t come in Paul’s lifetime. He died before the year 70. That was the year the Roman Emperor sent Titus to destroy Jerusalem and its temple that was so important to the early Jewish-Christians. Mark’s gospel was written then and it ends, not with the resurrection (those verses were added later), but with the women leaving the tomb “sore afraid.” All Christians were afraid at that time. Without a resurrection there could be no “end of the world.”

I think it must have been around the years 80 and 90 when Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels were written that Christians began to realize: “Hey, maybe the end isn’t coming now.” And we see this reflected in the way they talk about the reward in heaven as something coming after death, with no connection to the end time (Luke.6:23). And certainly by the time John is written after the year 100, all thought of Paul’s concerns have vanished, and “belief in Jesus” brings everlasting life to individuals without any apocalyptic ending (John 11:26).

One of the problems I face in reading the New Testament is forgetting who wrote it. Jesus did not sit down and write it. As far as we know, Jesus didn’t write anything. He taught — in Aramaic — until about the year 30. After he died, small groups of Jews began talking about his teachings and repeating them sometimes verbatim, sometimes with additions, as was the custom then. But still we have no writings.

Twenty years later, Paul, who never met Jesus and couldn't stand the apostles (Galatians 2:11) started the “Christ” movement among the Greeks and wrote letters, not gospels. The gospels, or stories about Jesus, were written in Greek — not Aramaic — during the years 70-110 from oral traditions and a scattering of scrolls that had been edited and translated over the preceding 50 years. So what about heaven?

Well, as my wife puts it so well: “Once you hit 80, all those scriptural arguments become a bit irrelevant and any old kind of heaven will do just fine, thank you.”

Dr. Bill Cummings is the CEO of Cummings Consolidated Corporation and Cummings Management Consultants. His website is www.billcummings.org.

This story was originally published August 30, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "DR. CUMMINGS: Oh for heaven’s sake! ."