An Old Testament scholar tells us that the Bible makes it very clear: there has to be a resurrection of the body. Early church fathers were convinced that this body would contain the very same molecules that we “owned” while alive on earth. And many Christians today, without thinking too deeply about the subject, imagine their resurrected body looking very much like it does today.

But there are some simple reasons why it can’t be as physical as one might have imagined (hoped?): too many people have “owned” the same molecules while alive on earth, and each of us have “owned” many different bodily forms over the course of our earthly lives.

We then go on a historical journey over the past fifty thousand years looking at the evolution of Hebrew and then Christian thinking about the afterlife. The Hebrews held a very Babylonian and Egyptian view of the afterlife, with no postmortem judgement scenario: everyone ended up in a dark, dusty place crawling with maggots. Christians radically changed that in response to Zoroastrian and Greek thinking: there was now a postmortem judgement followed by a place of reward or of punishment.

In the process of this change: the Garden of Eden morphed into Paradise, which eventually became Heaven, while Sheol became Gehenna and then eventually Hell. Christians also introduced a couple new ideas to solve the problem of how one’s final destiny was decided: Penal Substitutionary Atonement and Purgatory.

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