Most people today don’t understand this, but the Greeks and Romans didn’t even have a concept of the afterlife like we do today. Even more shocking for people who are not biblical scholars, neither did the ancient Jews until sometime around Jesus’s era, and even then the idea developed very slowly.

People who take the concepts of heaven and hell for granted back-read meaning into Biblical passages written by people who not only didn’t conceptualize of heaven and hell the way we did, but didn’t even have the concept of an eternally living soul.

Read the New Testament as a tabula rasa and see if you can find the concepts of heaven and hell like we talk about today.

Many people are surprised to find that you just can’t do that.