Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country

CHAPTER THREE But Not Life as We Know it

There is a school of thought which claims Jesus was an Essene, and that he is the ‘righteous teacher’ referred to in the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, the case remains unproven and is scorned by many eminent religious historians. What is true is that in Jesus’ pronouncements on heaven and afterlife recorded in the Gospels, he shows more than a touch of Essene influence. Generally, early Christian ideas about heaven broadly mirror the contemplative Essenes in that they are little concerned with the fate of Israel, or indeed with anything to do with this world, being almost exclusively focused on a personal experience of the divine be it compensation for whatever ills have befallen individuals in their earthly lives, or, more simply, anticipation of the promised all-consuming experience in death which will wipe out all that has gone before.

Christianity distanced itself from its Jewish inheritance, in that heaven was seen as being exclusively with God in the hereafter, with no ongoing ties to this world. Gradually, over the centuries, the new religion moved to rejecting the idea of a heaven on earth. God’s kingdom, as far as Christianity was concerned, was elsewhere. The Gospels and epistles offer little by way of brochure details for those contemplating travel to this faraway heaven. In this they mirror their Jewish roots. What they do say is confused, woolly and sometimes downright contradictory. No iconic picture emerges. You take your pick of the options on offer – as indeed Christians have done ever after.

The New Testament gives the overall impression of regarding this particular aspect of eternal life as of little more than academic importance. Certainly there are few echoes of the detail-encrusted dreams of Enoch. Yet at the same time, Jesus and his followers operated within a society where the popularity of inter-testamental literature demonstrates a healthy appetite for speculation about what life after death would be like. The Gospels report that Jesus was occasionally drawn into debates about the nature of heaven. Even in these, though, there is a vagueness, especially around the use of the phrases ‘the kingdom of God’ and ‘the kingdom of heaven’. While the former carries with it the sense of an alternative to secular and prevailing attitudes, and hence could exist on earth, it is also often used interchangeably with ‘the kingdom of heaven’ as a description of a better and separate place ruled over by God.

The confusion seems to revolve around two issues – first fudging the Jewish idea of a renewed earth under direct rule by God so as to embrace it in an all-inclusive picture of heaven; and second the fervent expectation of the second coming and how the early Christians dealt with the disappointment of those hopes. In Mark’s Gospel, written supposedly by St Peter’s interpreter and dated around AD 64, Jesus refers continually to the kingdom of God rather than of heaven. Yet fifteen years later, in Matthew’s writing, when there still had been no second coming and the leaders of the fledgling Christian community were starting to scratch around for ways of explaining this away, there is a higher incidence of the expression ‘the kingdom of heaven’. It postponed the day when Christianity’s claims would be put to a public test.

In both Matthew and Mark there is an account of a discussion Jesus had with a group of Sadducees about the potential fate of a much-married widow in heaven. However, Luke’s later account, said to be written around the same time as Matthew, is the fullest and most intriguing:

Some Sadducees – those who say that there is no resurrection – approached him [Jesus] and they put this question to him, ‘Master, we have it from Moses in writing that if a man’s married brother dies childless, the man must marry the widow to raise up children for his brother. Well then, there were seven brothers; the first, having married a wife, died childless. The second and then the third married the widow. And the same with all seven, they died leaving no children. Finally the woman herself died. Now, at the resurrection, to which of them will she be wife since she had been married to all seven?’

Jesus replied, ‘The children of this world take wives and husbands, but those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the dead do not marry because they can no longer die, for they are the same as angels, and being children of the resurrection they are sons of God. And Moses himself implies that the dead rise again, in the passage about the bush where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is God, not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all men are in fact alive.’ (Luke 20:27–38)

By rejecting the Sadducees’ question – which was clearly a carefully baited trap – Jesus directly questioned a whole barrowload of Jewish notions about the afterlife. If the hereafter has no place for the recreation of earthly relationships, then the time-honoured link with ancestors (implicit in the command to raise your dead brother’s children and much treasured by the Sadducees) is of no importance. Moreover, the breaking of that bond only serves to emphasise Jesus’ description of heaven as somewhere entirely other – not of this world, not concerned with this world, and certainly not a recreation, however cleaned up and diamond-clad; the standard view of the apocalyptic writers. In effect he was saying, yes, there was life after death, but not life as we know it.

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)

With no precise location of this heaven ‘in the air’ and ‘in the clouds’ mentioned elsewhere, Paul might well have been speaking metaphorically, but both the apostle and Jesus were utterly at one in emphasising the central importance of being with God in heaven and in dismissing Jewish hopes for an earthly messianic kingdom. From the perspective of earth, Paul wrote in one of his best-known phrases that we can only imagine meeting God as ‘we see through a glass, darkly’. However, he gave the theocentric line an imaginative new gloss: God’s kingdom, he argued, was already here in one form because Christ was everywhere where people worshipped him and praised him. (This interpretation may indeed be what the author of Luke is driving at when he has Jesus speak of the ‘God of the living’.) Heaven, by contrast, would bear little resemblance to this life because, according to Paul, our resurrected bodies would not be our earthly ones.

For we know that when the tent that we live in on earth is folded up, there is a house built by God for us, an everlasting home not made by human hands, in the heavens. In this present state, it is true, we groan as we wait with longing to put on our heavenly home over the other; we should like to be found wearing clothes and not be without them. Yes, we groan and find it a burden being still in this tent, not that we want to strip it off, but to put on the second garment over it and to have what must die taken up into life … we remember that to live in the body means to be exiled from the Lord. (2 Cor 5:1–7)

The Acts of the Apostles tells us that Paul was a tent-maker by trade, so the metaphor he uses is apt. The separation of body and soul was, as we have already seen, a distinctly Greek idea, especially in the hands of Plato, and Paul knew Greek as well as any of the early Christian leaders. His talk, of a ‘spiritual body’, however, was never precise or well-defined. And his insistence that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom’ (1 Cor 15:50) was strangely at odds with his focus on the image of the risen Christ – who ascended to heaven body and soul.

Indeed there is a good deal of confusion in Paul’s writings, for two verses further on, he states that the dead would be raised ‘imperishable … because our present perishable nature must put on imperishability’. This sounds suspiciously like bodily resurrection. Paul may have spoken Greek, have read Plato, and been influenced by him on the separation of body and soul, but he was also a Jew and Jews did not split up humanity in this fashion. Some argue that the distinction he was making was between ‘flesh’ (sarx), by which he meant the whole human being, body and soul, turned away from God, and ‘spirit’ (pneuma) the whole human being, body and soul, turned towards God.

‘Conceivably, had Paul known about atoms and molecules,’ writes E. P. Sanders, the American religious historian and admirer of Paul, ‘he would have put all this in different terms. What he is affirming and denying is clear: resurrection means transformed body, not walking corpse or disembodied spirit. We can hardly criticise him for not being able to define “spiritual body” more clearly. His information on the topic was almost certainly derived entirely from his experience of encountering the risen Lord.’

In spiritual man, then, Paul could have been suggesting an entirely new kind of human being, for whom there were no adequate words, essentially a transcendent being. Such a radical thought could then be placed alongside Paul’s habit of invoking other notions similarly revolutionary (for his time) – namely that there were no divisions between men and women, slave or freeman, Jew or Gentile.

The same might be said about the passage in his Second Letter to the Corinthians which links in closely with this line of thought. Here Paul wrote of a man (taken by many to be a thinly veiled reference to Paul himself) who ‘was caught up into paradise’ where he ‘heard things which must not and cannot be put into human language’ and therefore about which he refused to speak when he returned to earth. One approach would be to deduce that here Paul was offering an early hint of what came to be called ‘Jewish Throne Mysticism’. This entailed an inward trip, rather like the Buddhist search for nirvana, but done in the form of a symbolic ascent to a place of greater knowledge undertaken within this life. Paul was then encountering heaven, or salvation, but doing so within himself in a mystical form, a theory not wholly inconsistent with the ideas found in the Paulian writing we have already looked at.

Mysticism has traditionally been a difficult concept for the monotheistic creeds to cope with because it cuts against their practical, naturalistic, action-reward philosophies and their taste for the literal. Yet it is ever-present in the history of heaven down the ages. Derived from the Greek verb musteion, meaning to close the eyes or mouth, mysticism generally refers to an experience of darkness or silence. It has been one of the main ways in which various religious traditions have attempted to explain the inner world of the psyche and the imagination in relation to a deity, and it has obvious parallels with modern-day psychoanalysis.

In the second and third centuries Judaism developed a strong and well-recorded mystical bent as a way of turning away from external realities of political persecution towards a more powerful internalised divine realm. This may already have been around in Paul’s time. The throne of God in this strand of theology was approached via an often terrifying but explicitly imaginary, inward journey through seven heavens. Throne Mysticism thrived within Judaism and even inside the great rabbinic academies until it was overtaken by a new form of mysticism, Kabbalah, in the twelfth century. Karen Armstrong places it in a wider context which links Judaism with other belief systems.

The visions are not ends in themselves, but means to an ineffable religious experience that exceeds normal concepts. They will be conditioned by the particular religious tradition of the mystic. A Jewish visionary will see visions of the seven heavens because his religious imagination is stocked with these particular symbols. Buddhists see various images of Buddhas … Christians visualise the Virgin Mary. It is a mistake for the visionary to see these mental apparitions as objective or as anything more than a symbol of transcendence. Since hallucination is often a pathological state, considerable skill and mental balance is required to handle and interpret the symbols that emerge during the course of concentrated meditation and inner reflection.

(from A History of God)

Hence, arguably, St Paul’s reticence and refusal to go into detail. His experience had frightened him. However, the episode potentially offers a bridge between Judeo-Christian images of heaven and Eastern concepts of nirvana. Moreover, it brings monotheism and pantheism closer together. Islam too, as we shall see, had a similar tradition with Muhammad ascending symbolically to heaven where he saw and yet did not see the divine presence. That final lack of precision is key to identifying Throne Mysticism. The author must struggle but fail to find the right words, whether it be because they are unsure about what exactly they are seeing, or whether, like St Paul, they simply refuse to go into detail.

On another level, Jewish Throne Mysticism links the outward search for a blueprint of heaven with an acknowledgement that afterlife can only ever, for the living, be an imaginary thing, a type of contemplative experience. This is an important thought to keep in mind when examining the final book of the Bible, Revelation. The traditional view is that Revelation was written by the apostle John in the closing years of the first century, when he had been exiled to the Greek island of Patmos. As a source of inspiration to a Christian church then being persecuted by the Romans, he sent out a vision of the final victory of God to the seven churches of Asia. The basis of this judgement is not obvious from the text, religious scholars point out, and the only consensus is that the author was a person called John who considered himself called to be a prophet. Arguably the Bible’s only thorough-going apocalyptic text, Revelation postdated both Paul and the Gospels, and its picture of heaven is clearly governed more by political realities of the time than by any pure or philosophical vision of paradise. Heaven is described in such a way as to cast a poor light on the fate of the late first-century Israel and to mark a stark contrast with the Roman world. If it was composed, as has been suggested, during the persecution of Domitian (AD 51–96), then the terrible fate of the damned towards the end of the book could be read as a quite unholy fantasy about what Christians would like to do to their persecutors if they ever got the chance.