I suppose, at this point, we'll keep getting Ehrman books until they stop selling. The problem with that is each of his books proves itself more inane than the last, so we're going to keep getting hot air filling the shelves. The opening salvo in this book is laughable, as is the entire approach of "not a biblical doctrine, it's a cultural invention." Get out of town.

I liked this book though I did find the reading quite dry at times. I definitely recommend for anyone interested in the subject matter.

I wanted to like this book but I felt that it didn't really give a lot of new info about the subject. To be fair, my undergraduate degree was in religious studies. However, I think the information about the views of the afterlife in the Western tradition presented in this book are well known. That brings up my second issue with this book: it's focused exclusively on the Western religious traditions. I would have loved if Ehrman had a discussion about how Eastern religions view life after death. Having a survey of how various religion traditions view death (and a potential afterlife) and how they possibly came to these views would have been fascinating to read. Instead, I feel that Ehrman wrote this book to convince literalist Christians (who I doubt will actually read this book) that heaven and especially hell are later constructs that much of the ancient world didn't believe in. This might be interesting for this audience. However, I doubt it will be a new discovery for typical readers of Ehrman's books.

Bart D. Ehrman is one of my favorite authors on the history of religion (along with Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels) and this book did not disappoint. Scholarly but still accessible for the lay reader, this exploration of the history of the afterlife in the Judeo Christian tradition is the only book you'll need to understand how we arrived here today, as well as how far we've come from the beliefs held at the various times the scriptures were written.

Fascinating, challenging, well-documented, but incomplete

Humans have entertained hopes--and fears--of an afterlife across all cultures and time periods. The good news of Bart D. Ehrman's book is that "there is nothing to fear" in a next life--no flames of eternal torment, no punitive forms of hellfire and damnation--but the good news is also the bad news: there is NOTHING after this life. This is his reasoning, based on a close examination of the beliefs of the ancients, from Egypt to Greece, Sophocles to the epistle-writing evangelist Paul. He does not mention Hinduism, Buddhism, or other religions where an afterlife without the possibility of eternal damnation is a possibility.

Ehrman does an excellent job of arguing that the Biblical view of hell does not hold water. Christians will either dismiss it outright or find their beliefs challenged. And when faced with the idea that there is no such place as hell, the idea of heaven plummets along with it. This may be traumatic for those born into the Christian faith, as I was, but from earliest memory, I questioned the strange ideas I was being exhorted to believe. The Bible struck me as being full of contradictions, man-made rationalizations, lame explanations, and a sad paucity of historical and scientific veracity to help me make sense of the extraordinary claims we must embrace or be damned.

Reading this book left me feeling dejected for a short time, but I hurried to the internet in search of reasons to believe there is some kind of life after death. I've read Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza; I don't understand New Age physics or any kind of physics, but I'm willing to believe science has shown us that there is no reason to believe no part of us survives the death of the body.

A Huffington post article by Scott S. Smith ("Is There Evidence of Life After Death?" 02/21/2017) may be reassuring, especially this line of thought:

"The likelihood of human survival of death does not explicitly provide evidence for God or any particular religious philosophy. However, it would be evidence that the global phenomenon of belief in the supernatural has a grounding in some kind of alternate reality that deserves more study."

Ehrman's "Heaven and Hell" certainly convince me that the Biblical view is not believable, but his own personal conclusion that there is nothing after this life is not so clearly reasoned. I'm torn between four vs five stars because of Ehrman's lack of attention to (disregard for?) other world religions and contemporary views on the physics of life.

In all, this is an excellent historical look at some but not all of the major world views on life and death. Far from complete, it is compelling and all but Ehrman's one paragraph on his own personal conclusions make this a must-read.

My first encounter with Bart Ehrman was his Misquoting Jesus, which I was given as a gift and found to be an excellent read. I've read almost everything he's published since then. His work is never "bad," but its strengths are uneven. Lost Christianities, like Misquoting Jesus, was brilliant. Other titles, like Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene feel less substantial: some interesting ideas spun out into a book-length work when they could have been effectively presented in a briefer fashion. Heaven and Hell is interesting, but it does fall into that second category, a book that feels longer than it needs to be in order to make its points.

Heaven and Hell explores the evolution of the Christian concept of the afterlife going back to pre-Christianity, the early Jewish world, as well as Greece and Rome. As always, Ehrman's writing shakes up what seemed to be solid ground, showing us that what seems obvious today wasn't always obvious. Heaven and Hell offers a multitude of perspectives on the afterlife, from viewing it as annihilation to a sort of grey half-life to eternities of great cruelty or reward. The material is fascinating, but I didn't need 352 pages to understand what Ehrman is presenting. I would have enjoyed some deeper digging with more detailed historical and textual discussion to fill out those 352 pages.

I received a free review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley. The opinions are my own.