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.