The Gospel Is Not About What Happens When You Die

The Gospel is not about what happens when you die.  I don't know for certain what happens when you die, but, our science to date has been unable to show that anything happens beyond our brain losing all cognitive functioning and our body rotting away.  A lot of study has gone into spiritualism and the paranormal over the years, but it has never been able to sustain itself as a science, and no compelling evidence of intelligence or life beyond the grave has ever been found.  However, who knows for sure.  Recent scientific theory and research has suggested that, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” (Attributed to Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington).  Time, it is proposed, is only perceived by us to be linear.  And then there is the "spooky action" of particles that act in accordance with other particles separated by great distances.

http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/heaven-is-not-for-real/

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This I do know; the subject of the Gospels is not what happens when you die.  The main point of the good news is not that you will literally live forever and be spared eternal torture in the next life if you utter the correct magic incantation.  How is it good news that God finds you born worthy only of never ending punishment because of an action by your distant ancestor and will only relent in everlasting cruelty if you perform a rite revealed only to a certain segment of a single religion?   The good news is much better and more transformative than that.

So, what about all those references in the Gospels to an afterlife, you might ask.  To begin with, you have to remember that Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi and wisdom teacher who belonged to post-exilic Rabbinical Judaism.  He and his early followers saw themselves as thoroughly part of that religion and tradition.  Wisdom teachers in that tradition frequently used the telling of popular stories, parables, and myths with their own twist in order to make a point, or bring a different perspective to light.

One of the best examples of this from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures, is the story of Noah, which is a retelling of the story of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, fragments of which have been found on tablets dated around 2,000 B.C., and which was also retold by the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians.  This story was never meant to portray a factual account of some literal historic event.  Its importance is in the way it was retold and interpreted by the Hebrew people.  My Old Testament Studies professor, a Jewish Rabbi, contended that the main theme in the Tanakh is the Covenant between God and the Hebrew people, and that most of the Scriptures are a casting of the experience of the Hebrew people in the light of the fulfillment of that Covenant.  When Israel is defeated or under attack, undergo famine or disease, it is explained as being the result of the people or their leader falling short on their side of the Covenant.  Seen this way, the story of Noah is an explanation of why God does not finally and completely punish the Hebrew people, or humanity as a whole, for not following his ways.  According to this parable, the nature of God is such that if he ever did do this, he would only become more compassionate and promise to never do it again.
http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/flood-myths-who-believes-in-noahs-ark-and-why/

Secondly, one needs to be aware that an afterlife was not a theme in the Rabbinical Jewish tradition that Jesus and his followers belonged to.  After death was only sheol, the grave.  The Hebrew tradition and Tanakh is all about their Covenant and relationship with God in  life.  I can only imagine that they steered clear of any suggestion of an afterlife in reaction to the prominent place the idea held in the religion of their oppressors in Egypt.  As a result, the closest thing to an afterlife in the Tanakh is where Elijah is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind.  However, he didn't experience a life beyond death, he just didn't die.

There are only two references in the Old Testament that could be said to refer to an afterlife and these are more Persian influenced references to a resurrection in some future time rather than an immediate transition to another conscious reality at the point of death. The first is: “Thy dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise, awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust, for thy dew is as the dew of light, and the earth shall bring to life the shades” (Isaiah 26:19); and the second: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence” (Daniel 12:2).

Outside of the Rabbinic Literature, there is a doctrine in Jewish eschatology of Resurrection, where in a future age the dead will rise from their graves to live again.  This idea was closely associated with the doctrine of the Messiah and would be a ready store of allusions for the Gospel writers who cast Jesus in the Messiah role.

Stories and myths about an afterlife in Jesus time, however, mainly came from other religions and traditions; the Egyptian stories of the Field of Reeds where the soul went to enjoy a continued existence without sickness or disappointment for eternity, or the Greek myths of Hades where there were different planes of existence the dead could inhabit depending on how they had lived their life on earth.  The Roman city of Sepphoris, the capital of the Galilee province, a hotbed of Hellenistic culture, was only five kilometers away from Nazareth.  Jesus and his audience would have been quite familiar with the Greek stories about an afterlife.

Like the good Jewish wisdom teacher he was, Jesus used the popular stories, myths and ideas his audience were familiar with, giving them his own twist to illustrate his ideas and perception of reality. The writers of the Gospels did the same thing using allusions to these stories in their metaphorized accounts of Jesus' life and actions.  Marcus Borg in his writing uses the example of the parable of the prodigal son to demonstrate how a story in Scripture does not have to be literal in order to illustrate truths.  No one would say that because the family in the parable were not literal historical figures and that the narrative told is not a recording of actual historical events that the point it was meant to illuminate is not "true".  Many Christians, however, do not seem able to accept metaphor and allegory in the Scriptures where the text is not clearly identified as being a parable.

So what references to these stories from other cultures and religions about an afterlife were made in the Gospels?  There is the example of Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke.  In this parable, the rich man and Lazarus both die and experience an afterlife where they are judged and sent to different planes of existence dependent on how they had lived their life on earth like in the Greek myths of Hades.  This is obviously a parable and shows up in Luke among a collection of parables.  It doesn't make sense to interpret it as Jesus giving a science lesson on the actual workings of what happens when people die.  The point being illustrated is that wealth and luxury are not rewards from God to the righteous and that failure to look after the poor and suffering is worthy of punishment (at least, that's how I interpret it).

Awhile back I read, "The Meaning of Jesus", co-authored by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright, a former bishop of Durham in the Church of England. In this book, Wright argues that popular Christian thinking about the afterlife is all wrong and that the correct theological view would be that we don't go to heaven when we die, but are "asleep" until the Resurrection and heaven comes down to earth.  He expounds on this further in his book, "Surprised by Hope".

To me, resurrection is not the main message of the Gospels, but a literary device to, on the one hand affirm the legitimacy of Jesus' teaching by linking him to the popular messianic doctrine of the time, and on the other hand act as a metaphor for the "new life" found in following his teachings.  The earliest Gospel written, the Gospel of Mark, originally ended with a young man in a white robe telling the women visiting Jesus' tomb that Jesus had risen and gone ahead of them into Galilee.  The subsequent verses about Jesus' appearances to the disciples are not found in the earliest manuscripts.  This further suggests to me that Resurrection was not the main message, but a device to validate the message.

The main message is Jesus' revelation of the character of God, what is legitimate and right, as primarily loving, generous, tolerant and forgiving, and that new life awaits those who emulate those qualities and put their trust in them.  Seeing the world through this perspective is sight to the blind and walking in the light.  This is life everlasting with the actions flowing from this spirit affecting the lives of others and bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth well after the death of the body.  "Waking" to this reality is the true resurrection and is not about what happens when you die.