Your Soul After Death is a Slippery Idea

I subscribe to a blog site of author, professor and public speaker, Bart Ehrman. I will reference the site once in a while but to read his entire blog on some topic you will need to send money to his charity fund.

Ehrman has been writing about the common practice of church goers to believe almost passionately  the Bible says something which it does not. One such thing is about the afterlife.

Most Christians today believe the soul separates from the body at death--the body stays on earth and rots away. The soul, most believe, is something like the body. That is it can see, speak, hear and recognize other from life and they recognize you.

Ehrman says this is exactly the opposite of what Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15 and what Jesus is claimed to have preached. They preached the body and soul are one unit for eternity. What some would call "true Christianity" is not the soul separating from the body, it is the opposite of what most of the faithful believe today. References to the one unit body and soul began to appear about 250 years prior to the alleged time of Jesus.

The body/soul afterlife was so controversial at the time non Christians made fun of it. It was so outrageous it did not stand up over the two centuries and now is not believed by the faithful today, even though it is part of the Christian tradition.

That the faithful have changed from an earlier belief in the one unit body/soul but also believe the old myth, "the faith never changes", is not unusual. It is one issue we can add to the list of original beliefs too preposterous to stand up over time.

Comments

  1. Ardy BAugust 24, 2019 at 9:38 AM

    “In spite of the erroneous teaching of “Jehovah’s Witnesses” and of other false sects that “no man has a soul,” the Bible states emphatically that man was created a trinity of spirit, soul, and body even as the eternal God is Himself a trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”, https://bible.org/seriespage/2-man-trinity-spirit-soul-body Most [true sect] diagrams depicting the Christian triune man have the body containing the soul and the soul containing the spirit. What then a diagram of the triune eternal God? None of this makes much sense to me but I enjoy the exchange of ideas. At death I guess the outer shell man-body falls away and the man-soul containing the man-spirit migrates to the after-death-life. For the no soul 'false sects' maybe the man-body falls away and the man-spirit migrates to the after-death-life. If I were to create a triune man diagram I would put the man-spirit as the outer shell, which includes the man-soul, which includes, at the core, the man-body. When the core man-body dies so goes the rest. All is body. Nothing to fear. We may know we're dying but we won't know we're dead. Now there's a Slippery Idea.

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