ABSTRACT
Even though their existence is no longer universally accepted, heaven and hell are still very much alive in Western civilisation. Priests and ministers often refer to them (if, admittedly, less to hell), literature uses them as metaphors, and the cinema even occasionally tries to represent them. Our ideas about the afterlife are part of the legacy of Christianity. As the first Christians were Jews, who lived in an area, Palestine, which at the time of Jesus was already heavily influenced by Greek culture,1 we might have expected that both Greece and Israel – or at least one of them – always had fully developed ideas about the soul and the afterlife. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Heaven, hell and the immortal soul were all relative latecomers in the ancient world. Where, then, did these concepts come from and why did they develop? It is these questions which have stimulated me to write this study. Naturally, a book based on a series of lectures can only be selective. That is why I will start with a short, panoramic survey of the development of the soul (section 1) and afterlife (section 2) among the Greeks and Jews (section 3) of the pre-Christian era. This survey will provide the reader with the necessary background against which the succeeding chapters (section 4) have to be seen.
