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Immortality refers to a person’s survival of bodily death and ability to gain eternal life. This religious idea of escaping mortality and hoping for immortality has a long and complicated history. Several aspects are found in the Bible and in early Christian literature.Ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish Ideas of ImmortalityAlready in Homeric times, the souls of the dead were believed to survive the death of the body and go to the underworld, where they became shades (Hom. Il. 1.1–5). However, for many Greeks such a disembodied shadowy state did not mean a real and full exis…

The afterlife is the continued existence of human beings after physical death, either in a specific realm or on the earth. It can also be called “life after death,” “the hereafter,” or “the postmortem existence.” The early Christian belief in an afterlife is manifested in several aspects: various ideas of the abode of the dead, an intermediate state of the deceased between their death and their final destiny as well as their final eschatological state, and forms of afterlife existence.OriginsEarly Christian views on the afterlife mostly originated in the cultural-religious…

Gehenna is a term for the place of punishment of the wicked in Judaism and early Christianity. It takes its name from a valley near Jerusalem, which later, due to its evil reputation as the place of idolatrous practices, was transformed into the place of final destiny and punishment of the wicked, that is, to hell.…

The general resurr…

Hades (ᾅδης) is a traditional Greek term for the underworld as the abode of the dead. In the Septuagint this term corresponds to Hebrew שְׁאוֹל/ š ĕôl…