Monday, January 6, 2020

Eliezer Gonzalez and texts that purportedly teach "heaven going" at the moment of death


Commenting on a minority of texts that, at first blush, may appear to suggest “the immediate ascent of the righteous into the presence of God” (i.e., heaven itself), Eliezer Gonzalez, in a study on the fate of the dead in North African Christianity in the third century wrote:

These include Luke 23:43; Eph 2:6 (cv. Col 2); Heb 12:18-23; Rev 6:9-11. Those who wish to understand these passages as referring to an immediate post-mortem ascent to heaven must also necessarily classify them as exceptions to the explicit majority teachings of Jesus and Paul. Rather, it is far preferable to attempt to understand these references, as with 2 Cor 5:1-8, within the traditional, Pharisaic and Jewish terms of an eschatological resurrection within the context of an essentially monistic anthropology. As an example, Luke 23:43 represents a particularly interesting statement by Jesus to the thief on the cross. However, it should not be decontextualized, in its exegesis, in a way that sets it against Jesus’ explicit teachings on the afterlife, and the balance of the explicit teachings of the New Testament. (Eliezer Gonzalez, The Fate of the Dead in Early Third Century North African Christianity [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2-14], 51 n. 85, emphasis in original)