... a fulsome sweep through the biblical, philosophical, and literary canon.

... will rankle his longtime fundamentalist Christian antagonists and amuse his typically liberal and secularist devotees.

Bart D Ehrman’s latest work of popular scholarship is boldly subtitled A History of the Afterlife, but it is a history in only the most rudimentary sense. An unsatisfying read, Heaven and Hell is more of a bulked-up timeline, which evades close historical work and nuanced contextual thought by either dismissing the possibility of such work or wilfully misunderstanding the nature and function of literary texts.

Heaven and Hell is not an easy read. Rather than a developmental chronology, Mr. Ehrman jumps back and forth between various periods. I was quite surprised that he virtually ignores the influence of Egypt. The most glaring omission in this book is the absence of the evolution of the power that became the Devil. The Devil arrived late in human history (our modern concept is not found in the Jewish Scriptures).

[Ehrman] is a fine writer who shuns theological jargon and knows how to bring himself, very occasionally, into the story.

Ehrman’s subtitle is a bit misleading, since it’s not an actual history of these places.

Ehrman...is a skilled and erudite revealer of patterns and oddities found in the bible.

This is a wide-ranging survey.

In this enlightening survey of human understanding of the afterlife, Ehrman...offers a persuasive analysis of how the current evangelical Christian understanding of eternal life and eternal damnation developed as well as a well-reasoned critique of that perspective.

Ehrman...skims the surface in this offering for general readers.