The Omnipresent Fear of Death
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2023
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As far back as we have literary reports -- beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh, our earliest surviving narrative, written centuries before the oldest accounts of the Bible -- humans have feared death more than almost anything.
Many people fear the process of dying; others fear facing eternal torment; yet others fear the void, the idea of non-existence.
In this episode we talk about ancient reflections on death and about why some stalwart souls insisted that in fact there was nothing to fear.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:07.2 | The only show, where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, |
| 0:13.3 | uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. |
| 0:23.4 | Let's begin. Welcome back, everybody, to misquoting Jesus. The preoccupation with mortality is one of the |
| 0:31.0 | most enduring features of humanity. We see it in literature from around the world, dating almost as far back as the |
| 0:36.7 | invention of writing. |
| 0:38.2 | What role did this fear play in the development of Christianity, and did the Christian afterlife |
| 0:42.7 | provide an incentive for non-Christians to convert? |
| 0:46.3 | Before we get onto that uplifting and charming topic, though, but, hello, how are you this week? |
| 0:50.9 | I'm fine. I actually, I've not been obsessing about death this week, but I have been thinking a lot about |
| 0:57.0 | age. |
| 0:58.0 | My daughter just turned 43, and I'm thinking, yeah, wait, how'd that happen? |
| 1:04.0 | And then, like, the day before, my, I got a student in one of my classes who came up to me, |
| 1:10.0 | and she's telling me she liked my |
| 1:11.8 | classes and she said that her father had taken two classes with me. |
| 1:16.8 | And when she told me when it was, I realized, huh, that was eight years after I started teaching |
| 1:21.9 | here. |
| 1:23.3 | I was like, oh my God, there's something wrong with this picture. |
| 1:27.8 | How are you doing? You look ageless. Oh, well, that's very kind of people. It's like, oh my God. There's nothing wrong with this picture. How are you doing? |
| 1:28.5 | You look ageless. |
| 1:30.0 | Oh, well, that's very kind of you. |
| 1:31.3 | It's the wonders of makeup because I don't sleep always because I have small babies who yell a lot at nighttime. |
... |
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