When in 1498, during his third voyage, Christopher Columbus reached the gulf of Paria at the mouth of the Orinoco river (in what is now Venezuala) he thought that he had found the outward traces of the Garden of Eden, the biblical earthly paradise. Although he believed the garden itself must lie further inland and be situated high up, he thought that the waters of the Orinoco river he saw coming down to form the gulf must come from the primeval river that flowed out of Eden. He wrote in his journal I do not suppose that the earthly Paradise is in the form of a rugged mountain, as the descriptions of it have made it appear, but that it is on the summit of the spot which I have described as being in the form of the stalk [or stem end] of a pear; the approach to it from a distance must be by a constant and gradual ascent; but I believe that, as I have already said, no one could ever reach the top; I think also that the water I have described may proceed from it, though it be far off, and that stopping at the place I have just left, it forms this lake. It might seem incredible that an explorer like Columbus, intelligent and knowledgeable, would think that he had found the Garden of Eden. The most obvious question is why he or anyone else would ever have thought that the Garden of Eden was located in South America? The answer of course is that Columbus didn't know he had discovered the Americas - he was hoping to reach China and India (i.e. the 'East') by sailing west, and the biblical story located Eden in the east. It made perfect sense to Columbus that by sailing to the furthest point east he could imagine, he might discover the location of paradise But more fundamentally we might wonder why Columbus imagined he might find paradise on earth in the first place. Wasn't Eden a mythical garden? Wasn't it part of the primeval history in the book of Genesis, that collection of mythological stories about creation of the cosmos in seven days, the formation of the first humans out of clay and bones, impossible towers to heaven and a world-wide flood that wiped out all living creatures except those who were hiding in the giant boat Noah made (and the fish!). Why in the 15th century would an intelligent cultured European explorer think that he had found the mythical land of Eden? And the answer to that is that ever since the book of Genesis was written countless Jewish and Christian readers of that story in the subsequent centuries continued to believe that the Garden of Eden, paradise, was a real place, a location in space and time. Even though the story tells us that the garden God made was 'far, far away' and 'long, long ago' it was, in their minds, nonetheless a real place, where two historical human beings had once lived and where events took place that were drastically to shape their own history. Some writers and thinkers reflected on that story and believing that it was a story about a real place in the real world and reading that the tree of life had once stood there in the centre of the garden, began to imagine ways in which human beings might find their way back to paradise and to that tree which would heal them of their terrible propensity to die! Paradise became the object of intense speculation and aspiration. People believed that it still existed and they wanted to go back there. And so, over the centuries, people wrote stories trying to describe what may or may not have happened to Adam and Eve during their time in the garden and afterwards; they wrote imaginary visionary tales in which biblical heroes were taken by angels to visit the paradise garden; some people thought about how they could get to paradise without physically going there i.e by ascending to paradise through contemplation of the divine throne/chariot (that Ezekiel had seen); and, in the medieval era, people drew maps of the world in which paradise always featured at the top, as the historical and theological 'starting point' of the history of the world. When Columbus sailed to 'the east' (in a westerly direction!) he was fully aware that he was heading towards that 'far away and long ago place' where paradise lay. I have no idea whether he expected to find it on his voyages but when he discovered the rich, luxuriant beauty of the new land and saw the great Orinoco river flowing into the gulf of Paria, he had no problem in thinking that he had found the earthly paradise or, at least, signs of its proximity. In this post I want to explore the way in which the story of that first garden in Genesis came to have such powerful effect on subsequent expectation in Judaism and Christianity that one day we might find our way back there, and how the nature of the Genesis story laid the foundations for the subsequent paradise tradition. In chapter two of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible we read that at the beginning, before anything else lived or grew on the earth, God made a man and placed him in his garden somewhere in 'the east', a term which calls to mind the idea of 'far, far away' and 'long long ago'. The garden was created in a place called Eden, a word whose root means 'fertility' or 'abundance' or 'gladness'. In this far away garden of joy and abundance God placed the man, the adam, to cultivate and guard it. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Genesis 2.8-9 NRSV Location, LocationThe terms 'in the east' and 'eden' are not primarily geographical terms. The writer was not trying to help locate the garden on a map. Eden means joy or gladness and the word translated east is also sometimes translated as 'long ago', or 'of old'. The word gives the impression of far away in space and time. The writer is not primarily interested in where the garden was, but rather with what went on in the garden. But having acknowledged that, it is nevertheless true that that the garden is described as a place in space and time. Eden becomes not just a metaphor for gladness and abundance but a place where gladness and abundance were once experienced. And the reference to the easterly location refers not just to distance but to proximity. Not proximity to us or to the readers, of course, but to the edge, to the edge of the (flat, disc-like) world and therefore closeness to heaven. In the ancient Hebrew cosmology the earth was thought of as flat and the heavens were imagined as the vast dome-like structure which sat like a bowl on top of the disc of the earth. You can read more about that cosmology here. God lived above, in the heavens, and so was both far removed from and also near the earth. Where the dome of the firmament met the disc of the earth there was access between heaven and earth. To locate the garden of God in the east was to set it near the home of God. This was God's garden. He planted it and he made a man to work it! The east may have set paradise in a far away time and place but it also located it, at the edge. But we discover as we read on that it had even more definite geographical connections with the earth with which the readers would have been familiar. From this garden a river flowed which became the source of four other great rivers. A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. Genesis 2.10-14 NRSV Two of these rivers are well known; the Tigris and the Euphrates. The other two, the Pishon and the Gihon are less easy to identify. Some commentators identified these as the Indus and the Nile respectively and if so the first readers would have thought of Eden as the source of the four great rivers that watered the whole of the Ancient Near Eastern world. Every land known to the readers would have some blessing from these waters and therefore some 'connection' to Eden's garden. But it is also quite possible that the names Gihon and Pishon wouldn't have rung any bells for readers, that they are simply poetic, rhyming names which indicate places of mystery and 'otherness'. Thus the story pulls the reader in by speaking of great rivers known to everyone and then speaks of mysterious rivers yet to be discovered! But even so, these rivers watered apparently 'real' places, the lands of Havilah and Cush, Havilah was probably a reference to Southern Arabia, famous for its great wealth of precious stones, and Cush may have referred either to a location in Mesopotamia or to Ethiopia. Even these places are somewhat mysterious but the vagueness of these place names and their locations doesn't detract from the important point the writer is making; this place, this primeval garden was not a 'made-up' land that lay outside of the created cosmos. In the Genesis story, this is a garden or park (a real space of recognisable form and function), which inhabits a specific (although un-findable) geographical location beyond the experience of any living person. From that garden, the story says, there still flows the great original river that feeds the other rivers that water the known world. If all this seems rather strange we shouldn't forget that in that time people depended completely on personal experience for their knowledge of the world. There were no maps, no TV programs about far away places no printed books and little formal education. Places were real because you visited them (and very few people travelled) or because people came from these other places and they described these places to you. For most of those who heard this story the known world was full of 'mythical' places, places they knew (probably) existed but had great difficulty in relating to their everyday, 'real' lives. Later, in the medieval era in Europe, when people tried to describe the world through maps, they did so from the perspective of faith. They tried to describe the world, not primarily geographically but from the point of view of the spread of the gospel. The world they pictured was a real one (otherwise no one would have felt any connection to their lives) but it was represented in such a way as to emphasis the story of salvation, beginning of course with the Garden of Eden which was located at the top of these maps, at the beginning of everything. These maps were oriented with north at the far left and therefore east was always at the top. Usually paradise or Eden was represented as a separate vignette, connected to the world and yet not really part of it, with the gates and walls of paradise, Adam and Eve and usually the tree from which they ate, all pictured. Vignette of paradise (possibly by Leonardo Bellini) on the Fra Mauro World Map 1450. As in many medieval world maps paradise (with walls and gates) is connected to the known world but not part of it. It exits on the edge. An angel guards the gates. The river flows out to source the four great rivers. To sum up, the Garden of Eden was a real place, a location on the created world. It was far, far away and inaccessible but it existed . . . . somewhere. Markus Bockmuehl puts it like this However, for many and perhaps a majority of both Jews and Christians from antiquity to the modern period, paradise was at least in principle a real place somewhere on this earth. Not, to be sure, a location straightforwardly accessible by conventional modes of travel, but on earth nonetheless, and at least in principle reachable. Legends from widely differing centuries affirm that heroic individuals from Seth to Alexander the Great and beyond traveled there. In that sense the geographic inaccessibility of the earthly paradise is not unlike that of other high mountains and distant lands. Terra incognita it may have been, but terra nevertheless. Markus Bockmuehl in Paradise in Antiquity p 194. The Good LifeSo, for the writer of the Eden story, the garden was a real (if slightly hazy) place. As such it was the original home of mankind. Here God placed the man, the adam, and here God made all the animals and then, the first woman, the eve. Here the man and the woman found delight in one another, managed the garden as the stewards or vice-regents of God, and lived in a state of moral perfection, as indicated by their lack of shame - they were naked. Everything worked in this garden. The trees and plants were fruitful and abundant and easy to cultivate and harvest. The animals didn't pose any kind of threat to the humans (just as the man and woman posed no threat to the animals - it appears that they were vegetarians!) and the human couple lived in harmony with one another and with God, who, we are told, used to visit His garden in the evenings, when the soft breeze blew (Genesis 3.8) This was truly a 'garden of delight', as the name Eden indicates. It was a physical location where nothing but joy and happiness were experienced by the two people who lived there (and indeed by everything that lived and grew there). The problem, of course, is that this was not destined to last. Breaking BadThe story goes on to relate how the man and woman were persuaded by the snake (or serpent) to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which probably refers to the knowledge of everything (just as we say 'from A to Z' or everything 'in heaven and earth'). All knowledge was contained within Good and Evil and so, because knowledge is power, they had become like God and so were now unsuited for continued presence in God's garden. God, it seems, was worried that if they stayed and ate the fruit from the other tree in the garden, the tree of life, they would gain, in addition to God-like knowledge, unending life. The only thing that could stop them from becoming rivals to God was the limitation of death, the necessary boundary to such powerful, dangerous lives. If they stayed and ate the fruit of the tree of life there would be no boundary, no limit to their lives and so no limit to the damage they could do. They had to go! Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’--therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. Genesis 3.22-24 NRSV And so they were expelled from the garden to begin a new life 'outside' of paradise, in a world of thorns and pain. They would have faced the reality of ageing and death in the garden - they were not made immortal - but now they had no access to the tree of life which could have sustained their lives forever. Now they would have to deal with death and corruption. The important point to grasp is that the fact that the Garden of Eden had been given a 'geographical' location and the image of the tree there whose fruit could provide uninterrupted life for humanity, turned the garden from an historical reality into a focus of future hope. According to Genesis, paradise was still there. God hadn't destroyed it, or abolished it. Frustratingly, tantalizingly, the power over death was kept locked away in a garden in 'the east'. That tree held the power to defeat death and, with it, all the other forms of 'death' that limited life; disease, tragedy, poverty and childlessness. The garden was still there, somewhere 'in the east' and in that garden was the secret to life in all its fullness. The Tree of LifeThe tree of life then became the focus for hope and longing within Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity and the garden where it still grew became an idealised place where there was no death, only abundance and joy. Such a place could easily become the future hope of the faithful. And so we find in ancient Jewish texts references to the tree of life as the object of the longing and expectation of The Righteous. In a very influential writing known as the Apocalypse of Moses (which is the Greek text version of the Life of Adam and Eve) which fills out the Genesis story and its aftermath, we read this conversation between God and Adam, when Adam is expelled from paradise And the Lord turned and said to Adam "From now on I will not allow you to live in paradise. " So here the writer imagines Adam desperately trying to get some of the fruit from the tree of life before he is kicked out of paradise! He wants the gift of unending life but God tells him he cannot taste it until after the resurrection when, as a resurrected person, he will have full access once again to the garden and be able to eat the fruit of the tree. Clearly the writer is expressing a hope that the resurrection of the dead would be followed by life in the Garden of Eden, paradise, with all that that implied - access to the tree of life and immortality. One of the most striking visions of the tree of life as the object of eschatalogical hope appears in a vision attributed to Enoch in the collection of writings we now call 1 Enoch. In a previous post I tried to describe what Enoch found when he was taken up to heaven. What he found was a world of fire and ice, a vast and terrifying heavenly Temple, totally unsuited to human habitation. Following that tour of heaven, Enoch is taken on a tour of the earth. At one point in this tour he is shown seven mountnains. One of these reaches up to the heavens itself and he discovers that this is the place where God will make his appearance at the the Day of Judgement. There he sees a beautiful, fragrant tree that amazes and delights him: And I proceeded beyond them, and I saw seven glorious mountains, all differing each from the other, whose stones were precious in beauty. And all (the mountains) were precious and glorious and beautiful in appearance—three to the east were firmly set one on the other, and three to the south, one on the other, and deep and rugged ravines, one not approaching the other. The seventh mountain (was) in the middle of these, and it rose above them in height, like the seat of a throne. And fragrant trees encircled it. Among them was a tree such as I had never smelled, and among them was no other like it. It had a fragrance sweeter smelling than all spices, and its leaves and its blossom and the tree never wither. Its fruit is beautiful, like dates of the palm trees. Enoch wonders what kind of tree this is and Michael his angel-guide explains. This high mountain that you saw, whose peak is like the throne of God, is the seat where the Great Holy One, the Lord of glory, the King of eternity, will sit, when he descends to visit the earth in goodness. And (as for) this fragrant tree, no flesh has the right to touch it until the great judgment, in which there will be vengeance on all and a consummation forever. So Michael tells Enoch that the tree is the tree of life and that at the Last Day, the time of eschatalogical judgement of mankind, the fruit of the tree will be the food of the chosen. The effect of eating its fruit will be that they will live long lives and suffer no more torments and plagues. Note that after the great judgement the tree of life will be transplanted to the site of the Temple in Jerusalem where presumably the righteous will henceforth live out their long, plague-free lives.. That theme of access to the tree of life as the hope of the faithful was taken up by christian visionaries too. In John's remarkable vision at the very end of the New Testament, the book of Revelation, he sees a vision of God's kingdom which will be established on the earth after God's victory over the forces of Satan. The kingdom is pictured as a wonderful city. One of the most striking features of this city is that the river of the water of life runs through the centre of the city. Beside the river, with its roots running to both sides, is the tree of life from Eden. Just as Enoch had been promised, the tree has been transplanted to a more urban environment! Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever. Revelation 22.1-5 NRSV So the Christian hope had also incorporated the Eden promise of a tree that gave life. Here we are told that it now has incredible power - that its fruit (or, here, 'leaves') provide healing for the nations. Access to this tree is the promise of Christ to the faithful at the beginning of the book (Revelation 2.7). The Cross and the TreeThe fact that Jesus died on a wooden cross that had once been a living tree combined with the hope that one day the righteous would be saved by the fruit of a tree, inevitably led to a conflation of the two - for some Christians the cross of Christ became the life-giving tree. This was no doubt helped by some linguistic ambiguities in crucial texts cherished by the Christian community. Here, in John's revelation of the end-time City of God, the word he uses for 'tree' is one which usually in Greek refers to dead wood, wood that comes from a tree that has been cut down and is being used for something, just as the cross was. Paul also makes a reference to the 'tree' on which Jesus was crucified (Galatians 3.13-14), a reference not to the Garden of Eden or to the tree of life, but to a text in Deuteronomy, but in an era when commentators didn't look to discover the original context of a verse or text this could easily suggest a link between Calvary and Eden. This link between the cross and the tree of life became a theme in later Christian art as this remarkable image by Giovanni da Modena illustrates. Apologies - this black and white version is the best I can find. Here the two trees of the Garden of Eden are actually merged into one. The tree from which Christ hangs is also the tree of the knowledge of good and evil whose fruit Adam is eating (as indicated by the serpent coiling around it). But it has now become the tree of life through which Christ brings life to the world. Below, a more modern painting by Bradi Barth, is a strikingly beautiful and powerful interpretation of this idea, The theme is something she has returned to several times. Going GreekSo we have seen that in Jewish and Christian traditions the paradise of Eden and its wonderful life-giving tree became a focus for the hope of those who expected some kind of life beyond death. For them The Garden of Eden still existed and it contained the tree that could allow death (and everything death represented) to be defeated. In that glorious garden people could find fulfillment and delight without limit. But because we so often use the word paradise to refer either to a perfect place on earth (with beautiful beaches and endless sunshine) or to heaven, it is easy to forget that for the Jews and Christians of this period (and indeed much later) paradise had only one meaning - the Garden of Eden. This garden was the one and only Paradise (i.e. with a big 'P'). It might help to trace how the word paradise became associated with the garden because that may not be obvious from our bible translations today. The word 'paradise' became linked to the Garden of Eden when the Hebrew bible was translated into Greek, in what was known as the Septuagint translation of the bible. From about the third century B.C. onwards many Jews (or perhaps we should say Judeans, i.e. people from Judea) found themselves living outside Palestine, in other parts of the Graeco-Roman world, some because of forced deportation and some from choice. This spread of the Jews/Judeans has come to be known as the 'diaspora' and these exiles found themselves living mainly in Greek-speaking places like Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria. The apostle Paul was a diaspora Jew from Tarsus. These were Greek-speaking places because they had been conquered by Alexander the Great and with Alexander and his armies went the Greek language. In time these Jewish/Judean communities felt the need for a version of their Bible in this 'new' language of Greek, which was now their language too and so the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. It was this Greek version of the Hebrew Bible that many of the the first Christians (such as Paul) used as their bible and which is still the basis for the version of the Old Testament (as we Christians call it) used by adherents of the Orthodox Church today. When the translators of the Septuagint came to the creation story in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis they used the Greek word paradeisos (parad-eye-sos) to translate the Hebrew word for 'garden'. So when Greek-speaking Jewish readers of the bible read the story they read that God 'planted a paradise in Edem (Eden) towards the east', and that it was into this 'paradise' that God placed Adam. The word paradeisos is a 'loan word' from Persian. That means that the word was originally part of the Old Iranian language where it meant an 'enclosed space' and so, often, a 'park' or an orchard. It was particularly associated with royal parks and gardens. These would have been vast enclosed spaces for the royal family and selected 'big wigs' to enjoy. So, when the translators of the Septuagint used this word to translate 'garden' in Genesis, they probably had in mind the idea of an extensive, walled royal estate or 'park' belonging to God, the 'king'. As the church spread throughout the Greek-speaking Roman empire, the Greek Old Testament became the Bible of the church and now Christians too read that God planted a 'Paradise' in the east and that Adam and Eve had once lived there. But of course, in time, many Christians in the west of the empire needed a reliable version of the bible in the language of the western empire, which was Latin and in 405 A.D. St Jerome produced what came to be known much later as the Vulgate translation which, in different forms, was used by the western church for many centuries. Translating Genesis 2:8 Jerome translated like this plantaverat autem Dominus Deus paradisum voluptatis a principio in quo posuit hominem quem formaverat So the name 'Eden' disappeared and it became instead a 'paradise of pleasure'. The garden was also no longer in or towards 'the east'. Rather the garden was planted 'from the beginning'. This translation had two effects. First of all it embedded the name paradise into the story of Eden so that for many centuries every Christian who read (or heard) the Genesis story, read (or heard) that God made a paradise (not 'a garden) in the beginning and that it was in that paradise (not the 'garden') that the first human couple lived. Thus 'paradise' became synonymous with the home of the first human couple. They had lived in the paradise God made. The second effect was that by translating Eden as 'joy' or 'pleasure' and 'to the east' as 'from the beginning' the version de-geographised (I know there is no such word . . . or maybe there is now!) the garden. It was no longer in any particular place. It was just a paradise, somewhere, from 'the beginning''. This was ideal for the early church bible scholars and interpreters, many of whom approached the bible looking for its allegorical meaning. Although they usually recongised that biblical texts had a historical or plain meaning they considered the allegorical meaning offered by the text to be more important and more relevant for the life of the church. So the story in Genesis stopped being a part of identifiable and locatable pre-history of humanity and became a symbolic text full of allegorical significance. The idea that finding paradise would mean finding the Garden of Eden was harder to maintain when that garden grew not real trees but meaningful, allegorical truths! Back to BasicsParadise was a place far, far away and long, long ago. Before it was anything else, a tropical beach, a perfect lagoon, a lush and verdant forest, it was a garden in the east of the world, at the edge. That paradise became more than a 'history' however - it became hope. In paradise people thought there was something that could let them live forever, a tree with amazing power to defeat death and give immortality. People imagined this paradise garden and where it might be and how they could find it. Sometimes they thought of it still on earth, sometimes they located it at the top of a mountain, sometimes in one of the heavens. Later in the medieval period, paradise became equated with heaven. God no longer lived in heaven, in fact God no longer lived anywhere - God was pure thought, pure intellect needing no home. The heavens then became vacant and paradise moved in! Dante's Paradiso, the third part of his Commedia, is the high-point of this transformation of paradise from a garden with a magic tree to the vast, stunning strangeness of heavenly perfection. In his brilliant poem Dante describes with ever increasing intensity the overwhelming 'otherness' of his version of paradise. And this image of life bathed in intense light, of perfection illuminated by the Vision of God, above and beyond all earthly reality, became the model of paradise (at least from a spiritual point of view) for many subsequent imaginings. It's good to remember then that when the bible spoke about paradise it only ever meant a garden . . . somewhere in the east . . . far far away. You might also be interested in . . . .
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
April 2016
GalleryThis blog is as much about images as it is about text. Below is a slideshow of the pictures and images used in this blog. Click on any of the pictures to go to the post where that image is featured.
PostsLocating Paradise #1 In a Garden, Far, Far Away
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #5 'Stuck in the Middle With You'
The Resurrection According to Rahner
Today You Will Be With Me in Paradise
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #4 'And Who by Fire'
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #3: Held in the Balance
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #2: Once, Twice, Three Times a Sinner
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #1: The Broad and Narrow Gates
Daily Dante 7: Many Rivers to Cross
Daily Dante 6: 'You Gotta Serve Somebody'
In Hell Everyone Can Hear You Scream. The Vision of Tundale #3
Teeth, Spikes and Cleavers: At the Sharp end of Hell. The Vision of Tundale #2
'No Pain No Gain': The Vision of Tundale #1
'Hellzapoppin':
Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #2 'It's The End of the World as We Know It (and we feel fine)'. Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #1
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #2 Blinded by the Light
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #1: Glorious and Immortal
Daily Dante 5: What the gates said.
Daily Dante 4: When I find myself in times of trouble
Daily Dante 3: I'll take you there
Daily Dante 2: Fierce creatures
Daily Dante 1: If you go down to the woods today
In Seventh Heaven or 'What Enoch Did Next'
A World of Fire and Ice: Heaven according to Enoch
The Power and the Glory: Visions of God as king in the Hebrew bible
The Beautiful Bestiary of Catherine Cleves: Monsters and Demons in detail.
Heaven is for Real: Heaven as a physical space up above the sky
Resurrecting the Dead or Reviving the Flowers? The loss of resurrection faith in Judaism.
The Defeat of Death #1: The promise of resurrection in the Isaiah Apocalypse.
The Defeat of Death #2: Death as a hostile power and promise of God's victory in Isaiah
Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: The 'Last Judgement' according to Stefan Lochner
Hell in the Hospital: The 'Last Judgement' of Rogier van der Weyden in the Beaune altarpiece.
'Hell' in the New Testament #2: The gates of Hades shall not prevail
The Hours of Catherine Cleves: Imagining hell and purgatory in Catherine's prayer book
'On Earth as in Heaven': The kingdom of God as a revelation of heaven
'Hell' in the New Testament #1: Gehenna
Lost in Translation #1: How the King James version got it so wrong about hell
Heaven is not our home
Domes, Depths and Demons: The cosmology of the Hebrew world
A Bigger God
"See you in Sheol" - Sheol, the common destination of all
Heaven, Hell and Christian Hope
BooksBelow are some of the books which have helped me the most in the research and writing for this blog. Click on any image to find out more about that book at its page on Amazon uk.
Categories
All
|