Thanks Dr Carrier! That answers my question perfectly. I had noticed you had a really thorough answer so I made sure to read it thoroughly before replying back. And you even mentioned things like the moon. Nice.

It’s fascinating stuff how things change over time!

I don’t have any follow up questions but thanks!

I’m not sure the first switch ever happened. The second is messy.

First, there was no distinction between “the sky” and “outer space” in the sense you mean until a modern understanding of the stellar vacuum (theories existed, but not popular belief). What they did was layer the sky, so that the lowest sky was called “sky” (in whatever words they used) and the upper layers were numbered as heavens (in Judaism the distinction starts in Genesis with the “upper waters” being “the heavens” and “the firmament” being the “sky” holding those celestial waters up, originally conceived as an actual metal dome, but under the influence of Hellenistic science, it was simply regarded as a phase shift from aer to ether, in parallel to the phase shift below that from sea to air).

Second, “Paradise” is a distinctly Jewish notion (the Garden of Eden with the Tree of Immortality, and Knowledge, everyone was kicked out of and that was then guarded by an angel with a flaming sword etc.). That was not widely conceived as a place for the dead until I think the Middle Ages. The Jewish-Zoroastrian idea was that the Earth would be melted and entirely replaced, or else everyone would go live in the layered heavens (as described above).

The idea that some (the damned) might go below to a lake of fire was actually fringe, not the common view, and came out of an evolution of the idea of Gehenna, which was a kind of syncretism of the ANE/Greco-Roman concept of Hades and the Zoroastrian purgatory (a cosmic fire that would burn away the bad parts; and bad people would have to burn longer; and the worst would burn up altogether in the end because nothing good would be left over—this still survives in some Eastern Orthodox soteriological schemes). Christians modded and schemed this idea out more as centuries went on. But where the syncretism started is unknown. After 500 BC; probably before 100 BC. And as a uniquely Jewish idea. Pagans had more complex ideas (Hades/Tartarus were not on fire), some closer to the original Zoroastrian one (the fire was temporary), and the most elite moved it all to space (the dead wait on the moon until their ultimate eternal fates are decided, but the worst place to go was to be stuck forever on the moon).

There are hints that the souls of the dead (perhaps only of the most righteous) might in some fringe Jewish views “waystation” in Paradise until the End Times (in “Abraham’s Bosom”). But it wasn’t a common view and we don’t know when that view started (it might even be a Christian invention, conflating the Bosom of Abraham in a higher heaven for the third heaven based on Paul mentioning the latter but not in connection with the afterlife).

So your second question can’t be answered in any simple way. You’d have to “choose your adventure,” i.e. pick a specific idea. For example, Paradise as a place for people to go in the afterlife was an entirely different question from where Paradise “was.” So in respect to where it “was” there were competing factions and we don’t know which was more popular or when the second faction arose (pre-Christian in any event, probably post-Hellenic, so maybe c. 300 BC +/- 200y). The first faction held “it’s some faraway place on Earth” (just “out in the East” somewhere or some such). The second faction held “it’s in the third heaven, and Adam’s fall was literal.”

This resulted in multiple redactions of the Life of Adam and Eve, where later Christian editors did not like the celestial Eden concept (for whatever reason); but it’s in the earliest redaction and thus the original pre-Christian core of that story.

But “where it was” was a different question than who got to live there—and even that was split between “who gets to live there now” (before the Resurrection of Israel) and “who gets to live there later” (after the Resurrection), and people could take different positions on every single one of these questions.

But if we stick with just “when did anyone move it from Earth to the third heaven” the answer is “sometime before Paul” and that’s the best we can do. But we can guess most likely it was sometime in that window I mentioned (c. 300 BC +/- 200 years).

O ok— let me reclarify my question. I’m still reading the article. But 300 years ago [edit. 3000 years ago] there was a switch from the sky concept to spiritual heaven.

what I’m wondering is also if 2000 to 3000 years there was a switch from “earthly paradise” to “outer space”.

Thanks. I’ll take a look. And side note – it looks like I said “300 years”. I of course meant to say “3000 years”.

Yes. There is a good article on this at Aeon that I cite in Obsolete Paradigm now: “Inventing Heaven.”

You’ve definitely shown that there was a process of people
taking their beliefs of God being in outer space to now
being more like another dimension.

Do you think there was a similar process that happened
300 years ago of people redefining where gods lived?
Like, it seems like in the oldest stories, Paradise was an
actual garden. Then it got transferred to space.Now its
some other dimension. The gods lived on mountains.
Then they lived in outer space. Now they live in
spiritual dimensions. Etc.

Is that more or less what happens? People over thousands
of years have been playing the game of redefining
where the gods live?

On the side point, the exact historicity of David is debatable. There appears to be some real evidence of a warlord of that name in that region around the expected time (though the region was not as well developed technologically and economically as his mythology imagined). It is perhaps unlikely a tomb for the man would have survived identifiably so long in that particular place, but even if the tomb was a fake, that would not entail David was. Remember, historical people can get heavily mythologized too. The question is how often are heavily mythologized people historical, not whether they can be.

On the proposed chiasmus: that is not how chiasmus works as a literary device. A chiasmus would actually be in the text. This would indeed have been a great one. But the author didn’t use it. Which is actually conspicuously peculiar. So even at best we can infer nothing about what the author intended.

Though IMO this author did want to push an empty tomb narrative (given that they did in the Gospel half), there is evidence, as I outline in Ch. 9 of OHJ, that this author was adapting material from some earlier source that lacked the empty tomb element, including this speech. But we can’t know for sure how much comes from that possible source and how much is Luke’s additions and embellishments. Alas, here, it’s too vague to deduce whether the composer of that speech meant there to be an empty tomb or not. Certainly, the narrative completely ignores it. No one is ever told about it or challenged with it, and no one responds to it, e.g. as they do in Matthew’s mythical embellishment, which Luke conspicuously did not use and thus did not like (especially if, as I suspect, Luke used Matthew as a source). For whatever reason, in composing Acts, Luke completely dropped the empty tomb as a narrative device, and never uses it in any of the lists of cited evidence he has missionaries repeat. Including here. Where the only evidence mentioned is the apostles “seeing” the risen Jesus “exalted” to the right hand of God. In Acts, visions and scripture are the only evidence ever cited to the public by anyone.

I discuss this more (including how the author “changed scripture” to alter this speech) in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 343-45. I think Luke has altered an original, inherited speech, to make it align more with his “empty tomb” storyline, but not so much as to actually reintroduce that storyline into his narrative at this point.

David died
David is buried
Occupied Tomb till now
Passion
Jesus died
Jesus is buried
Empty Tomb

There is no single book. Indeed most of this knowledge is in the literature, as in hundreds of journal articles.

A so-so treatment of the subject can be found at the Jewish Encyclopedia online. I say so-so because it’s old and biased against the conclusion (its Jewish authors clearly chafe at the admission of influence, although they are more honest about it than Christian fundamentalists would be).

To read some of the primary sources pertaining, and quotations from leading peer-reviewed books, and a bibliography, see my section on it in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 85-99.

Otherwise, perhaps the best place to start would be John Hinnells, Zoroastrian and Parsi Studies (2000), esp. pp. 29-92, and Mary Boyce’s Zoroastrians; or even better, if you can get a hold of a copy (it’s now out of print but still a classic in the field), Boyce’s A History of Zoroastrianism in three volumes (1975), esp. pp. 367-68 and 392-440.

P.S. Regarding Hellenism’s effects on Judaism, you’d really need to be more specific (you can find specific books on specific things; but no book covers all the things), but otherwise, Wikipedia has a summary and bibliography; and even more is at the JewishEncyclopedia online.

I doubt it. The article you cite is so old, it is almost certainly of no appreciable reliability (you can’t trust history done before 1950 that isn’t backed by some subsequent research confirming it; and you especially can’t trust history done before 1900, likewise).

In general, these ideas are prehistorical. All cultures have systems of sin atonement even related water rituals. But that’s a meaningless comparison in causal terms. You need much more specific features to identify distinct causal relationship and hence actual influence. And I have never seen any reliable peer-reviewed defense of that applying to the ideas you mention. Maybe someone somewhere has accomplished it recently. But you’d have to show me an example.