After death we go...?

Most Christians today believe something very different from what Jesus taught

Heaven and Hell

A History of the Afterlife Bart D Ehrman

Oneworld 2020

Hb, 352pp, £20, ISBN 9781786077202

Many Christians believe that their doctrines sprang fullyformed from the Jewish origins of Christianity. But if this were so, many beliefs would be very different, including those about Heaven and Hell – where we go (if anywhere) after we die.

Bart Ehrman has written many popular books on early Christianity and its variant forms. His latest might puzzle some: why devote the first 80 pages to Greek beliefs? The answer is simple: the greatest influence on culture and philosophy in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus was Greek. Everyone with any education spoke Greek. The books of the New Testament were written in Greek. Jewish and Christian beliefs on the afterlife were inevitably influenced by Greek beliefs.

What will be startling for Christians is that nowhere in the Old Testament can we find the traditional Christian views of the afterlife, writes Ehrman. The OT prophets were more concerned with the ultimate fate of the nation of Israel, not of individual people. Once beliefs about the fate of individuals did begin to develop, there was nothing about dying and going straight to Heaven or Hell, as most Christians today believe; Jewish apocalypticists (including Jesus) believed that “on the Day of Judgment… the righteous would be given eternal life and the wicked would be annihilated forever”.

The idea of immediate postmortem reward or punishment actually first surfaced in a Jewish apocryphal book, 4 Maccabees (first or second century AD), which said that the wicked “will not simply stay dead but will be punished, tortured…” This eventually became standard Christian teaching – in complete contrast to Jesus’s teaching that the wicked should “fear the one who can annihilate both the soul and body in Gehenna”.

“By the second century very few followers of Jesus held to his own views of the afterlife,” says Ehrman.

The change from Jesus’s own teachings came because of the composition of early Christian communities “not of Jews raised on apocalyptic views of the coming judgment of God but of former pagans raised in Greek ways of looking at the world that stressed the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection of the body. For such people, eternal life would involve rewards and punishments after death.”

And the punishments became increasingly horrendous. The fourth or fifth-century Apocalypse of Paul sets out the penalties: “A presbyter who offered communion after committing fornication finds himself in a river of fire, tortured by angels vigorously piercing his intestines with a three-pronged iron instrument – for all time.” Delightful!

Ehrman doesn’t make this point, but there’s an astonishing irony that so many of the 19th-century Christian sects – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christadelphians, Seventh-day Adventists and others – are condemned as heretics by mainstream Christianity for teaching what Jesus himself believed: that the unsaved are not tortured forever in hell, but are annihilated.

Jay Vickers

★★★★

How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls

Animal movement and the robots of the future

David L Hu

Princeton 2020

Pb, 248pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780691204161

Opening with the author’s girlfriend’s poodle shaking itself to get dry, at a speed faster than a cornering Formula 1 car, How to Walk… looks at nature’s various “non-intuitive yet effective” solutions to locomotion and humans’ attempts to replicate them. And yes – author David Hu, a professor of both mechanical engineering and biology, with his colleagues really did go on to build a highly efficient animal-shaking-itself-dry simulator, based on watching bears and pandas shake themselves dry at Atlanta Zoo.

The water walkers of the title are insects including water striders that have been rowing across the surface of ponds on pontoon-like legs for 300 million years. Weighing in at just 10mg, their mass is “enough to bend but not break” the surface of the water, as they ride the waves they generate as they row. Invincible cockroaches can survive being squashed to half their height.

How to Walk’s robots are typically tiny – the “Robostrider” has a body cut from a tin can, wire legs and pulleys made from sock elastic. The thousand-strong phalanx of tiny K-Bots, programmed to form shapes like fire ants building bridges, are so small the varying weight of different types of solder used to weld them together affects their performance.

After a lot of experiments involving adding dye to tanks to see the eddies these creatures generate, Hu concludes many of these miracle movers ride the vortices they generate themselves as they undulate through air, water or even sand. Marine worms force open cracks as they move through dry mud and inflate themselves to create new cavities in wet mud.

Applications? Cockroach-style collapsible robots would be handy for search and rescue. Snake robots can enter hard-to-access human body cavities for medical procedures. A patch of loose sand immobilised the Spirit Rover on Mars; could the toaster-sized H-Rex robot that jogs through sand do better?

There is much to engage the reader – like Hu travelling home on the Long Island Railroad from a reptile fair, 10 “affordable” snakes hidden in his jacket so he could watch them slither around his flat. But the narrative keeps switching between fun accounts of field work – taking delivery of a flying snake captured by the Singapore Police and chucking it off scaffolding towers to watch it fly, a bin filling up with failed downhill-walking robot parts – to frankly dull physics.

But there’s enough wonder, enough “So that’s how they do it!” moments – and enough descriptions of shaving the skin off a dead shark – to keep the reader’s interest.

Matt Salusbury

★★★★

The Mystic Lamb

Admired and Stolen

Harry De Paepe & Jan Van Der Veken

SelfMadeHero 2020

Hb, 112pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781910593899

Printed on heavy paper, with elegantly restrained full-page illustrations in tones of steely blue or subdued russet, the crisp neatness of this book makes it pleasant to read and handle, but I’m not at all sure who it’s aimed at.

It offers a biography of the travels and travails of the 15thcentury Flemish artists Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s most impressive painting, the 12-panelled altarpiece “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” from the cathedral of St Bavo in Ghent.

Unveiled in 1432, it had been piously commissioned by a leading local citizen, but also reflected the taste of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, who employed Jan van Eyck as court artist-cum-ambassador/spy. We have tantalisingly few details about this enigmatic chapter, and famous though it became, the altarpiece too holds its secrets. But the picture’s fame has also been its curse as, quite aside from the usual complications of poor restorations and confusing copies, it has been threatened by Reformation iconoclasm, split up and hidden, claimed several times as a prize of war, smuggled to various secret safe havens, partially sold

the art market and looted by the Nazis under Hitler’s direct orders. As a prime example of approved northern painting, it would have been a centrepiece in the great Führermuseum he planned for Linz. Hitler’s enthusiasm is understandable – the central panel shows the Holy Lamb standing on an altar as its blood flows into a chalice, evoking the Holy Blood and Grail imagery of his personal mythology.

Though its peregrinations ended after it was recovered from wartime storage in a salt mine and restored to Ghent, the altarpiece still poses an unanswered riddle. One of its panels, the “Just Judges”, is a replacement, the original having been stolen by a local stockbroker (and fantasist) Arsene Goedertier in 1934 and never recovered. With alarming ease Goedertier carried off two panels before sending an anonymous ransom note demanding a million francs for their return. Following negotiations that evoke a vintage crime novel, one panel was returned, but only a smaller ransom handed over. When Goedertier died later that year his responsibility for the theft came to light, but not the whereabouts of the still-unrecovered “Just Judges”, despite enigmatic clues and enthusiastic theories.

There are some nice fortean possibilities here – a mysterious colour photo in the Louvre, the confusion between copy and original – but they are not followed up or illustrated. This is neither a book of fortean investigation nor of art history – it offers only one unimpressive colour photograph of each of the altarpiece’s four faces and no analysis of content or meaning. The story is a blandly-told episodic account that can jump over centuries and slip annoyingly into the present tense while putting anecdotal words into the mouths of historical individuals. Despite the contributions of illustrator Jan van der Weken, it is far from being a graphic novel, with simplified depictions of scenes that, delightful as they are in themselves, add nothing to our reading of the narrative.

A lovely volume with an interesting tale to tell, still I can’t imagine whose expectations this book will satisfy.

Gail-Nina Anderson

★★★

Death and Changing Rituals

Function and meaning in ancient funerary practices Ed. J Rasmus Brandt, Marina Prusac & Håkon Roland

Oxbow Books 2020

Pb, 480pp, £35, ISBN 9781789253818

Death and Changing Rituals contains 14 papers covering different aspects of funerary practice and belief from the Mesolithic to the early modern period. They address the question of changing funerary rites: why and how do communities change the ways in which they treat dead bodies?

The examples in this volume address a number of different changes, including transitions in burial location, religious ritual, grave-goods and more. Each explores the ways in which these changes were influenced by social and political pressures, contact with other communities, developing beliefs about death and the body, and more. Although these connections can be enigmatic, the papers demonstrate insightful ways of thinking about the processes underlying change in funerary practice.

Two papers stand out as potentially interesting to fortean readers. J Rasmus Brandt’s detailed, lavishly illustrated account of changing imagery in Etruscan tombs provides some compelling theories about the ways in which Etruscan images of the underworld and the space between it and the world of the living developed over time.

Sarah Tarlow’s discussion of the ways in which beliefs about the dead body changed in postmediaeval Britain and Ireland explores religious, social, and scientific beliefs about the importance of the body after death, then compares them to folk beliefs about the body, revealing a telling inconsistency.

All of the papers in this volume provide fascinating examples of the reasons for change in funerary practices over time, making it fascinating reading for anyone interested in the archaeology of death and burial. Readers without some background in burial archaeology may not get as much out of most of the papers, although some, like Brandt and Tarlow’s, could be rewarding for a broader audience.

James Holloway

★★★★

My Favourite Dictators

The Strange Lives of Tyrants Chris Mikul

Headpress 2020

Pb, 308pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781909394704

Writing “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”, Thomas De Quincey suggested murder could be considered under two aspects. There was the moral aspect (“and that, I confess, is its weak side”) but there was also the aesthetic aspect – and that was the side he was going to concentrate on. There is a similar emphasis in this book by the admirable Chris Mikul, who has set himself the contentious task of taking a clutch of the world’s most unpleasant and catastrophic dictators, and serving them up for their entertainment value.

For three decades Mikul has produced the zine Bizarrism ,and he has more recently compiled the Eccentropedia, an encyclopaedia of eccentrics. His take on dictators is related to this, although as he points out they are in a sense the opposite of eccentrics, who tend to be benevolent, while dictators destroy eccentricity in others, removing any space where it could flourish. Eccentric or not, the 11 dictators in here are ridiculously aberrant: Hitler and Stalin are not included because Mikul considers them too dull.

Usually from underprivileged backgrounds, dictators tend to have stereotypically grandiose ideas about interior design (see Peter York’s marvellous Dictator’s Homes). They also have dodgy taste in art – Saddam Hussein was a big fan of American fantasy artist Rowena Morrill – and serious art is one of the first things to die in a dictatorship. But the art form they do often have a feeling for, to a sinister degree, is cinema, with its illusion and its total orchestration of reality.

Like the Ceausescus, Chairman and Madam Mao devoured glamonto orous movies of the kind totally forbidden to their people, while Imelda Marcos built a $100 million dollar film festival building, and Enver Hoxha’s Albania had a bizarre state-sponsored cult of Norman Wisdom. Kim Jong-Il (a big fan of James Bond, and anything with Elizabeth Taylor) took things a stage further by kidnapping a foreign director and actress to make films, and in reality, if you can call it that, North

Korea’s showcase capital Pyongyang has an allencompassing fakery that would do credit to the Truman Show.

Field Marshal Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC and Conqueror of the British Empire, presented a less sophisticated spectacle and he is predictably good value, although it is worth remembering he murdered 300,000 to 500,000 Ugandans, many of them forced to kill each other with hammers or eat their own cooked flesh until they died from bleeding and septicaemia (it is hardly less shocking that he enjoyed a long and pleasant retirement in Saudi Arabia, where King Fahd gave him a pension of $14,000 a month).

Jean-Claude “Papa Doc” Duvalier is urbane in comparison, with his Tonton Macoute secret police (the name means Uncle Knapsack, a children’s bogeyman), but there are still picturesque touches, like the rotting corpse of a rebel leader seated in an armchair by the airport, under a Coca-Cola sign reading “Welcome to Haiti”.

It’s hard to find entertainment in the sheer magnitude of human suffering and cultural destruction in Mao’s China, whose results the world still lives with today, and it is a bold move to market this book under Humour. Popular history at its most readable, yes, but Humour is stretching things, albeit intentionally: “the most potent weapon we have against dictators is laughter”, says Mikul.

Less exploitative than it looks, this historically sound book has a winning sanity and intelligence. It is a powerful reminder of mankind’s endlessly toxic irrationality, and we should remember millions upon millions have not had the luxury of laughing.

Phil Baker

★★★★