Whether we believe in them or not, we are all familiar with the concepts of heaven and hell. There was a time, however, when no one thought they would go to either of these places after they died. So where did these ideas come from? In Heaven and Hell, Bart Ehrman provides a fascinating history of the afterlife, spanning the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, the teachings of Jesus and his early followers, and the writings of Augustine. Beginning in a time when Greeks, Jews and Christians held competing views of the afterlife, he reveals how the ideas of heaven and hell were closely connected with the social, cultural and historical worlds out of which they emerged.