Excerpts from Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God" (Copyright 2009 - Published by Little, Brown)

The Crucifixion embodies one of Christianity’s central themes, God’s love for humanity. As the iconic Christian verse John 3:16 puts it: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.…” And, as powerfully as these words ring now, imagine their impact in the ancient world. Throughout history, gods had been beings to whom you made sacrifices. Now here was a god that not only demanded no ritual sacrifices from you but himself made sacrifices—indeed, the ultimate sacrifice—for you. All of humanity’s sins, including yours, could be wiped off the ledger by God’s self-sacrificing redemption.

And this reversal of sacrifice was only Act One of Crucifixion theology. Act Two—the Resurrection of Jesus after his execution and burial—was an equally potent symbol. It illustrated both the possibility of eternal life and the fact that anyone of any ethnicity and any social class could qualify for it; all they had to do was accept and comprehend the Resurrection of Jesus himself. In full form John 3:16 reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but should have everlasting life.” The book of Galatians spelled out this open admissions policy: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Universal salvation was on offer from a deeply compassionate and giving God, and it’s hard to imagine a more resonant symbol of this fact than the Crucifixion of his son.

The heart of the Christian message is that God sent his son to lay out the path to eternal life. Jesus is, in this view, a heavenly being who controls access to heaven. He “is seated on the right hand of the Father” and will “judge the living and the dead,” as it is put in the Nicene Creed, a foundational document of ancient Christianity and to this day a common denominator of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestant churches.

Yes, but the Nicene Creed was written centuries after Jesus died. The common picture of Jesus it reflects—Jesus as heavenly arbiter of immortality—would have seemed strange to followers of Jesus during his lifetime. So would its corollary: that the righteous ascend to heaven in the afterlife.

Eternal life of a certain kind may well have been part of Jesus’s original message. But it may not have been, and in any event the details of the story—the part about heaven, for example—changed consequentially in the decades after the Crucifixion.

The idea of followers of Jesus getting to join him in heaven upon dying probably didn’t take shape until about a half century after he died. To be sure, his followers believed from early on that the faithful would be admitted to the “kingdom of heaven,” as the New Testament calls it. But “kingdom of heaven” is just Matthew’s term for what Mark had called the “kingdom of God”—and, as we've seen, the kingdom of God was going to be on earth.

In Matthew, Jesus says, “Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age.” Angels will come down and scour the land for “all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

Note the dynamic: angels come to earth from heaven and weed out the bad people, after which the good people remain on the new, improved earth. There’s nothing about the souls of dead people ascending to heaven.

In fact, there’s nothing about dead people at all. Jesus, convinced that the kingdom of God was “at hand,” didn’t spend much time describing the afterlife; he spoke as if the day of reckoning was going to arrive any moment, before his listeners had a chance to die, and told people how to prepare. Judgment Day was about the living, not the dead.