Here is a sobering thought for anyone involved in the world of finance. Those who charge interest when they lend money are doomed to spend eternity in a pit with filth up to their knees. This is not the verdict of some radical, online, anti-capitalist echo chamber but of the second-century Apocalypse of Saint Peter, an early Christian text in the form of a graphic tour of heaven and hell, ascribed to the leader of Jesus’s apostles, though not actually written by him.
It offers scant comfort too for those who have sex before marriage: their bodies will be torn to shreds in the afterlife. And for women who have the temerity to plait their hair to make themselves look more attractive: they are damned forever to hang by that same hair over the eternal flames. The point the anonymous author was hammering home to his fellow believers (it might of course have been a woman, but there is something so misogynist about the 21 punishments laid out that I can’t believe so) was a simple one, and all about fear. Be good, do what the rules tell you and you will get your reward in the hereafter. And if you choose not to, don’t say you haven’t been warned!
Though the Apocalypse of Saint Peter —and many of the other vivid early church documents and texts that Bart Ehrman quotes so effectively in his history of the afterlife — never made it into the Christian canon, they reflect the times in which they were written. And they explain, too, in their power and inventiveness, a curious aspect of the Christian legacy in our more secular, sceptical but alas no less fearful times — namely how images of heaven and hell remain so widespread in our collective imagination when so many of us have no link with organised religion.
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