What happens when we die? A majority of Americans believe in a heaven and hell of some sort, but as Bart Ehrman points out, eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament and are not what Jesus taught. So where did these ideas come from? Looking at texts ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the writings of Augustine, Ehrman concludes that the ancients had competing views of the afterlife, and it was only in the early Christian centuries that notions of eternal bliss or damnation became widespread.