Was it Jesus that came up with the idea of eternel life, and why didn't God himself ever talk about that?

Answer 1

Eternal life is an idea that Christianity ansorbed from earlier religions. The Greeks taught that after death you were ferried across the River Styx by Charon to the Shades where you would live forever forgetting all that went before. When people died a coin was placed int he mouth of the corpse before burial in order to pay the fare on the ferry.

The original source for the idea of eternal life came from Egypt. Mummification was a process to prepare the body for the afterlife. The god who was also a man, Osiris, died and was resurrected and is remembered in a meal of bread and wine. The bread becomes his body and by eating his body and drinking his blood the devotees of Osiris can share in his eternal life. This was thousands of years before Christianity continued the same concept. The Risen Christ figure is just one more representation of the mediator and redeemer of the ancient religion of Isis and Osiris.

Several hundred years before Christ, one manifestation of the Osiris-and-Isis story flourished in Phrygia, where Galatia is located. When St. Paul learned that the Galatians were keeping the holidays of that old local religion, he admonishes them to knock it off: Galatians 4:10. However, the old religions of the region were not ended until the Roman emperor lowered the boom and wiped them out, and allowed only Christianity to be the religion of the Empire. Various ideas from various religious sources were synthesized into Christianity, including Manichean Zoroastrianism through St. Augustine. Eternal life is just one of the concepts imported into Christianity in its early centuries.

Answer 2

Where do our ideas and values about so-called "cleanliness" come from, anyway? Western civilization has a long history of associating cleanliness with goodness and merit, best summed up by the old expression "cleanliness is next to Godliness." In ancient Greek plays, evil people and spirits—the Furies, for example—were often described as filthy. The Furies were dirty, aged, and female, exactly the opposite of how the playwright who described them saw himself; their filthiness, among other things, identified them as an outgroup—as alien, animal, inhuman. Over time, cleanliness became a measure with which the "haves" separated themselves from the "have-nots." Those who possessed the wealth and power required to have the leisure to remain indoors, inactive, scorned the peasants and travelers whose lifestyles involved getting their hands and bodies dirty. Throughout our history, we can see that cleanliness has been used as a standard of worth by those with power to ascribe social status—and thus, the "Godly," the self-proclaimed holy ones who stood above the rest of us in hierarchical society, proclaimed that their cleanliness, bought with the labor of the others who were forced to work for them, was a measure of their "Godliness" and superiority. To this day, we accept this traditional belief: that being "clean" according to social norms is desirable in itself.

Answer 3

The Old Testement Jews did not believe in eternal life.

Answer 4

What makes you think god ever spoke? Have you talked to it\him personally? Are you hearing voices?