One of the most difficult things about studying religion as an academic is convincing people that things in the past were different from what they are now. To put it another way, what most people think of as essential elements of "Christianity," or "Judaism," or "Islam" (just to take the 3 major monotheisms of the world) have not always been there. The simple phrase of "things change over time" has to be the mantra of any historian and is particularly relevant when applied to concepts. We have to take our subjects of study on their own terms and not impose our own modern assumptions onto them - to be wary of, as James T. Palmer has coined it, falling into the Jurassic Park paradox and grafting frog DNA into dinosaur DNA, thereby creating a hybrid monster.
One easy assumption we make - even as historians sometimes - is that Christianity has always had a defined relationship with death. We assume that the early "Jesus Movement" always offered a sense that the individual Christian was responsible for their own soul, that each person needed to police their behavior in order to ensure their entrance into Heaven.
But not so.
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