The historical-critical account differs from the confessional ones and is worth stating separately. Scholars generally hold that Israelite religion had no significant afterlife hope for most of its history, that Sheol is not a place of reward or punishment but simply where the dead are, and that resurrection belief appears in Jewish sources in the Hellenistic period, in Daniel and in the literature surrounding the Maccabean persecution, where the deaths of the faithful created precisely the problem that resurrection answers. Whether Zoroastrian eschatology influenced this development is a long-standing question: Zoroastrianism has an early and developed doctrine of individual judgement, the Chinvat bridge, and a final resurrection and renovation of the world, but the dating of the Avestan and Pahlavi sources makes the direction of influence extremely hard to establish, and specialists disagree. Confident claims in either direction outrun the evidence.
Within traditions, the sharpest internal disputes concern hell. Everlasting conscious punishment has been the majority Christian position. Conditional immortality, or annihilationism, holds that the lost finally cease to exist and has had growing support among evangelical theologians since the later twentieth century. Universalism holds that all are finally saved; it had a patristic advocate in Origen, whose views were condemned under Justinian, more cautious support in Gregory of Nyssa, and a continuing minority presence since, including Hans Urs von Balthasar's carefully limited argument that Christians may hope that all are saved without asserting that they are. Islamic theology debated whether the Fire is everlasting for all its inhabitants, and Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim are among those who argued that it might not be. Jewish tradition limits Gehinnom for most people to twelve months, which is why the mourner's kaddish is recited for eleven.
Modern challenges come from two directions. Empirically, the close identification of mental life with brain function makes survival harder to state coherently, and near-death experience research is claimed as evidence by some researchers and given neurological explanations by others; there is no scientific consensus supporting survival, and the question of what such experiences show remains contested. Morally, the doctrine of eternal punishment has drawn sustained criticism from within the traditions themselves as disproportionate to any finite offence, an objection at least as old as Origen and pressed hard since the nineteenth century. Survey data from Western countries consistently shows both a wide persistence of afterlife hope, including among people who report no religious affiliation, and a marked asymmetry: belief in heaven has declined much more slowly than belief in hell.