Is Heaven the Goal?

Protestant ministers, Roman Catholic priests, and Pope Francis have all claimed that heaven is the goal for Christians. But is that what early Christians believed according to scholars? What does the Bible teach? What is the plain truth about what Christians, heirs to the promises to Abraham, are to inherit? Did Egyptian, Greek, and Gnostic pagans teach that heaven was the reward of the saved? What was the goal of Mithraism? Could Emperor Constantine's sun-god religion have affected the Greco-Roman Catholics and later the Protestants? …