MortalWombat

Yes, it was a case of reading too quickly. I have edited my post above.

Diogenes the Cynic

This will be a rehash of a lot of what's in the other thread but here's a rundown of the facts:

There are three words in the Bible which are commonly translated as "Hell" in the bible.

Sheol
Gehenna
Hades

The first one, Sheol, was the name for an underworld similar to Hades. In Jewish eschatology, Sheol was only a temporary sort of holding tank until judgement day. Everybody went to Sheol, not just bad people. It was believed that on the last day, God would physically resurrect all the dead people and judge them. The good people would get eternal life (which was conceived as literal immortality in a physical body) and the bad people would be annihilated in Gehenna.

Gehenna was the Valley of Hinnon, southwest of Jerusalem, which was a garbage dump and a disposal site for animal carcasses. It was also thought to have been a site for human sacrifice by ancient Canaanites (making it cursed bu God) and was an occasional, ignoble dumping site for the bodies of criminals. People used to burn fires there pretty much continuously (eternal flames) in an effort to destroy the mountains of garbage and carcasses.

So because Gehenna was literally a God-forsaken, fiery pit that stank of sulphur and corpses and crawled with maggots and worms "that never died," it came to be envisioned as the final destination for the unrighteous on judgement day. It was also a figurative way to speak of a dishonorable death.

Most of the instances where Jesus is translated as speaking of "hell" he is speaking of Gehenna and he is talking about it in terms of his culture's eschatology. It was not an otherworldly underground, nor was it eternal. It was a place for annihilation only.

The last word, Hades, is used in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man but this is actually just a Greek translation of Sheol. In the parable, it says the rich man went to "flames" and Lazarus went to "the side of Abraham."

This is not Heaven and hell but two separate parts of Sheol. After Palestine became Hellenized, it influenced their conception of Sheol to the point that they started to imagine different parts for different folks like the Greeks had with Hades. Good people went to the "Bosom of Abraham," and bad people got some sort of temporary punishment.

It has to be remembered, though, that Sheol was not eternal. Everybody was going to be resurrected and judged eventually, so no torment lasted forever.

There was no concept of eternal Hell in 1st century Judaism and there is no such concept described anywhere in the New Testament. Every single instance that is commonly understood as such is completely explained in terms of Jewish eschatological and after-life traditions.

Diogenes the Cynic

MortalWombat,

read what I said about the Lazarus parable. It describes different parts of Sheol (which was temporary) not Heaven and Hell.

Jag,

if you want to argue that any 1st century Jew had a concept of eternal hell it is your burden to show it. The Jewish writings that we have do not evidence any such belief and the Talmud explicitly denies it. There has never been a concept of Hell in Judaism.

And as I said in the other thread, I would ask you to explain how any passage about Gehenna in the NT should be read any differently from how that place was understood in 1st century Palestine.

hagiograph

I am by no means an expert on this topic, but the concept of hell is one of those things that always haunted me when I was still a theist. It was the elephant in the room. I simply couldn't get past the threat of hell in order to enjoy the company of Jesus and God.

It's like having a mafiosi in the room. He can be a really nice guy and will take you to some great restaurants, but you know that if you dis him in some way he will break your legs with a baseball bat and then cap you in the head with his .45

That never seemed like a balance of love/mercy/justice. It sounded (like everything in religion) like something a person would make up to strong-arm other equally scared and uncertain people into their belief system.

Then I read the Bible cover to cover (without hitting the Apocrypha, saving that for later, perhaps) and realized that the Old Testament focused almost solely on God's temporal reward for his chosen people (life on the land for the faithful!) and virtually nothing about an afterlife, good or bad! A few outlier kind of stories (Samuel being called back from the dead, etc.) but it seemed that suddenly in the New Testament there's all this talk about an afterlife in heaven or eternal punishment in hell.

Almost like in 5BCE God installed an attic in the house (Heaven) and finished the basement with a big gas stove (Hell). But if God is unchanging why would he not have notified his chosen people about this VERY IMPORTANT concept of eternal supernatural life and/or AGONIZING PUNISHMENT back at the start?

Or could it just be more "making-it-up-as-the-religion-goes-along"?

I wish I could read Greek and/or Aramaic and/or Hebrew so I could know what God wants for all people on earth. But my friend tells me God speaks Latin, so I'm screwed there too, since the only latin I know is from watching Law and Order.

Res ipsa loquitor, baby.

-h.

MortalWombat

Just because there was no concept of Hell to 1st Century Jews, that doesn't mean there was no concept of Hell to the various writers of the New Testament, who believed in a bunch of stuff that Jews would find either offensive or blasphemous. Like bodily resurrection, doing away with the Law, the commandment to "eat my flesh and drink my blood", etc.

Diogenes the Cynic

If the writers of the NT believed in an eternal hell they never mentioned it in the NT.

Jagella

Of course. The Jews that wrote the New Testament (if they were Jews, and they probably were) were evidently renegades who differed from most of the other Jews at that time. Religion is like that: As time progresses, people change beliefs and often disagree with the older, established doctrines. In this discussion, I’m claiming exactly that. Although Gehenna started out as merely a “garbage dump� in which refuse was burned, it evolved into a place of eternal damnation for all people who rejected the teachings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament. One can readily see many instances of this belief in hell in the New Testament as a place of punishment for unbelievers.

Jagella

Sensei Meela

That was the original belief, and it was reinterpreted ('evolved') to mean eternal torment by later Christian groups. That such a belief was held by the Gospel authors is not evidenced in the texts themselves.

Amaleq13

One can readily see how the specific passages cited could be reinterpreted by later Christians to conform with this belief.

I believe you stated that you considered the Gospels to have been written in the 1st century. Since Christianity was originally a sect of Judaism, this would suggest that 1st century Judaism is the broad context for interpretation, right?

I'm satisfied with Diogenes' explanation of the rich man/Lazarus parable (what is eternal is the divide between the two halves of Sheol) but I think the 'mistranslation' of the two passages cited could use some more discussion. The wording in Young's Literal Translation doesn't seem to help much (maybe that's just me ):

"And these shall go away to punishment age-during, but the righteous to life age-during." (Mt 25:46)

"but whoever may speak evil in regard to the Holy Spirit hath not forgiveness -- to the age, but is in danger of age-during judgment" (Mk 3:29)

Diogenes the Cynic

The NT was mostly written by Gentiles. The authors of mark, Luke and John were certainly not Jews. Matthew was possibly a Hellenistic Jew. Paul was a Jew by background but could no longer be called a religious Jew by the time he wrote his Epistles.

The rest was all written by 2nd century Gentiles.

Christians in the first few centuries evolved their afterlife mythology into the common conception of Hell. Some of that mythology was based on a misunderstanding of the Gehenna passages in Matthew.

There is nothing in the NT which evidences that the authors had any knowledge of the modern concept of Hell. A lot of it is mistranslated. Besides the various mistranslations for "Hell," for instance, Mark's admonition about blasphemers against the Holy Spirit being in "eternal sin" often gets translated as "eternal damnation."

Even the word translated as "eternal" (aionion) doesn't really mean "eternal." It refers to a long and indefinite amount of time but not necessarily an infinite one. "Ages and ages" might be a way to convey the sense of the term. It means a long time but not infinite time in a mathematical sense.