Malachi151

The word hell has Germanic origins, and of course so do many English words, but I believe that "Hell" the word was introduced from German/Dutch translations.

That's really beside the point. The point is that the Christian concepts of afterlife clearly come from Hellenistic Greek culture and indeed all of the words used by the origional NT authors to describe the afterlife are the Greek place names.

The idea of "afterlife heaven" being some place up above the earth and Hades and Taratrus being hot places below the earth, with rivers and lakes of fire, where bad people are tormented potentially for eternity, all comes from the Greeks.

WishboneDawn

Our (christian's) idea of heaven is a greek concept as well, no?

Malachi151

Clouds, pearly gates, golden arches, angels with wings.... ummm.... :angel: :banghead:

lpetrich

The details of that common depiction of Heaven are very non-Greek -- that's essentially being a Xian angel living at cloud level in the sky. And it's also a takeoff of the Book of Revelation's New Jerusalem, which will be a city with gold-paved streets and walls of precious stone.

And according to that book, the inhabitants of this New Jerusalem will wear white robes that had been washed in the blood of the Lamb (don't ask me to make sense out of that -- is this some metaphorical kind of washing?). The halos are likely a modification of the glowing-head imagery of angels and saints and the like that one can see in some Byzantine artwork.

Interestingly, Dante's conception of Heaven was living in interplanetary space according to the Ptolemaic cosmology. the Earth is round and at the center, and each celestial object is on a crystalline sphere that surrounds it. The Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the stars. But it seems like a rather colorless existence.

The Hellenic-pagan "Heaven" was the Islands of the Blessed and the Elysian Fields. Virgil (70 BCE - 19 CE) describes the Elysian Fields as an especially nice part of the underworld rather than a place in the sky:
(somewhere in the Aeneid)
And according to Pindar (518-438 BCE) (Islands of the Blessed),
I wonder what sorts of Heaven that Hellenistic and first-century Jews looked forward to.

But for being absolutely sybaritic, it is hard to compete with the Islamic Paradise.

Malachi151

I found this interesting:

djrafikie

Loving the elevators.

WishboneDawn

Looks like an oil refinery.

judge

Actually in the Aramaic version of the NT sheol is found and is not the same as ghenna, although both seem to have been translated as hell in the greek.

In Luke 16 the dead man is in sheol.

But in Luke 12:5 Jesus warns of ghenna.

As happens on many occasions the greek loses the extra information in the aramaic text.

lpetrich

That Aramaic version is a translation of the Koine Greek version, so what words it uses is irrelevant here, just as it is irrelevant what words a Modern Greek translation uses, a Latin translation uses, or an English translation uses.

judge, if you wish to argue that that Aramaic version is the original version of the New Testament, please do so -- in another thread. And please accept that the burden of proof is on you, just as Jesus mythers have been willing to do.

judge

No the burden is just as much on you.

Until the evidence is subjected to peer review we cannot say which one came first.

Or should we just accept it withiout peer review?

Here yet again we have evidence for an Aramaic original.

The greek translators rightly translated sheol as hades, but then having no word corresponding to ghenna they also translated it as hades.

the fact is that sheol does exist in the NT.