Jagella

Here’s three more passages from the New Testament that might describe hell in the traditional way:

So here we have Jesus describing hell as an eternal fire into which sinners are cast. As we both know, throughout most of the history of Christianity hell has been seen as a place of eternal torture or “torment� into which sinners are to be thrown. Are you saying that these Christians have been misinterpreting their own religious beliefs all along because they could not read or understand the Greek?

And we need not stick with the Bible. Here’s what Thomas Aquinas had to say about hell:

I agree that the dogma of hell started with the concept of death and the grave, but the early Christians took it a step further and made it a horrific punishment for sinners after death.

Based on the quotations I posted above, I find your argument hard to believe.

Sure it is. Just look at the passages from the Bible I posted above that describe the traditional concept of hell as a place of fiery torment.

If you wish to make an argument that “hell is nowhere to be found in the Bible,� then you’ll need to do better than to simply insist that the word "hell" is mistranslated.

Jagella

Jagella

Really? Sorry to disappoint you, but your "one true love" is an aging, bald, overweight guy that listens to Black Sabbath and spends a lot of time playing computer games (when he's not arguing with Christians in forums).

Jagella

Jagella

Of course it's a common Christian concept with its roots in the New Testament. It's strange the things that people will argue in these forums.

Jagella

Diogenes the Cynic

Nope. Your first two quotes both say Gehenna. Gehenna wasn't Hell. Sorry. There was nothing "traditional" about an eternal hell in the 1st century. It hadn't been invented yet. It was the flames that were "eternal," btw, not the torment. Talking about casting somebody into Gehenna was a figurative way to talk about consigning them to an ignoble death and depriving them of eternal life. They were seen as being annihilated in the flames, not tortured.


Your parable from Luke actually says Hades, not Hell, but the flames indicate that the saying probably originally referred to Gehenna. Once again, it was about annihilation, not eternal torture.
Correction. Jesus never says the word "hell" in the NT.
An eternal FIRE, not eternal torture. Once again, there was a belief that bad people would be annihilated in Gehenna on judgement day.
They didn't know what Gehenna was and they conflated it with non-Judaic conceptions of hells later on.
How is Aquinas remotely relevant?

Aquinas spouted a lot of crap that wasn't in the Bible.
Not quite so early, though. Not in the first century and not in Palestine. It's not in the NT.
[quote]Based on the quotations I posted above, I find your argument hard to believe.[quote]
Because your quotations are mistranslations and you are reading them with preconceived. enculturated ideas about what they mean.
No. You cited passages that describe the Valley of Hinnon as a symbol of eternal death and place where sinners were expected to be annihilated on judgement day.
If you want to assert that Hell is in the Bible you're actually going to have to show an example of it rather than quoting mistranslations that you don't understand.

French Prometheus

There are 2 Jesuses in the NT : the good one (love your enemies, share with the needy,...) and the "evil" one (slay non-Christians, beat your slaves,...). Assuming there was a historical Jesus whose life inspired the authors of the NT, there's no a priori reason why we should think he was the good one while the bad things ascribed to him were made up. It may have been the other way round.

Jagella

You are evidently not able to read. All the Bible quotations I cited describe hell. Although the Greek word for hell may be Gehenna, which I do not dispute, the English translation is describing hell as anybody can see from the context.

Not true. Consider the passage from Matt. 25:46:

Hell is an eternal punishment (according to the New Testament), it appears in many places in the New Testament, and it isn’t just an annihilation.

Of course he didn’t say “hell�—he didn’t speak English.

This claim is easy to refute by considering the following passage:

Aquinas, as you evidently are unaware, is perhaps the most important theologian in the history of Christendom. If anybody knew the teachings of the New Testament, that person was Aquinas. He believed in an eternal punishment in hell for sinners, and he derived this belief from the New Testament.

Let’s take a look at a definition for Gehenna courtesy of www.Google.com:

(Emphasis added)

As I hope you can see, Gehenna originally referred to a burning garbage dump. However, you seem to be missing the fact that it was later used in the New Testament as a place of eternal punishment for sinners. So hell does indeed often appear in the New Testament.

Finally, allow me to quote Encarta Encyclopedia:

(Emphasis added.)

Again, Gehenna is not different from the Christian hell when it’s used in the New Testament. The two words mean the same thing in the gospels. They are synonyms.

I hope you can now understand where you are going wrong, and I suggest that you correct you error.

Good day,
Jagella

Jagella

It appears that we'll never know for sure. Jesus, in my opinion, was not a historical, real person. The "Jesus" referred to in the New Testament was probably based on the apocalypse-obsessed preachers of that time, many of whom were believed to be healers and miracle workers.

Jagella

Diogenes the Cynic

Gehenna is Hebrew, not Greek. The NT just transliterates it into Greek and it has nothing to do with Christian :"hell." Hell had not been invented at the time of Jesus. The passages you quote describe annihilation and eternal deat, not torture.
It's eternal death. The "punishment" is death.

<insult deleted>
He didn't say anything which could reasonably be translated as hell either. Gehenna has only one meaning- the Valley of Hinnon.
You're quoting a second century gentile apocalypse now. It has no bearing on anything the character of Jesus said in the gospels, it's a highly symbolic book and even with all that it still says the "lake of fire" is only for "Satan and his demons."
I know who Aquinas is, my point is that his opinion means jack shit. He didn't know what he was talking about either. He was a medievel Christian fanatic who knew nothing of the hisrorical or cultural context of the NT and nothing about its authorship. As I said before, Aquinas based a lot of his bullshit on non-Biblical assumptions. He has nothing to add to this conversation.
That definition is wrong. It is a popular misconception that "Gehenna" as used in the Bible refers to Christian "Hell." It does not.
Your other definition is wrong as well. They are not synonyms. Sorry. They aren't. If you want to argue that they are, then show me a single 1st century or BCE reference to Gehenna as a place of eternal torment outside of the NT (which does NOT identify Gehenna as such a place either, btw). Gehenna symbolized eternal DEATH, not torment.
It's been my pleasure to educate you. Your misconceptions are extremely common, so don't feel bad. You should know, however, that I actually know what I'm talking about, I'm not just talking out of my ass. <insult removed>

Toto

So who invented Hell? What is the earliest usage of the term Hell to mean something like what Christians now believe?

Diogenes the Cynic

The word itself comes from a Norse word, Hel, (a Goddess of the Norse Underworld) but I'm not sure, lingustically, when it first became used to describe the Christian place of torment.

The idea of a place of eternal torture grew out of NT descriptions of Gehenna which were conflated with the lake of fire in Revelation as well as ideas (probably) like the Greek "Tartarus," which was sort of the basement of Hades where bad people were tormented.

To put it simply, "Hell" was a gentile concept, not a Jewish one. To be honest, the popular Christian image we have now is owed almost entirely to Dante who took some vague conceptions and synthesized them into what we have now. There has never been a hell in Judaism and if a real HJ spoke of Gehenna, he was not talking about Christian hell because no such concept existed in Judaism at the time.

Here's a bit from Wikipedeia
So regardless of how Christians interpreted Gehenna, or even how the NT authors (who were gentiles) interpreted it, it is not possible that any 1st century Palestinian Jew could have been referring to any concept of Christian hell when talking about the Valley of Hinnon.