Tentmaker

The Primary word some translators mistranslated hell is the Aramaic word Gehenna which is the Hebrew ga ben hinnom. It appears about 12 times only in the N.T. and mostly in Jesus' mouth. Here are just a few facts about this word. Much more could be said about it, but it was NEVER Hell in the Old Testament and Jesus NEVER had in mind that it was an eternal barbeque pit in which billions would be endlessly fried like the traditional church has taught. By the way, the modern church has changed its view what what is hell significantly.:

Dr. John Wesley Hanson, author of "The Bible Hell" and "Bible Threatenings Explained" (available from Tentmaker Publications or on our internet site http://www.tentmaker.org) gives us the following information about Gehenna/ga hinnom.

1. Gehenna was a well-known locality near Jerusalem, and ought no more to be translated Hell, than should Sodom or Gomorrah. See Josh. 15: 8; 2 Kings 17: 10; 2 Chron. 28:3;
Jer. 7:31, 32; 19:2.

2. Gehenna is never employed in the Old Testament to mean anything else than the place with which every Jew was familiar.

3. The word should have been left untranslated as it is in some versions, and it would not be misunderstood. It was not misunderstood by the Jews to whom Jesus addressed it. Walter Balfour well says: “What meaning would the Jews who were familiar with this word, and knew it to signify the valley of Hinnom, be likely to attach to it when they heard it used by our Lord? Would they, contrary to all former usage, transfer its meaning from a place with whose locality and history they had been familiar from their infancy, to a place of misery in another world? This conclusion is certainly inadmissible. By what rule of interpretation, then, can we
arrive at the conclusion that this word means a place of misery and death?�

4. The French Bible, the Emphatic Diaglott, Improved Version, Wakefield’s Translation and Newcomb’s retain the proper noun, Gehenna, the name of a place as well-known as Babylon. (Many translations since Hanson wrote have done the same thing.)

5. Gehenna is never mentioned in the Apocrypha as a place of future punishment as it would have been had such been its meaning before and at the time of Christ.

6. No Jewish writer, such as Josephus or Philo, ever uses it as the name of a place of future punishment, as they would have done had such then been its meaning.

7. No classic Greek author ever alludes to it and therefore it was a Jewish locality, purely.

8. The first Jewish writer who ever names it as a place of future punishment is Jonathan Ben Uzziel who wrote, according to various authorities, from the second to the eighth century, A. D.

9. The first Christian writer who calls Hell Gehenna is Justin Martyr who wrote about A. D. 150.

10. Neither Christ nor his apostles ever named it to Gentiles, but only to Jews which proves it a locality only known to Jews, whereas, if it were a place of punishment after death for sinners, it would have been preached to Gentiles as well as Jews.

11. It was only referred to twelve times on eight occasions in all the ministry of Christ and the apostles, and in the Gospels and Epistles. Were they faithful to their mission to say no more than this on so vital a theme as an endless Hell, if they intended to teach it?

12. Only Jesus and James ever named it. Neither Paul, John, Peter nor Jude ever employ it. Would they not have warned sinners concerning it, if there were a Gehenna of torment after death?

13. Paul says he “shunned not to declare the whole counsel of God,� and yet though he was the great preacher of the Gospel to the Gentiles he never told them that Gehenna is a place of after-death punishment. Would he not have repeatedly warned sinners against it were there such a place?

Dr. Thayer significantly remarks: “The Savior and James are the only persons in all the New Testament who use the word. John the Baptist, who preached to the most wicked of men did not use it once. Paul wrote fourteen epistles and yet never once mentions it. Peter does not name it, nor Jude; and John, who wrote the gospel, three epistles, and the Book of Revelations, never employs it in a single instance. Now if Gehenna or Hell really reveals the terrible fact of
endless woe, how can we account for this strange silence? How is it possible, if they knew its meaning and believed it a part of Christ’s teaching, that they should not have used it a hundred
or a thousand times, instead of never using it at all; especially when we consider the infinite interests involved? The Book of Acts contains the record of the apostolic preaching, and the history of the first planting of the church among the Jews and Gentiles, and embraces a period of thirty years from the ascension of Christ. In all this history, in all this preaching of the disciples and apostles of Jesus there is no mention of Gehenna. In thirty years of missionary effort
these men of God, addressing people of all characters and nations never under any circumstances threaten them with the torments of Gehenna or allude to it in the most distant manner! In the face of such a fact as this can any man believe that Gehenna signifies endless punishment and that this is part of divine revelation, a part of the Gospel message to the world? These considerations show how impossible it is to establish the doctrine in review on the word Gehenna.

All the facts are against the supposition that the term was used by Christ or his disciples in the sense of endless punishment. There is not the least hint of any such meaning attached to it, nor the slightest preparatory notice that any such new revelation was to be looked for in this old familiar word.�--endquote

14. Jesus never uttered it to unbelieving Jews, nor to anybody but his disciples, but twice (Matt. 23:15-33) during his entire ministry, nor but four times in all. If it were the final abode of unhappy millions, would not his warnings abound with exhortations to avoid it?

15. Jesus never warned unbelievers against it but once in all his ministry (Matt. 23:33) and he immediately explained it as about to come in this life.

16. If Gehenna is the name of Hell then men’s bodies are burned there as well as their souls. Matt. 5:29; 18:9.

17. If it be the name of endless torment, then literal fire is the sinner’s punishment. Mark 9: 43-48.

18. Salvation is never said to be from Gehenna.

19. Gehenna is never said to be of endless duration nor spoken of as destined to last forever, so that even admitting the popular ideas of its existence after death, it gives no support to the idea of endless torment.

20. Clement, a Universalist, used Gehenna to describe his ideas of punishment. He was one of the earliest of the Christian Fathers. The word did not then denote endless punishment.

21. A shameful death or severe punishment in this life was at the time of Christ denominated by Gehenna (Schleusner, Canon Farrar and others), and there is no evidence that Gehenna meant anything else at the time of Christ.

Here are the only places in the New Testament where the word Gehenna is found. Note that it is almost always in Jesus' mouth and He NEVER used it when speaking to common sinners, heathen, Romans, etc. He used the term when speaking to either very RELIGIOUS people or His disciples; those who consider themselves "God's chosen people!" (Matt 5:22, 29, 30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15; 23:33; Mk. 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5; James 3:6.) In other words, it is JEWS and CHRISTIANS who had better take the warnings about being thrown into Gehenna seriously, not the lost of the world. The only other person in the New Testament to use the word "Gehenna" was James.

God never warned Adam that the wages of sin was an eternal life of torture in a literal fire. Moses never warned Israel in all his 613 laws that the wages of sin was an endless life of physical torture in an eternal barbecue pit. None of the prophets of old never warned Israel or any of the surrounding nations that they would be endlessly tortured if they became enemies of Yahweh. As a matter of fact, most of the world was never warned about anything from the God of the Christian Bible. Countless nations have come and gone and never heard of Yahweh nor Jesus, the One Name under heaven by which man may be saved. Neither were they ever warned that they would be endlessly tortured by a loving God. If God planned to do this to all those who did not heed His warnings, then He did a lousy job in issuing the warning. The reason why most of the world has NOT been warned of this terrible fate is because God never planned to do such a horrible thing in the first place! As He said to Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, "Such a thing NEVER entered My mind!!!" (Jeremiah 32:35)

Tentmaker

I just figured out how to respond to particular links. I've been making posts that weren't connected to the inquiring link. Sorry, I'm sure that got a lot of people wondering. Most of the recent posts I've made on this thread have been to "follower of Chris" but my posts have been scattered all over the place because I didn't hit the "quote" button. Again, sorry for the confusion. Also I didn't know until today that the thread was moved to a different forum. Just saw that today also. Peace, Tentmaker.

Tentmaker

Tentmaker: I went to the link. Aaarrghhh. "Sometimes the truth is drowned in a multitude of words."

Tentmaker

Tentmaker: "And I if I am lifted from the earth, will draw (drag in the Greek) all peoples to myself. This he said signifying what manner of death He would die." John 12:32, 33

How's that for brevity? But how many people believe it? Most Christians don't. And that is why he stated "When the Son of Man returns will He find faith in the earth?" Well, He sure won't find it in the church. There's probably more faith in the local bars than in the local church.

Tentmaker

Tentmaker: That was only one historians view. Several others disagreed.

St. Basil the Great (c. 329-379) in his De Asceticis wrote:
“The mass of men (Christians) say that there is to be an end of punishment to those who are punished.�
I point out that he is not classified as a Universalist.
St. Jerome (342-420), the author of the Vulgate Latin Bible and whose jealousy got him into an ugly scandal that stained the church, wrote:
“I know that most persons understand by the story of Nineveh and its King, the ultimate forgiveness of the devil and all rational creatures.�
The last person I want to quote regarding what the average early Christian believed, is the very champion of the doctrine of “Eternal Torment� himself--Saint Augustine. He stands right next to Emperor Constantine as a key figure leading the church away from the original teachings of the Old and New Testaments. Augustine was in the Manichaean religion for nine years prior to becoming a Christian. This was an Eastern religion of fire worship. In this system, the universe would be divided forever between good and evil. The Romans and Greeks had a habit of incorporating the religions of the countries they conquered. The religions of the East flooded into the church after Constantine united church and state. Constantine provided the building materials to build this monstrous structure and Augustine built the theological structure. His most famous writing was The City of God. Now listen to the champion of “Eternal Torment� regarding the view of Christian believers over this matter over four hundred years after Christ’s resurrection:
“There are very many (imo quam plurimi, which can be translated majority) who though not denying the Holy Scriptures, do not believe in endless torments� (Enchiria, ad Laurent. c.29).
Out of his own mouth, the hero of the eternal tormentors of Christendom, stated that in his day many or the majority of Christians did not believe in endless torment and they did not deny the Holy Scriptures by believing it. In this period of time, the great teachers still read the new Testament in Greek, but Augustine admits that he “hated Greek.�

Follower of Christ, you need to be able to deal with this. This info isn't coming from universalist historians, it is coming out of the mouth of early church leaders. :-)

Tentmaker

[QUOTE=Follower of Christ]youve GOT to be kidding me pal
I use like 18 translations and compare them ALL.
And they ALL say Jesus taught hell. (unless youve some foreign translation Ive not heard of)

Tentmaker: Well pal, I have nearly a hundred English Bible translations and a bunch of them don't have the concept of Hell in them so I guess you haven't researched as deeply as I have. Maybe you've lived in the fundie world where no hell Bibles are banned and so you haven't seen one. Possible? I lived in the evangelical world for five years and no one ever told me there were translations without Hell translated by conservative Christians and scholars. So I learned something and it changed my life. I hope you learn something too and it will change YOUR life. Here is an article you should read about no hell bibles:

http://www.tentmaker.org/books/GatesOfHell.html

Just out of curiosity, do you have Young's Literal or Weymouth's New Testament before1923?

Chili

There is a difference between the teachings of the Council of Florence and its enforcement. You are comparing the actual teaching with the conviction of one heretic who refused to mend her actions after having been ordered to do so. It must be pointed out here that unbelievers were not called heretic and that not all heretics were convicted to be burned or die another way. Only those who were leading innocent believers to hell were tried and they had the opportinity to stop their active ministry as deceiver (wolf in sheep's clothing) or be condemned to die.

You must try to understand that if Catholics could enjoy heaven on earth it is obvious that hell is also a place on earth and if a heretic leads innocent believers to hell, he or she deserves the millstone, as Jesus put it. Moreover, if the premature awakening of divine Love (eg.Songs 2:7) sends us to hell it is not only prudent but also an obligation of the Mother Church to stamp out spiritual fornicators that rob its members of eternal life through the arousal of divine love before its own time (called the "message of salvation" today).

The living proof of the above argument is that there are no "Grahamites" proclaiming to enjoy heaven on earth while the Catholic church still maintains that heaven is for Catholics only (which does not mean that all Catholics go to heaven but it does mean that hell is not for Catholics-as-Catholic but only for estranged Catholics). That heaven on earth is not a frequent occurance these days is because they declared open season on the spiritual fornication of minors with the onset of the Reformation that simultaneously killed the heyday of Catholicism. The most obvious evidence of this is that Luther as much as replaced the confessionals with hatching boxes to prep the children for this [vain]glorious event.

The above does not deal with those who are cold as per Rev.3:15.

Jehanne

burned people for heresy (and later, witchcraft) for over 1000 years, a practice that they have all but renounced. How do you "explain" that? Seems to me to be more “economic� and “political� considerations as opposed to “theological�... As for "Joan of Arc", another individual, a male, was burned alive on the very same scaffold on which she stood later in the afternoon on May 30, 1431, so Jehanne's case can hardly be considered an "isolated" event. Historians know of his existence because his execution was mentioned at Jehanne's "Trial of Rehabilitation" in the context of hers.

Chili

Heresy itself was not sufficient grounds for execution but witchcraft was. Witchcraft was the actual physical evidence of heresy that showed the various ways in which the believer is compelled to act as heretic. No politics, no economics but pure theology, as we shall see.

The imagery alone should tell you what witchcraft entails. The "flying broom" image is where the believer had gathered some scriptures that allowed him to soar through mid-heaven from where he proclaims the good news to others below. This is the typical testimony stuff that full gospel churches cater to and rejoice in. The recipe was, of course, prepared by the "brew-master" who had started his own denomination on the basis of his own sola scriptura recipe that allowed him to soar.

The famous "burning stake" image is where they crashed if they failed to refuel their idol with new passages each morning . . . or after the old bundle would not sustain them any longer when they encountered new passages that fouled the ideal that upheld them. I am not sure if it can be compared with spontaneous combustion but if you go to the Baptist board today and ask if there are any who would be willing to die at the foot of the cross in wait of Jesus' return you might agree that combustion is evident either way.

In Revelation 13 and 14, witches, or those who were called witches, are identified. In Rev. 13 we see that the second beast come from the [old] earth and these are those who were reborn of carnal desire as opposed to the first beast that came from the [celestial] sea. Without going into the details between these two it is noted that the second beast will worship the first beast and will force, or try to force, everybody in the entire world to worship the first beast. These would be known as Jesus worshipers today because it is noted that the first beast had victory over sin and bore the stigmata. These two kinds of rebirth are identified in Jn.1:13.

It is also to be noticed that Jesus worshipers are determined to spread the good news to the entire world and will have no rest until this great commission is completed because that will be the day when their Jesus will come and end the slavery to their ideal by which they are tormented each and every day.

The three angels in Rev. speak of their behavior. The first angel flies through mid-heaven proclaiming the good news that the end of the world is near and that we must worship their God. Notice that mid-heaven is not equal to heaven but is slightly above the earth to show that they have been born again and have "entered the race" (since this is an image we all recognize).

The second flying angel condemns the Mother Church that only refined the believer into the kind of clay that a potter seeks and whom they now aim to enrich with worthless bible passages that only testify on the potters behalf (Jn.5:39-40).

The third angel, in full ignorance of his own deceit, is warning others about
the mark of the beast that these three angels proudly display to the rest of the world. This angel is also soaring, as he would, because he has also drank of the wine of Gods wrath poured full strength in the cup of his anger.

The smoke of their torment shall rise "forever and ever" just confirms that eternal suffering is opposite to "eternal life on earth" and that there is no relief by day or by night speaks of the fire that is burning within for which there is no consolation to be found in understanding (no living water that flows from deep within because they were reborn from carnal desire via sola scriptura instead of God).

Verse 12 just tells us that these little one ones are sustained by their faith in Jesus and their keeping of the commandments which is a contradiction in terms if it was for liberty that Christ set us free as per Gal.1-5. The message here is that freedom in Christ is equal to freedom from religion and the yoke of slavery and sin = the first beast.

Verse 13 speaks of those who have died to their sin nature in the Lord instead of wailing at the foot of the cross where they will die and get buried after that. This person did not drink the wine of Gods wrath but was taught to convert living water into wine.

Apologize for the Inquisition? I would say that it is wrong to even suggest that they should as it must have been very difficult for them to dispose of their sheep that they failed to keep within the Church that was inspired by Christ himself. But you know, I think that it is wrong that even one witch should have been sacrificed but it is equally wrong that even one would have remained in direct defiance of Christ's Church.

Maimonides

:devil1: I'll tell you the same thing I told someone else on another website who pushed the same point:

The whole notion of hell is troubling. Why would "God" send perfectly good people to hell solely because they didn't believe X Y Z? Makes no sense: many non-Christians aren't serving self or Satan any more than most Christians (and for some of them, probably a lot less). Furthermore, why hell? One would think an omnipotent deity capable of some other recourse. Why should "sin" lead to "Hell"? Furthermore, I don't believe in the historical existence of Adam and Eve, so how could I have inherited Original Sin?

The concept of Hell is an affront. It sounds suspiciously barbaric, scarist and puerile, like a scary bedtime story told by parents to frighten their children. Certainly it's "worked," emotionally scarring or affronting a lot of people (including many Christians, including myself); one wonders about the nature of a deity that would feel the need to do that.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist. Remember, I grew up in church! But it seems illogical and absurd.