That would be my first question…is it other people? Many think they live in it today in urban areas.
A great teacher said: why worry about the material the arrow is made of when you are being pierced in the heart by it?
Sefronia777
mama’s worry was a burden
they had seen her everywhere
and since her little one was now a dead man
they patted his back
and she thought
why did she let them?
Sefronia777.com
Drops 2/8/06
Let’s evolve together
So maybe heaven is music eternal, while hell is muzak eternal?
Thanks for the translation tip. I see that there’s a whole webpage devoted to that word: http://hellbusters.8m.com/aionlink.htm
Ok, so it’s not “everlasting punishment”, it’s eon-lasting punishment or maybe era-lasting punishment.
Now it seems to me that when somebody says [blank]-lasting [something you don’t want to happen], they’re implying that [blank] lasts longer than a pleasant summer afternoon. So while the Matthew may have had a less-than-modern concept of geologic time, it seems to me that he may have wanted to convey a notion of, “Longer than you want to think about”.
On page 2 of the rather diverting thread that tomndeb alluded to, DtC asserted, "Literally, aionon kolasin means “age-lasting pruning.” The “punishment” was death. " http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=6506123&postcount=60
Ok, so in hell you die a slow, presumably miserable, death. Except “slow” means “really-really slow, glacial even” --lasting an age (or aion).
Damn. That’s much worse than your typical horror flick.
Unless the Universalists are right and the kolasin/pruning can actually mean “Correction”- then it’s a slow hard rehabilitation, but still works out for the best.
While not a literal translation, it might not be bad to translate “aionion kolasin” as
“an aion/world of punishment/correction”.
Warden Jesus says "You spend an aion in the box!"G
I seem to recall that my flavor of Seventh Day Adventists (the church in which I was raised and baptized; I no longer attend) assigned a sort of length of torment, in proportion to one’s sin, but (as others have stated) it was most definitely finite. Meaning that say, Hitler, would burn far longer than Snickers would for her petty crimes, but that once the sins were consumed, the individual would cease to exist.
I remember my brother getting into a debate at church about the existance of hell. His opinion was that man had invented it because “death isn’t good enough.” Simple death isn’t a good enough punishment for the rapist who tortured and mutilated his victims (or you can insert your own vile, reprehensible crimes here); there must be more. We might have been Christians, but we were human enough to want vengeance and justice.
There is nothing in the Bible about “everlasting punishment” in the sense of ongoing, eternal torment. More on that in a second.
I’m going to take the second one first.
In Mtt. 25:46, the words translated above as “everlasting punishment” are kolasin aionion in Greek. aionion is an adjectival form of aion which means “age” or “era.” Aionion is an adjective which most literally would translate to something like “age-y” but is better rendered as “age-lasting” or “enduring.” It means a long time, an indefinite time, but not necessarily an infinite anount of time. I’m not really going to quibble with that, though because the word translated as “punishment,” kolasin, does not mean active torment. It comes from a root word meaning “cutting off” or “pruning,” and figuratively it means either “correction” or “penalty,” but it does NOT mean torture, torment, etc. For the bad people to be “eternally cut off” simply reflects the 1st century eschatological Jewish belief that bad people would be annihilated in fire (often visualized as happening in the Valley called “Gehenna” which Jesus refers to often and which is commonly mistranslated as “Hell”)
Mtt. 18:8 is easily dispensed with. It refers to everlasting fire, not punishment. The fires of Gehenna burned constantly. The bodies of criminals were often cast into those fires. It was widely believed at the time that bad people would be tossed into those fires on judgement day to be annihilated. It’s only the fire that is aionion, not the torment.
Mk. 9:42,43 Is just more eternal fire.
Your translation from 2 Thessalonians is just wrong. Here it is in the Greek:
Hoitines | diken | tisousin | olethron| aionion | apo | prosopou | tou | kuriou | kai | apo | tes | doxes | tes | ischuous | autou
Who | justice | they shall suffer (lit. “they shall pay penalty”) | destruction/death | age-lasting | away from | the face | [of] the | Lord | and | away from | the | glory | [of] the | power | his
To put it in better English, "…who shall suffer justice, age-lasting destruction/death, away from the face of the Lord and the glory of his power.
The key word there is olethron, which means “destruction, obliteration, death,” not "punishment or torment.
Glad to see you around, DtC
I’ll drop Matt 18:8 and Mark 9:42. The other 2 quotes are more interesting.
Couple of interesting elements in the above. Firstly, Jesus is the avenger here, not Satan. Second, if we believe the NRSV, it appears to imply that the damned die forever (without rebirth) as opposed to the freak-show that I alluded to above.
But Matt 25:46 is more puzzling, as “pruning” seems ambiguous at least to me. If it figuratively means “correction” or “penalty”, methinks that such a description could be euphemistic for the sort of fire and brimstone alluded to elsewhere in the NT. Whatever it is, it lasts an entire aion.
Perhaps a study of the 1st century Judaic penal system could offer some clues as to what “pruning” would mean at the time. If we think of the plant it could mean “fixing”, but if we refocus on the objectional parts of the plant it could mean “cut off (or killed)”.
The 13th-century Sufi mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi taught that although Hell lasts eternally, it will become cool and all the inmates released from suffering. A tree will grow. 
The Wahhabis condemn Ibn al-‘Arabi as the worst heretic of all. :smack:
If you think of it in terms of 1st century Jewish eschatological beliefs it makes sense that it would refer to being “pruned off” from God (and from eternal life) by being destroyed in the flames of Gehenna.
Ok, “Cut-off from God’s kingdom and thrown into Chernobyl”, sounds like a plausible translation (if a little rough). I still see some ambiguity, but at least we’ve laid out some of the main issues.
Good work gang. A question remains though. Where did the Christian concept of eternal hell come from? Tomndebb’s linked thread from last summer dates it to the 2nd century. Did the early church misunderstand or consciously extend scripture? Did the innovations come out of the Diaspora following the fall of the main temple (so that “Gehenna the abominable landfill” meant little to those living in, say, Rome)? Those who maintain that mainline Christianity gets it wrong have some explaining to do.
Tips for visitors:
Gehenna, located in the “Valley of Hinnom”, currently goes by the name of Wadi al-Rababi. It falls within the domain of the mayor of Jerusalem.
I have a question about Mark 9:42-43…
And if thy hand scandalize thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life, maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into unquenchable fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished.
[Bolding mine.]
I understand that it is the fire that is eternal, but why doesn’t the worm ever die? If I’m reading that correctly, perhaps that’s where so many extrapolate theories onto souls. If it never kicks the bucket and suffers the fire endlessly, maybe so do we. Or if I’ve got it wrong, who the hell (heh) does the worm belongeth to? Then “their” who??
It’s just a mild bit of poetry. The word translated as “hell” is Gehenna. The animal carcasses in Gehenna crawled with worms all the time despite the perpetual attempts to burn everything. The valley was literally a pit full of “everlasting” fires and “undying” worms. Those are only slightly figurative descriptors for how people perceived the local garbage dump.
Thanks Dio, that makes a bit more sense.
Jesus’s “unquenchable fire & undying worms” quotes are pretty much a direct quote from (Strong’s numbers) Isaiah 66:24, which clearly states that those afflicted by the worms & fire are corpses.
|5427| And they will go out
|7200| and see,
|6297| the dead bodies of
|0376| the men
|5674| who have transgressed
|0000| against Me.
|3588| For
|8438| their worm
|3808| not
|4191| will die,
|0784| and their fire
|3808| not
|1896| will be put out.
|1961| And they will be
|1860| an abhorrence
|3605| to all
|1320| flesh.
The Hebrew word
Strong’s Ref. # 6297
Romanized peger
Pronounced peh’gher
from HSN6296; a carcase (as limp), whether of man or beast; figuratively, an idolatrous image:
KJV–carcase, corpse, dead body.
– King James
Isaiah 66:24 And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.
– American Standard
Isaiah 66:24 And they shall go forth, and look upon the dead bodies of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.
– New International
Isaiah 66:24 “And they will go out and look upon the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.”
– Romanized Hebrew
Isaiah 66:24 wyaats’uu wraa’uu bpigreey haa’anaashiym haposhiym biy kiy towlataam lo’ taamuut w’ishaam lo’ tikbeh whaayuu deeraa’own lkaal-baasaar.