Mark 9:42-49 has a pretty graphic description. Revelation also has some data on Great Judgments, name being written in book of life, yadda yadda.
In the end: anyone can read anything they want into the Bible. Doesn’t matter what the Bible says–you’re going to believe what you want to believe, and the Bible will support exactly your beliefs.
Y’know, maybe, just maybe, it’s possible that the Greeks didn’t have a word that adequately described the Christian concept of Hell, and the best they could come up with was Hades.
And the chapter from Luke implies that the bad place where the rich man resides may be a little more than simply a transitional home:
*And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence. *
Any literary work which started as oral tradition in ancient languages, translated centuries later into Greek, then into other languages, and finally into different styles within languages is bound to have some room for different interpretation.
Y’know, the King James Version of Malachi 1 could be set to a rap beat…
Topheth was a specific part of the Valley of Hinnon- a hill where it was believed that children had once been sacrificed to Molech. It was probably a Canaanite word for an altar of burnt sacrifice.
The Christian concept of Hell didn’t exist yet at the time Luke was written. Hades was the way Sheol was translated in the Greek version of the OT and the divisions of Sheol were part of Jewish beliefs in the 1st century CE.
It was part and parcel of Jewish beliefs about the divisons of Sheol that no one could breech them. Sheol was still only temporary, though.
Any literary work which started as oral tradition in ancient languages, translated centuries later into Greek, then into other languages, and finally into different styles within languages is bound to have some room for different interpretation.
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There is no documentation for a Jewish belief in eternal hell before the Christian era.
Well, not unless you choose to ignore the Book of Enoch, written up to 250 years prior to the birth of Jesus (although much of it is later):
Chapter 10:
While those who come later will be bound to Semjaza for 15 generations, Semjaza and his buddies are, after waiting for 70 generations for judgment, to “be confined forever” in an “abyss of fire.”
Enoch was never canonical among the Jewish people. However, a claim that it does not represent “a Jewish belief” (by some unidentified number of Jews) is not tenable. It was sufficiently well known among Jews and Hellenized Jews to be quoted by the authors of the Letter of Jude and the Letter of Barnabas.
Verses 17, 18 and 19 seem to imply that those souls will eventually be destroyed.
No matter, I will concede the point that I was wrong to say that there is NO evidence of a pre-Christian Jewish belief at the time but I will maintain that it’s not in the Hebrew Bible and not in the NT. Enoch is a compilation of fringe writings - some of them dating into the Christian era- which contain any number of ideas (“levels of Heaven” and so forth) which do not appear in the TNK and may or may not represent mainstream Jewish ideas at any given time.
The OP’s question as to whether Christian Hell is described in the Bible is still a no- or at least, every example which is commonly translated or interpreted as such can be easily explained within a context of mainstream Jewish afterlife and eschatological beliefs which did not necessarily include a belief in eternal torment.
Moved to GD.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
The passages you cite all refer to heaven basically as the place where God lives. That was the distinction I was trying to make, that in the OT heaven is only where God lives, not necessarily someplace any of the rest of us can aspire to.
The references to hell are actually pretty subtle and not necessarily referring to hell per se. The story mentioned in Numbers, for example, sounds more like an earthquake than some kind of hell:
Either way, considering the importance given to heaven and hell in contemporary religions, you would think the Bible would have spent a little more time on it. Maybe if you have to spend your days on earth obsessing on which goat to sacrifice (gotta have both testicles, ya’ know) an eternity of misery and torture isn’t that big a deal.
It isn’t? What about the cited passage from Luke? You can debate whether the described torment is eternal, but it certainly sounds conscious if the rich man is begging for water.
Or are you defining “Bible” in such a way as to exclude the gospel according to Luke.
And here’s the passage from the Gospel of Mark to which dre2xl made reference:
Mark 9:42-48.
And I believe Mark is regarded as the earliest known Gospel (and therefore, the most unfiltered).
I can’t help but wonder why the founders of a religion that is so focused on the afterlife wouldn’t attempt to explain the consequences in a more direct manner. A parable written down by someone who never met Christ, and AFAIK does not appear in any other gospel or writings by those who could have heard the parable being told does not seem like strong evidence for the concept of eternal fire and demon whippings.
Yes, but as noted the same concept (if not the same parable) shows up in both Mark and Luke.
Yeah, but the Mark passage does not say that the soul will burn forever, just that the fire is not quenched. Which could mean that the worm eats the souls as they burn and the fire won’t go out no matter how many souls are tossed in. It does not imply, like Luke does, that the punishment goes on for a long time or that the soul is even aware of the burning.
And of course the book of Revelation makes reference to the “lake of fire”:
Revelation 20:15.
The torment isn’t necessarily eternal, though, in the conception of the writer of Revelation:
Revelation 21:8.
Now, granted, the book of Revelation came along late in the game, but the OP’s question was whether the concept of Hell appears in the Bible. Revelation being part of the Bible, you’d have to include its references.
I’m defining hell as eternal. Sheol wasn’t eternal.
The word tranlsated as Hell is Gehenna in Greek. It is the fire that’s eternal, not the torment. “The worm never dies” is a reference to the rotting carcasses in Gehenna which “eternally” crawled with worms. Gehenna is a place for annihilation and eternal death, not torment.
It’s two different concepts. the parable in Luke is about Sheol, in which temporary punishment is possible. The passage in Mark is about Gehenna, which comes after the dead are resurrected from Sheol and which is a site of annihilation, not torment.
Add the Gospel of Matthew to the list:
Matthew 25:41-46
The issue with any of the passages referring to everlasting fires (generally translating gehenna), is that while the fires last forever, the passages never actually say that the person will “survive” in those fires forever. The point being that the more traditional Jewish belief is that those who have done evil will, themselves, be destroyed in the fires that never will die.
There are passages that talk about everlasting punishment, but they are generally separate from the passages that use the image of fire or gehenna and they also generally use some variant of the problematic Greek word aion (’[symbol]aiwn[/symbol]), that does not have the specific meaning that “eternal,” “everlasting,” or “forever” have in English. It can mean “long ages” or “an indefinite long period of time” or even just “an age.”
My point in my exchange with DtC was that I do not believe that it is a cut-and-dried fact that Christianity introduced the notion of everlasting punishment in the second century. It may have done so, but there are glimpses and foreshadowings in the Apocrypha (such as Enoch), and there are references in other New Testament passages, that the concept of everlasting punishment was sufficiently familiar to the audience, indicating that while it was not a mainstream belief, it was a belief that people would have recognized.
As an example, Matthew 25:46
The exact same word is used to identify the future of those who are evil and those who are righteous, '[symbol]aiwnion[/symbol], yet I never encounter anyone arguing that those who are saved will eventually die.
However, to repeat the point, above, the references to everlasting fire that we find do not actually say that those condemed will burn forever, only that the fires, themselves, will never be extinguished.
And, again, I am not asserting that the belief clearly was present. I only contend that the issue is not one of clear fact.
Do you have a citation for that? Because the two passages appear to be referring to the same concept of fiery punishment after death. Call the concept whatever you will. (A rose by any other name and all that.)
Matt 25:41, 46 and Revelation 14:
10. The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:
11. And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.
are the strongest NT support for eternal hell.
The problem -alas-
the word in the Matthew passage translated as “everlasting” & “eternal” is “aionian”, which literally means “age-enduring”, but does not essentially mean “eternal”. The strongest argument, tho not irrefutable, that is does mean
“eternal” is that “aionian” is also used in the NT to describe the Afterlife of the saved.
And in Revelation 14. the term “forever and ever” is literally “for the aions of the aions”, “ages and ages”- also not necessarily forever & even if it did mean that- it says the SMOKE of their anguish will rise forever & ever, not that they will suffer forever & ever. Plus, it’s a reference to a prophecy against Edom in Isaiah 34:
9. And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch.
10. It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.
The fires of Edom’s destruction are no longer burning but the destruction of Edom was quite thorough.