# King James Bible confuses purgatory and hell?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [March 9, 2004, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358 "2004-03-09T22:01:47Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@NotSuitableforChildren](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NotSuitableforChildren)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2004, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/1 "2004-03-09T22:01:47Z")
I remember reading somewhere that the King James Bible repeatedly confuses purgatory (hades) and hell (gehenna). Specifically the part where it says Jesus went to hell after dying, and that it actually means he went to purgatory/limbo.
Could somebody find the quote/passage where it is explained? Thanks.
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### Author:  [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2004, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/2 "2004-03-09T22:07:11Z")
I don’t really understand your question. Both purgatory and limbo are later (and different), almost exclusively Catholic terms. The phrases used were “hades”, which is the Greek land of the dead, and gehenna, which literally is a valley outside of Jerusalem the city used as a waste dump, but came to mean a place of punishment and suffering after death in Judaism.
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### Author:  [@Dogface](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dogface)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2004, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/3 "2004-03-09T22:08:31Z")
> [@NotSuitableforChildren](#):
>
> I remember reading somewhere that the King James Bible repeatedly confuses purgatory (hades) and hell (gehenna). Specifically the part where it says Jesus went to hell after dying, and that it actually means he went to purgatory/limbo.
>
> Could somebody find the quote/passage where it is explained? Thanks.
Purgatory is never mentioned at all in Scripture.
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### Author:  [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2004, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/4 "2004-03-09T22:16:53Z")
In terms of the verse in the KJV, you might be thinking of Acts 2:31?
> [@](#):
>
> He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.
, and the word translated there is “Hades”.
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### Author:  [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2004, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/5 "2004-03-09T22:21:40Z")
In short, the KJV translates 4 different words as “hell”:
Hades (Greek afterlife)
Sheol (Jewish afterlife)
Gehenna (Jewish place of punishment in the afterlife)
and once
Tartarus(Greek place of punishment in the afterlife)
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### Author:  [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2004, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/6 "2004-03-09T22:25:11Z")
It may be irrelevant, it may be connected, a KJV scholar can tell me…but in Dante’s _Divine Comedy_, Jesus passed through purgatory in order to reach hell.
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### Author:  [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2004, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/7 "2004-03-10T06:10:59Z")
> [@](#):
>
> It may be irrelevant, it may be connected, a KJV scholar can tell me…but in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Jesus passed through purgatory in order to reach hell.
Not exactly. In the _Inferno_, the First Circle of Hell is populated by the virtuous pagans who exist in a pleasant condition, free of pain and torment, but who can never see God. This is a description of Limbo. Limbo was a theological construct (and was never adopted as Doctrine) to come to grips with the apparent contradiction between the idea that one could not be saved “except through” Jesus and the notion that a just God would condemn virtuous people to Hell.
Purgatory got its own whole book, (named, interestingly enough, _Il Purgatorio_) and was reached by climbing out of Hell after reaching the Ninth Circle of Hell.
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### Author:  [@Extraneous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Extraneous)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2004, 6:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/8 "2004-03-10T06:49:45Z")
Isn’t Purgatory derived from one of the Macabee books, which the Catholic Church considers canon, but the Protestants do not?
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### Author:  [@kniz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kniz)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2004, 6:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/9 "2004-03-10T06:56:03Z")
The longer we can keep purgatory and hell confused the better off we’ll be.
😃 [sup] **Divide and conquer is the next step.** [/sup]
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### Author:  [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2004, 7:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/king-james-bible-confuses-purgatory-and-hell/233358/10 "2004-03-10T07:50:44Z")
Purgatory and Limbo are not in the Bible.
Hades was the Greek underworld where _everybody_ went.
Sheol was the Jewish underworld where _everybody_ went. It was pretty much the same as Hades with the distinction that it was not eternal. All would be resurrected and judged by God on the last day.
Gehenna was (and is) a valey in jerusalem which was used as a dumping site for animal carcasses and garbage in ancient times. It was also an occasional dumping site for the bodies of criminals. People kept fires going there pretty much constantly as an attempt to destroy the rotting carcasses. Gehenna was also believed to have been a site of human sacrifice in pre-Israelite times. Gehenna became a symbolic synonymn for death, especially ignoble death. Being cast into the fires of Gehenna was a fate for the most despicible criminals. Since Jewish views of the afterlife were influenced by the Hellenization of Palestine, “Gehenna” may have become the name for a Jewish analogue to the Greek “tartarus.” which was the lowest part of Hades where the bad people were tormented.
Purgatory, as **~tom** said, ia basically a theological inference designed to reconcile a benevolent God with some of the moral problems that would arise with a permanent Hell.