Let's talk about Hell

[FriarTed]

@Latro

Is it too late into the thread to still ask a serious question?

I would like to know about when the transition to either Hel or Heaven became to be understood as “after you died”.
I think that most Christians believe their deceased loved ones to be in Heaven now. That they went there just after they died.
But this doesn’t seem to be the idea as described in the bible. It states there that it is decided ,who will go to Hell and who will go to Heaven, after the apocalypse. After Jesus’ return (or when the Messiah comes).

Is this idea, that the dead are in Heaven or Hell right now, sort of a continuation of the pre-Christian/Indo-European ideas about death?
Where when you died you either went to Hel (in the germanic meaning as the underworld, the place where the dead dwell) or, if you had been Good (as in died in battle) you would be taken straight to “a good place” like Walhalla or Sessrumnir.

Luke 16- Jesus’s story of the beggar Lazarus & the Rich Man seems to occur right after death, not at the Final Resurrection. Remember that in the New Testament, there are three words translated “Hell”- Hades, which is the realm of the dead, and “Gehenna” the burning dump, which I think is identical with the Lake of Fire in Revelation 20, the final destination of the damned at the Last Judgment.

[Latro]

@FriarTed

Luke 16- Jesus’s story of the beggar Lazarus & the Rich Man seems to occur right after death, not at the Final Resurrection.

But is Lazarus an exeption or did the ‘Jesus movement’ differ from Orthodox Judaism in that they thought people went straight to heaven?
In another instance Jesus says, to the other criminal crucified beside him, that he would be in paradise today.
(Although I know the J-witnesses claim there was a comma ommited and that it should read “I tell you today, you will be in paradise.”)