I think this goes here- it’s kind of a matter of debate.
I’ve been following the posts about hell and the supernatural recently. This summer, I will read the Bible and many other religious documents. But this question I ask now.
The New Testament, it can be pointed out, does quite a crappy job of both describing what this ‘Hell’ is that must be avoided, and defining how one is to be ‘saved’ through faith in ‘Jesus.’ Jesus the rabbi spoke of ‘hell’ frequently in the synoptic gospels. But, I know that King James trans. is wrong, he is really referring to Gehenna from OT, the literal place Jeremiah describes where wicked Jews were sep. from God and a fire burned constantly. But it seems like Jesus was also drawing from Greek mythology with his idea of Hell. Is this right? Tell me: what the ‘hell’ was Jesus the rabbi referring to when he talks about how unforgiven would be cast into a dark place w/ ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ where ‘the worm never dies?’ Where do most scholars believe he got these ideas?
Also, the most cited source of info about ‘hell’ from Jesus is Luke 16, the story of the rich man and Lazarus. This is the only time the rabbi describes this literal place of torment; and many people don’t take it literally, b/c it is in the form of a parable. But personally, as a complete skeptic and diametrically opposed to Christianity, I even admit that it seems like a literal desc. of this place. He mentions a chasm sep. it from the place of Abraham and the angels, he describes the wicked man suffering b/c of his disbelief in Moses and the prophets, and in a physical way in real time. But Diogenes the Cynic mentioned that there is no desc. of ‘hell’ in scripture, so I want to hear what he has to say about this.
And I know that other parts of the NT suggest, as the other post on hell talks about, that NT authors such as Paul, the author/s of John, and of Revelations, believed in an immediate destruction in the ‘fiery pit,’ not an everlasting burning. That post mentions how the document John seems to promise eternal life to those who believe, as if the other option is not living forever; kinda like any other saviour god at the time? Paul says that the wages of sin is ‘death,’ never mentions ‘hell.’ And I know that the authors of the epistles and Revelations prob. didn’t refer to Jesus the rabbi’s teachings anyways, so that helps explains the contradictions.
Whether a literal hell is biblical or not, that, and the idea of an everlasting soul, are crucial (if you don’t mind the pun) to the spread of religion. Without the hope of continued life and the threat of damnation, there is no hold on people. Intellectual arguments for behaving in a certain way are inferior to the carrot of eternal life and the stick (stake?) of damnation.
I understand- but please, please, let’s not talk about the philosophy of ‘hell.’ I’m only asking what scholars see as the basis for what the rabbi spoke of.
I read on a website examining Christianity that the NT authors prob. stole the idea of Good/Evil, God/Satan or Devil or Lucifer- which does not exist in the OT- from Persian mythology. That’s what leads me to think they stole ‘hell’ from Greek or other myth. too. But I’ll leave the floor to the scholars.
The early Christians built up on the idea of Satan from the OT, and it was they who gave him his present attributes, the ultimate manifestation of evil, the total opposite of God. See Elaine Pagels’ The History of Satan (1995, Random House) for a full treatment of this.
Claiming that it is “wrong” is an overstatement. The imagery used by Jeremiah and Isaiah was constantly developed and enlarged upon between the sixth and first centuries B.C.E. so that the name Gehenna had taken on more meaning than that of just the valley dump.
There have been several threads (that resided quite happily in GQ) on this topic, including:
Just a note- the idea of a continuing afterlife, whether by immortality of the soul or bodily resurrection or a combination thereof, does become prominent in the Jewish inter-testamental literature, whether it be Deutero-canonical, Apocryphal or Pseudipigraphical. So it didn’t leap out of nowhere into the Christian Scriptures.
Indeed there are slight descriptions of Sheol & Tophet (equivalent to the Greek Hades & Gehenna) in Isaiah 14 & 30.
Paul says that the wages of sin is ‘death,’ never mentions ‘hell.’ And I know that the authors of the epistles and Revelations prob. didn’t refer to Jesus the rabbi’s teachings anyways, so that helps explains the contradictions.