Throw everything out, wipe the slate clean, go back to the New Testament, and start again.
In the NT, there is no text at all that corresponds to the High Medieval Christian idea of Hell as a place of eternal torture ruled over by Satan and his minions.
There is Hades in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19), but that is a parable, not a prophecy of an eschatalogical state.
There is Tartarus in 2 Peter 2:4, from pagan Greek lore, referring to a place deep in pagan Hades, of imprisonment and punishment, most especially of the Titans. In Peter the reference is to a prison where fallen angels and their demonic offspring are held until the day of judgment.
And then there is the gehenna
From the Aramaic of the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom, ‘Valley of Hinnom’ (originally Ge-ben-Hinnom, ‘Valley of Hinnom’s Son’). This appears 11 times in the synoptic Gospels (7 in Matthew, 3 in Mark, and once in Luke), and only once in the rest of the New Testament (in the Letter of James). Why this valley, south and west of Jerusalem, had by Christ’s time become, in apocalyptic literature and emerging Rabbinic tradition, a name for a place of punishment or purification or both is difficult to tell.
Scripture and tradition tell of it as the place of child sacrifice for worshippers of Moloch and Ba’al (Leviticus, 2 Chronicles, 2 Kings, Isaiah and Jeremiah). There might have been tombs, and after the arrival of the Romans, crematory grounds. A Mediaeval tradition, which may draw on older accounts, say the valley served as a rubbish tip and charnel ground, where refuse was burned and where animal and human corpses were left as carrion, but evidence for any of this is lacking.
Christ himself describes the valley in terms of Isaiah 66: 24, of human corpses being consumed by inexterminable worms and inextinguishable fires (neither of which, incidentally, is described as either otherworldly or eternal in nature).
No one knows for sure precisely how this valley became a metaphor for divine punishment, in this world or the next. Neither do we know with great certainty precisely what meanings and connotations the term would have had for Jesus or for his listeners.
Before, during, and soon after the time of Jesus, it was common parlance among a great many sects and schools, understood sometimes as a place of final destruction, sometimes simply as a place of punishment, and sometimes as a place of purgatorial regeneration.
The two dominant rabbinical schools of Christ’s day, that of Shammai and that of Hillel, both spoke of it as a place of purification or punishment of a limited duration, but both also taught that for the incorrigibly wicked there would, or could, be a state of eternal or final shame, remorse, suffering, or ruin.
Shammai had a somewhat grimmer view of the number of the ultimately lost (about a third of humanity, on some accounts), whereas Hillel had a far keener sense of the power of God’s mercy to save. For Shammai, the gehenna was principally a refiner’s fire for those souls neither incorrigibly wicked nor blamelessly good, and those subjected to its pains would ultimately be raised up to paradise. Hillel apparently thought of the gehenna as a place of final punishment and annihilation (body and soul) of the utterly depraved, but thought their number extremely small.
And rabbinical tradition says that it is from Hillel that what became the standard Rabbinic view – that no one can suffer in the gehenna for more than twelve months – originally comes; the idea at least goes back as far as Rabbi Akiva, in the generation just after Christ.
But, really, we do not know whether Jesus advanced a similar view of the gehenna’s fire, or what duration he might have assigned to the sufferings of those committed to it, or how metaphorically or literally he or his listeners might have understood its imagery. Clearly, though, metaphor was his natural idiom, and so it seems unlikely that his language here should be assumed to be any more literal than his language of ovens or harvests or threshing floors.
Later Christian tradition casts no real light on the issue, given the diversity of views that prevailed in the early centuries of the church.
And there is a total absence of any language of the gehenna, or of any kind of lasting postmortem torment, in the earliest Christian documents we possess – the letters of Paul.
Whether Jesus viewed that fire as one of final destruction or one of purification, we just cannot say.
The former possibility – annihilation – is an imagery frequently employed by Jesus – chaff and darnel weeds, dead branches being consumed in an oven (if these are metaphors for sinners rather than, as certain patristic exegetes believed, for their sins).
Then there is Matthew 10:28, “And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
But those same images could serve the other view equally well. Then we have Jesus in the Gospels offering metaphors of the punishments that follow from divine judgment:
– if remanded to the prison, “you shall most certainly not emerge from there until you repay the very last pittance” (Matthew 5:26; cf. Luke 12:59);
– the unmerciful slave is “delivered ... to the inquisitors until he should repay everything owing” (Matthew 18:34);
– some wicked slaves “will be beaten with many blows” and others “beaten with few blows” (Luke 12: 47, 48);
– “everyone will be salted with fire,” the fire in question being explicitly that of the gehenna, and salting being a common image of purification and preservation – for “salt is good” (Mark 9:49-50).
It's worth looking at Mark 9 here:
41: And whosoever shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me; it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he were cast into the sea.
42 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:
43 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished
44 And if thy foot scandalize thee, cut it off. It is better for thee to enter lame into life everlasting, than having two feet, to be cast into the hell of unquenchable fire:
45 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished.
46 And if thy eye scandalize thee, pluck it out. It is better for thee with one eye to enter into the kingdom of God, than having two eyes to be cast into the hell of fire:
47 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished.
But do we then accept that Jesus, the Bible and the Church should endorse self harm and suicide?
And the phrase "Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished" is a direct reference to Isaiah, who is speaking of the bodies, not the souls, of the dead.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3:12-15, distinguishes not between the saved and the damned, but between those who (passing the test of fire) merit reward and those who (their works failing that test) will “suffer loss, yet shall be saved, though so as by fire” (v15).
As for the remaining possibility, that the gehenna is a name for a place neither of annihilation nor of purification, but of eternal conscious torment – the God of Love’s perpetual torture chamber – for this rather repellant idea there is the least evidence in the Gospels (if any); but the notion may have some precedent in Jewish apocalyptic literature, such as the Book of Enoch, as well as in some early Rabbinic traditions, and it accords with most later Christian readings of that sole suggestive verse, Matthew 25:46 (especially after the fifth century).
St Gregory of Nyssa, a Universalist, a spiritual as well as exegetical genius, assumed the purgatorial view of the gehenna, and was able to unite all the various biblical texts in a seamless synthesis in his writings, omitting nothing known to him as Christian canon – and he was a declared Universalist.
Conversely, the Latin-speaking Augustine, who had such an impact on Western theological development, took very much the contrary view but
– was far more selective in his use of scripture,
– was very much dependent on often misleading translations,
– and had to expend enormous energy on qualifying, rephrasing, and explaining away a host of passages that did not really conform comfortably to the theological system he imagined he had found in Paul’s writings.
One might also suppose that other images of exclusion used by Jesus – locked doors, outer darkness, wailing and the grinding of teeth – are descriptions of a literally perpetual state of existence after death, of which there can be no end and from which there is no hope of deliverance through purification. And one can perhaps assume that the “inexcusable” sin of blasphemy against the Spirit, mentioned in all three synoptic Gospels, is one for which the penalty exacted must be everlasting, rather than one necessarily leading to either annihilation or purification.
But the texts do not actually say any of that, and again, there is
– no hint of any such notion in the Pauline corpus
– or in John’s Gospel.
– Or is there in the “Catholic Epistles,”
– or very early texts like the Didache and Apostles’ Creed,
– or the writings of the Apostolic Fathers ...
the very concept of eternal punishment is as Biblically unsound as it is morally unintelligible.
In the end we reconcile the passages in the NT as we so choose.
The most one can honestly say is the text does not say anything with anywhere near the satisfaction and certainty we suppose
In the NT, there is no text at all that corresponds to the High Medieval Christian idea of Hell as a place of eternal torture ruled over by Satan and his minions.
There is Hades in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19), but that is a parable, not a prophecy of an eschatalogical state.
There is Tartarus in 2 Peter 2:4, from pagan Greek lore, referring to a place deep in pagan Hades, of imprisonment and punishment, most especially of the Titans. In Peter the reference is to a prison where fallen angels and their demonic offspring are held until the day of judgment.
And then there is the gehenna
From the Aramaic of the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom, ‘Valley of Hinnom’ (originally Ge-ben-Hinnom, ‘Valley of Hinnom’s Son’). This appears 11 times in the synoptic Gospels (7 in Matthew, 3 in Mark, and once in Luke), and only once in the rest of the New Testament (in the Letter of James). Why this valley, south and west of Jerusalem, had by Christ’s time become, in apocalyptic literature and emerging Rabbinic tradition, a name for a place of punishment or purification or both is difficult to tell.
Scripture and tradition tell of it as the place of child sacrifice for worshippers of Moloch and Ba’al (Leviticus, 2 Chronicles, 2 Kings, Isaiah and Jeremiah). There might have been tombs, and after the arrival of the Romans, crematory grounds. A Mediaeval tradition, which may draw on older accounts, say the valley served as a rubbish tip and charnel ground, where refuse was burned and where animal and human corpses were left as carrion, but evidence for any of this is lacking.
Christ himself describes the valley in terms of Isaiah 66: 24, of human corpses being consumed by inexterminable worms and inextinguishable fires (neither of which, incidentally, is described as either otherworldly or eternal in nature).
No one knows for sure precisely how this valley became a metaphor for divine punishment, in this world or the next. Neither do we know with great certainty precisely what meanings and connotations the term would have had for Jesus or for his listeners.
Before, during, and soon after the time of Jesus, it was common parlance among a great many sects and schools, understood sometimes as a place of final destruction, sometimes simply as a place of punishment, and sometimes as a place of purgatorial regeneration.
The two dominant rabbinical schools of Christ’s day, that of Shammai and that of Hillel, both spoke of it as a place of purification or punishment of a limited duration, but both also taught that for the incorrigibly wicked there would, or could, be a state of eternal or final shame, remorse, suffering, or ruin.
Shammai had a somewhat grimmer view of the number of the ultimately lost (about a third of humanity, on some accounts), whereas Hillel had a far keener sense of the power of God’s mercy to save. For Shammai, the gehenna was principally a refiner’s fire for those souls neither incorrigibly wicked nor blamelessly good, and those subjected to its pains would ultimately be raised up to paradise. Hillel apparently thought of the gehenna as a place of final punishment and annihilation (body and soul) of the utterly depraved, but thought their number extremely small.
And rabbinical tradition says that it is from Hillel that what became the standard Rabbinic view – that no one can suffer in the gehenna for more than twelve months – originally comes; the idea at least goes back as far as Rabbi Akiva, in the generation just after Christ.
But, really, we do not know whether Jesus advanced a similar view of the gehenna’s fire, or what duration he might have assigned to the sufferings of those committed to it, or how metaphorically or literally he or his listeners might have understood its imagery. Clearly, though, metaphor was his natural idiom, and so it seems unlikely that his language here should be assumed to be any more literal than his language of ovens or harvests or threshing floors.
Later Christian tradition casts no real light on the issue, given the diversity of views that prevailed in the early centuries of the church.
And there is a total absence of any language of the gehenna, or of any kind of lasting postmortem torment, in the earliest Christian documents we possess – the letters of Paul.
Whether Jesus viewed that fire as one of final destruction or one of purification, we just cannot say.
The former possibility – annihilation – is an imagery frequently employed by Jesus – chaff and darnel weeds, dead branches being consumed in an oven (if these are metaphors for sinners rather than, as certain patristic exegetes believed, for their sins).
Then there is Matthew 10:28, “And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
But those same images could serve the other view equally well. Then we have Jesus in the Gospels offering metaphors of the punishments that follow from divine judgment:
– if remanded to the prison, “you shall most certainly not emerge from there until you repay the very last pittance” (Matthew 5:26; cf. Luke 12:59);
– the unmerciful slave is “delivered ... to the inquisitors until he should repay everything owing” (Matthew 18:34);
– some wicked slaves “will be beaten with many blows” and others “beaten with few blows” (Luke 12: 47, 48);
– “everyone will be salted with fire,” the fire in question being explicitly that of the gehenna, and salting being a common image of purification and preservation – for “salt is good” (Mark 9:49-50).
It's worth looking at Mark 9 here:
41: And whosoever shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me; it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he were cast into the sea.
42 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:
43 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished
44 And if thy foot scandalize thee, cut it off. It is better for thee to enter lame into life everlasting, than having two feet, to be cast into the hell of unquenchable fire:
45 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished.
46 And if thy eye scandalize thee, pluck it out. It is better for thee with one eye to enter into the kingdom of God, than having two eyes to be cast into the hell of fire:
47 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished.
But do we then accept that Jesus, the Bible and the Church should endorse self harm and suicide?
And the phrase "Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished" is a direct reference to Isaiah, who is speaking of the bodies, not the souls, of the dead.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3:12-15, distinguishes not between the saved and the damned, but between those who (passing the test of fire) merit reward and those who (their works failing that test) will “suffer loss, yet shall be saved, though so as by fire” (v15).
As for the remaining possibility, that the gehenna is a name for a place neither of annihilation nor of purification, but of eternal conscious torment – the God of Love’s perpetual torture chamber – for this rather repellant idea there is the least evidence in the Gospels (if any); but the notion may have some precedent in Jewish apocalyptic literature, such as the Book of Enoch, as well as in some early Rabbinic traditions, and it accords with most later Christian readings of that sole suggestive verse, Matthew 25:46 (especially after the fifth century).
St Gregory of Nyssa, a Universalist, a spiritual as well as exegetical genius, assumed the purgatorial view of the gehenna, and was able to unite all the various biblical texts in a seamless synthesis in his writings, omitting nothing known to him as Christian canon – and he was a declared Universalist.
Conversely, the Latin-speaking Augustine, who had such an impact on Western theological development, took very much the contrary view but
– was far more selective in his use of scripture,
– was very much dependent on often misleading translations,
– and had to expend enormous energy on qualifying, rephrasing, and explaining away a host of passages that did not really conform comfortably to the theological system he imagined he had found in Paul’s writings.
One might also suppose that other images of exclusion used by Jesus – locked doors, outer darkness, wailing and the grinding of teeth – are descriptions of a literally perpetual state of existence after death, of which there can be no end and from which there is no hope of deliverance through purification. And one can perhaps assume that the “inexcusable” sin of blasphemy against the Spirit, mentioned in all three synoptic Gospels, is one for which the penalty exacted must be everlasting, rather than one necessarily leading to either annihilation or purification.
But the texts do not actually say any of that, and again, there is
– no hint of any such notion in the Pauline corpus
– or in John’s Gospel.
– Or is there in the “Catholic Epistles,”
– or very early texts like the Didache and Apostles’ Creed,
– or the writings of the Apostolic Fathers ...
the very concept of eternal punishment is as Biblically unsound as it is morally unintelligible.
In the end we reconcile the passages in the NT as we so choose.
The most one can honestly say is the text does not say anything with anywhere near the satisfaction and certainty we suppose
