Is Hell Real, Or About Vivid Imagination and Bad Translation?

Deconstructing Christianity: Jesus didn't believe in or talk about hell. It was dreamed up later and attached to a mistranslation.

Given the ways Christian teaching has evolved over two millennia, many people would be surprised to learn that Jesus did not teach about hell as a place of eternal punishment, especially since some of his teachings—as translated into English—mention hell. In the first part of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ in Matthew 5 (and in Mark 9), hell is mentioned several times. But in all cases, the word in Greek is Gehenna, which is a transliteration of the Hebrew placename Gehinnom—the Valley of Hinnom southeast of Old Jerusalem. Gehinnom is mentioned in several places in the Hebrew scriptures, typically in the most negative terms. Tophet was the location in Gehinnom where rituals connected with the worship of Molech likely involved child sacrifice.

Because it was located on the southeast side of Old Jerusalem, prevailing winds blew air away from the city. For this reason, it became the city dump. Dead animals from temple sacrifices were thrown there to rot. Trash was constantly being burned there. The bodies of those who died under a curse of sin were thrown on the garbage fires. The city’s sewage emptied there. It was a stinking, ugly, burning place, crawling with worms, full of rot, and full of disease. It was believed by the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem to be the most unholy, God-forsaken place in the world.

In some Jewish apocalyptic writing of Jesus’ day, Gehinnom was associated with the divine punishment of the wicked. In the ancient world, Jewish, Greek, or Roman, the worst thing that could happen to a person after death would be denial of a decent burial. In keeping with teachings concerning the annihilation of the ungodly, Jesus references a repugnant scenario where bodies are unceremoniously tossed into that most desecrated dumping ground on earth—a place of constant burning. Jesus did not say that souls would be tortured there; according to his Jewish belief and understanding, their souls would no longer exist.

Early translators of the New Testament into English did not properly understand the Latin term gehennæ or the Greek γέενναν. Rather than being transliterated as a placename, Gehenna was translated as hell, an Anglo-Saxon term derived from Hel—a very cold place in Norse mythology that is the after-death abode of oath-breakers, other evil persons, and those unlucky enough to die of old age or illness rather than in the glory of the battlefield, whereupon they would dwell in Valhalla. Imaginative medieval concepts of eternal damnation and everlasting torment, as conceived, for example in the Inferno portion of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, were applied to the understanding of “hell” as used in the English Bible.

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Jesus’ stress on the annihilation of sinners appears throughout his teachings. In Matthew 7 he describes a narrow gate with a hard road that leads to life, and a wide gate with an easy road that leads to destruction. Not eternal torture. Destruction.

Jesus taught the destruction of sinners, body and soul. The Hebrew term nephesh is often translated as “soul” or “life,” among other terms. It is from a root meaning ‘to breathe’. The Greek term psuché was often used to translate nephesh. It is found in Matthew 10, where Jesus tells his disciples not to fear those who would persecute them, destroying their bodies but not their souls (which would be eternally restored at the resurrection), but to fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.

The version in Luke 12 is a little different: “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into Gehenna. Yes, I tell you, fear him!”

In Matthew 13 Jesus says the future kingdom is like a fisher who sorts through the catch, keeps the good fish, and throws the others out. He doesn’t torture them. They just die. In explaining this parable, as well as the one about burning up weeds that grew among the wheat, Jesus describes angels throwing evildoers into a furnace of fire where they suffer and are burned up. There is nothing about eternal torment; they are consumed by the fire and are no more.

In the story of the Sheep and Goats in Matthew 25 where the people of the nations are separated, the “sheep” whose observance of Jesus’ teaching had led them to compassionately care for the most vulnerable of God’s children are rewarded with eternal life in “the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” The “goats” who did the opposite are punished with the opposite: annihilation in “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” While one can certainly take ideas introduced to Christianity well after Jesus’ time concerning the eternal torment of conscious souls in the inferno and read them into this passage, they are found neither in the text itself nor in the context of ancient Jewish apocalyptic assumptions. When Jesus summarizes the parable in the last verse of the chapter, the only concepts from either the text or its cultural context, are “eternal life” and “eternal punishment” with its opposite—death forever. Christians are conditioned to read torment in hell into this mention of punishment, but it is not there in the text.

Hades in ancient Greek religion and mythology is the god of the dead and the king of the underworld, with which his name became synonymous. The ancient Greek underworld is the murky abode of the dead. This term is also used ten times in the Greek New Testament, in two instances to translate the Hebrew word sheol. The KJV translates it as “hell,” but most modern translations use the transliteration “Hades.” Most of its appearances have little if any relation to afterlife rewards or punishments.

Genesis 25 tells us that, “Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.” Again, the people of early Israel did not believe in an afterlife. Being “gathered to his people” meant being buried with them.

The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16 was already an old story when Jesus told it. A similar story circulated in ancient Egypt, exhorting the rich to bridge the gap between themselves and the poor by attending to and responding to their plight. In the parable (a Greek translation of Jesus’ Aramaic words) the rich man is tormented in “Hades.”

Missing from the gospel writer’s version of this parable is any modern evangelical formula for avoiding torment in Hades—no admonition to accept Jesus as ‘personal savior’. In Jesus’ context, what was necessary to be gathered to the bosom of Abraham and avoid Gehinnom was to follow the law and the prophets (especially as Jesus interpreted them). There is no mention of heaven. Lazarus’ reward was to die in peace and be gathered to Abraham and the rest of his people. The rich man was being burned up in Gehinnom. The cultural context of this parable makes it clear that it is not to be taken literally as a description of life after death.

Given the history of Christian teaching, it is reasonable that many Christians believe when you die, your soul goes either to everlasting bliss or torment (or purgatory on the way). This is not what Jesus taught. Neither Jesus nor the Hebrew Bible he interpreted, endorsed the view that departed souls go to eternal paradise or everlasting torment. For the meaning of The New Jerusalem in Revelation, see my post Why Apocalypse Is Not the End of the World, and What It Means.

A couple hundred years before Jesus’ time, Jewish thinkers were grappling with the suffering of their people given the concept of a powerful God. They began to develop the idea of something after death—a kind of justice to come. YHVH was eventually going to intervene and destroy everything and everyone who had opposed him, and establish a new realm on earth.

This new existence would include not only those who were alive at the time but also those who had died. God would breathe new life into the dead. All the dead would be resurrected, including those who had opposed God, whereupon the latter would be wiped out of existence forever. No ‘afterlife’, just everlasting life on earth for the people of God, and permanent annihilation for all others, as opposed to eternal existence and torment.

The twist Jesus put on it was that no one would inherit this glorious earthly future by strictly adhering to the most intimate details of Jewish law, or meticulously observing established rituals and holy days, but by observing the core teachings of the law: complete love for God no matter how difficult, and work for the welfare of others out of unconditional love for them, no matter who they are.

Immortality of the soul in Jesus’ context is a Greco-Roman idea subscribed to by some Greek thinkers. As early Christianity grew, adherents who came out of gentile circles adopted this view for themselves and reasoned that if the soul is eternal, so must its fate be. The result was an unfortunate amalgamation of Jesus’ Jewish views and those found in parts of the Greek philosophical tradition.

It was nearly 400 years after Jesus’ time that Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius developed the notion that the ancient Hebrew narrative about the introduction of evil into the world meant that human beings had to suffer not merely death, but the eternal damnation of their souls.

Belief in hell has a long history within Christianity. It started with the beliefs of some gentile converts who imported ideas about the durability of the soul into the Christian movement. It continued with the great expansion and imaginative embellishment of these ideas in the context of Medieval Christianity. These powerful images and concepts were assumed without reflection by the Protestant reformers and enshrined as cardinal principles in the evangelical Christianity that developed in England and North America.

It is no wonder that hell is understood by most Christians as basic to Christianity itself. But hell is not, in fact, basic to Christianity. On closer inspection, hell is not part of Jesus’ teachings, nor of the instructions of apostles to the early church. The fact that the number of people who express belief in hell is falling dramatically should not be a cause for concern among Christians. It could rather be considered as something of a potentially liberating development.