opinions and musings

In this second part we continue to look at the use of the word Greek word Gehenna in the gospels.   As we covered in the last post, Gehenna was a valley in the city of Jerusalem.   It was referred to by the prophet Jeremiah in Jeremiah 7 as the place where the Jewish corpses would be buried after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC.      Most of the references to Gehenna from Jesus in the gospels seem to be warnings of the judgment coming in 70 AD when the Roman armies attacked Jerusalem, killed thousands of Jewish people and burned the Jewish temple to the ground.   Gehenna was to be a place where the bodies of the slain would be piled up and burned during that awful event.   Here is a list of the Gehenna passages in the gospels: Matthew 5:22 : "...whoever shall say, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough to go into Gehenna." Matthew 5:29 : "....it is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole

Let's look at the teachings of Jesus on hell as found in the four gospels. The word hell does not appear at all in the English translations of gospel of John so there is nothing to look at there. The word does appear frequently in the "synoptic" gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.   There are two Greek words translated as hell in our English Bibles which appear in those gospels. The first word is “hades” which simply means “the place of the dead.”   It is equivalent to the Hebrew word Sheol and carries no connotation of any kind of torment or punishment.   It is simply the place where the dead await the end of time and the final judgment. The word hades is used in several passages of Jesus’ teachings.   For example, it is the term used in his statement “I will build my church and the gates of hell (hades) will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). The idea there is that the powers of death will not prevail against the church. The second Greek word appearing