What Did Jesus Teach About Hell? (Part Two)


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 body to be thrown into Gehenna."
  • Matthew 5:30: "...better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole body to go into Gehenna."
  • Matthew 10:28: "...rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna."
  • Matthew 18:9: "It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than with two eyes to be thrown into the Gehenna...."
  • Matthew 23:15: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you... make one proselyte...twice as much a child of Gehenna as yourselves."
  • Matthew 23:33, to the Pharisees: "You serpents, you brood of vipers, how shall you to escape the sentence of Gehenna?"
  • Mark 9:43: "It is better for you to enter life crippled, than having your two hands, to go into Gehenna into the unquenchable fire."
  • Mark 9:45: "It is better for you to enter life lame, than having your two feet, to be cast into Gehenna."
  • Mark 9:47: "It is better for you to enter the Kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes, to be cast into Gehenna."
  • Luke 12:5: "...fear the One who, after He has killed has authority to cast into Gehenna; yes, I tell you, fear Him."

There are two passages which suggest that Jesus is using the physical place Gehenna as a metaphor for some kind of post-mortem judgment.

The first passage is Matthew 10:28 in which Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid of people who can kill the body, but can’t kill the soul. The one you should be afraid of is the one who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.”  It is clear in this passage that Jesus is using Gehenna as a metaphor for a place of destruction after death. 

The second passage is Luke 12:4-5 and it is very similar: “So, my friends, I have this to say to you:  don’t be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more they can do. I will show you who to fear:  fear the one who starts by killing and then has the right to throw people into Gehenna.  Yes, let me tell you, that’s the one to fear!”

If Gehenna in these passages serves as a metaphor for a place of afterlife punishment, then the only one who has authority to throw a dead person into Gehenna would be God himself.  So these passages may indicate some type of post-mortem judgment from God which destroys both the human body and soul. Notice there is no mention from Jesus here about Gehenna being eternal. There is no duration given at all. These two passages are often used to support the annihilation position, which proposes that unbelievers’ existence will be simply terminated at the final judgment. That is much more merciful than eternal torment, and there are other verses in the New Testament that seem to support the annihilation view.

In the time of Jesus, Gehenna had become a term freighted with meaning. There were two major rabbinical schools in first century Israel:  the school of Shammai and the school of Hillel.  The term Gehenna was used by both of those schools to indicate a place of post-mortem purification or punishment for a finite term.  However, both schools also taught that there will be some final state of suffering or destruction for souls who were incapable of correction. Later on, the dominant view of rabbinical Judaism was that no one would suffer in Gehenna for more than twelve months.  This view came from the Rabbi Akiva, who lived just after the time of Jesus (50-135 AD).  That concept may have been around before Akiva as well. We don’t know exactly which of these Jewish rabbinical views Jesus subscribed to, if any. It is not clear exactly what he meant by the “body and soul” being destroyed in Gehenna. 

Let’s move on to one more verse in the gospels that seems on face value to support the idea of endless torment for some human beings. It is Matthew 25:41,46.  These verses are found in the context of the Lord’s parable on the judgment of the nations.  The Gentile nations are assembled before the Lord and he separates them as a shepherd would separate sheep from goats.  He says to the “sheep” that they are to enter into the Kingdom of his Father because they cared for the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the foreigners, the naked and those in prison.  He tells these compassionate ones that when they helped the “least of these” they were really serving Jesus himself.  Then the Lord turns to the “goats” and says because they neglected to care for these needy people they are being banished into “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (verse 41).  The Lord concludes the parable by saying, “Then they [the goats] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (verse 46).  

Many of the native Greek-speaking early fathers of the church (e.g. Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa) understood from the New Testament that hell was a place of temporary purification, not endless punishment. This passage in Matthew 25:46 and its meaning in Greek is one of the reasons for that.  In the Greek, this passage reads, “these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age” (New Testament translation by David Bentley Hart).

The word translated “punishment” in most English translations of Matthew 25:46 is the Greek word "kolasis." It is more accurately translated as “pruning” or “chastening.” In the footnote to this verse, David Bentley Hart observes the following:  “the word kolasis originally meant ‘pruning’ or ‘docking’ or ‘obviating the growth’ of trees or other plants, and then came to mean ‘confinement,’ ‘being held in check,’ ‘punishment,’ or ‘chastisement,’ chiefly with the connotation of correction. Classically, the word was distinguished (by Aristotle for instance) from timoria, which means a retributive punishment only.”

Let’s also look at the word translated “everlasting” in Matthew 25:46. The Greek adjective aionios is often translated in English Bibles as “eternal” or “everlasting.”  The noun “aion” which the adjective comes from meant simply “age”.  The best translation of the adjective aionios is “age enduring.”  The noun aion was most often used in Greek literature of the first century to indicate the lifespan of one person.  Sometimes it was used to indicate the duration of a single year.  In Jewish eschatology there was the concept of the present age, and the age to come, which was to be the time of God’s kingdom on earth.  The phrase “eternal life” which we find often in the gospels, (particularly in the gospel of John) is best translated “the life of the age to come.”  The gospel of John asserts that believers in Jesus can now share in the life of the age to come – the life of God’s Kingdom age (see John 17:3 for example).

The eastern Greek-speaking church and the Syrian church have preserved the correct meaning of aionos in their faith.  In the 13th century, the East Syrian bishop Solomon of Basra wrote that in the New Testament aionios does not mean “eternal” and that of course hell is not an unending condition for human beings. In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, completed around 150 BC), the text uses the word aion in Deuteronomy 15:17 to indicate the lifespan of a slave.  Elsewhere it uses the term aion to translate the Hebrew “olam” which means “an age” or “an epoch.”  In other words, hell is a place of purification, but it does not last forever.
 
Going back to the New Testament, the Greek phrase “eis tous aionas town aionon”, often translated “forever and ever” literally means “unto the ages of the ages.” This is the closest we come in the New Testament to the concept of eternity.  It may also mean a really, really long period of time which does have an ending. None of the verses using the term Gehenna or the term Hades in the gospels is linked to that Greek phrase.  I will repeat that: none of the verses using the term Gehenna or the term Hades is linked to that Greek phrase. 

In summary, there are only three verses in the gospels which could possibly be interpreted to mean some sort of suffering after death for the wicked (Matthew 10:28, Luke 12:4-5 and Matthew 25:46).  However, the only one that has a time element associated with it is Matthew 25:46, and the meaning there is an age.  An age has a definite beginning and a definite end. Contrast those three verses with the over 25 verses in the New Testament that state that in the final consummation all creation will be reconciled to Christ.  Based on this evidence one wonders why the doctrine of eternal hell became so prevalent in the western church…

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