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Jesus as Torah – Love Wins

March 16, 2011 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

While I await my copy of Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived to arrive later this week, I have been reading some of the blog posts and news articles about the book as well as engaging in a few discussions with other people concerning what Rob Bell’s views potentially are. I have also spent some time ruminating about how I feel about the topic of God’s love as it relates to Heaven and Hell.

Those who have read through my still unfinished series on Hell have no doubt picked up on the fact that I am highly doubtful of the existence of an eternal type of Hell where those who ultimately reject God will end up being eternally punished for a lifetime of sinful living. While I am not a Universalist and I do believe that salvation is through Christ alone, I am leaning toward more of an inclusivist theology. I would like to believe that my God is big enough to make a way to whatever afterlife there is, still through Christ, for those who may call upon Him in whatever context that they have been raised in, whether that be Allah or even the Great Spirit. With that said, I am still not excused from spreading the words of Christ whenever and wherever I can.

I am beginning to wonder if we as Christians are asking all of the wrong questions when it comes to Heaven and Hell. Many people claim that Jesus spoke more about Hell than anyone else in the Bible, and although I will admit that He did speak much about Judgment, I am beginning to realize that many of those “Hell passages” were more than likely speaking about “Hell on earth” than they were about Hell in the afterlife. I think that at least half of those passages where directly pointed at the judgment that was to befall Jerusalem in 70 CE. And even those passages where He was definitely speaking about the Final Judgment, I believe that from an epistemological standpoint it is impossible to determine what the fate of those who receive a “negative judgment” might end up being. I lean towards annihilationism but I have not ruled out rehabilitation for those who are willing…perhaps a purgatorial type of Hell much like Origen wrote about.

The overwhelming message that I find in the Gospels is that of love and grace, not one of judgment. A couple of passages come to mind here. The first is John 3:17 where Jesus states that “”God did not send His Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him”. This is echoed later on in John 12:47 where Jesus states that ” If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.” When I read the Gospels, what I see is love, love, love, and grace, grace, grace.

“Okay”, you might say, “but what does that have to do with the Torah?”

I have read quite a few books and essays that essentially say that Jesus came into the world as Torah, hence His words, “I came not to destroy the law (Torah), but to fulfill the law.” If you read through the the first eighteen verses of John and substitute “Torah” for “Word” you can make some startling conclusions.

With “Jesus as Torah” in mind we might read the beginning of John as ; “In the beginning was the Torah, and the Torah was with God, and the Torah was God.” or “In the beginning was the Law, and the Law as with God, and the Law was God.” Again, of course, we need to read the entire chapter, especially those all-important verses: “And the Torah became flesh, and dwelt among us,” and the equivalency of Jesus as this Word, this Law; the equivalency of Jesus and God.

An interesting thing that I have discovered during my study on Hell was how ancient Israel related to the afterlife. It appears that they were not all that concerned about what happened after they died. Not that it was never thought about the afterlife, it’s just that by and large Israel focused on Torah. Later in their history, during and after the exile, there was more focus on the afterlife, but Torah was still primarily about the here and now. Torah was not so much just a bunch of rules, but a means by which one lived a life dedicated to God. Torah also created a means by which an observant Jew could be in relationship with Yahweh, and a right relationship with God meant that God’s Shekinah glory would dwell (or tabernacle) in the temple and be accessible for remission of sins much like Jesus now tabernacles among us and is available to all who call upon His name. Torah was primarily meant for this life, not the next one. The blessings that one received by being a Torah-observant Jew were to be received in this life, not the next one. “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and your neighbor as yourself” was a way of bringing immediate blessings to you and all of those around you.

So, if Torah was primarily meant for this life, and Jesus is Torah, then perhaps living a life for Jesus should not be so focused on the next life, but more so for right now. Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever, and if Torah was meant primarily for this life, then what changed after Christ fulfilled Torah and essentially became Torah? If God really intended us to focus on loving Him and doing as much for His Son as possible in this life, then why are we so concerned about the next one? The next one will come soon enough…perhaps too soon for many of us.

Maybe we are spending too much time worrying about “who’s in” and who’s out” and missing out on spreading the Gospel that Jesus preached. It was a Gospel that essentially meant that “Love Wins” as the title of Bell’s book suggests. And instead of waiting for Heaven or worrying about Hell, maybe we should be spending that time getting to know Jesus a little better and asking ourselves what He was really saying about His Kingdom , one that I believe was inaugurated on Easter morning when he overcame the world, ripped the temple veil and made God’s Shekinah glory available to every man and woman who would ever live.

While I do believe that we will all stand at the Judgment Seat of Christ one day, perhaps all of the focus on Heaven, Hell (and when Christ is returning) takes our eyes off of what Jesus wants for us to be doing in the here and now, which is spreading His love and His message wherever and whenever possible. Sure, I look forward to Heaven, and there are scores of New Testament verses that repeatedly underscore the hope that we have for resurrection bodies living forever with God in a New Heaven and a New Earth. However, the only time or place that we have any control over is here and now.

With the recent devastation in Japan following the earthquake and tsunami, I am reminded of just how fragile our lives are. Any one of us can be gone in an instant. Perhaps a more concentrated focus on what I can be doing right now for Jesus is much more important that anything else. And I think that sharing the love of Jesus is much more appealing and Biblically correct than warning everyone about burning in Hell. A Hell that we can’t even prove exists (at least not in the traditional Jonathan Edwards sense) to begin with.

I don’t know what I will find in Rob Bell’s book, but I doubt that it will be anything that I will strongly disagree with. I doubt that he is a universalist (although he might have some inclusivist leanings) and I doubt that he is going to chunk Hell out of the Bible altogether. I kind of suspect that he is going to be saying something of the sort of what I’m thinking here in this post. “Stop worrying so much about Heaven and Hell and get busy for Christ, for the Kingdom of God is among us right now.” Whatever he has to say, I will be writing a review on his book in a couple of weeks (fingers crossed).

Note: I will be resuming my series on Hell in a few weeks. Right now I am tied up with other projects and simply don’t have the time.

Filed Under: Heaven, Hell, Jesus Christ, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Eternal Life – A Gift or A Given?

November 13, 2010 By Randy Olds 5 Comments

In a discussion about the nature of Hell, a topic which must be considered is the immortality or the soul. If the human soul is inherently immortal, then only two possibilities exist; either one must embrace some sort of Universalism in which God will ultimately heal and redeem every person who has ever existed, including figures such as Adolf Hitler and Ted Bundy, or one must admit that there are simply some individuals who are irredeemable and must therefore be banished from the presence of God, which necessitates some form Hell which includes eternal conscious torment.

Many other world religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism explicitly have beliefs centered around an eternal soul. In the Western world, Plato was one of the first to positivity state that the human soul was indeed immortal and he was drawing from Aristotle when he wrote that the soul was pre-existent as well as eternal. Many Christians who deny the immortality of the soul will claim that it was because of the influence of Greek philosophy that many early Christian thinkers adopted doctrines centered around inherit immortality which included forms of Universalism as well as eternal conscious torment. I think that the pre-existence of the soul like the Mormons teach can be easily ruled out as early as Genesis 2:7, but as to whether or not the life that God breathes into us is then eternal requires a bit more looking at.

The Biblical witness on this topic is subject to many differences of opinion. Frankly, from my reading of the Bible, eternal life seems to be a gift that God may grant to those who are in Him, but is not an inherit attribute of the human soul. Beginning in the earliest portions of Genesis, we see how Adam and Eve are driven out of the Garden of Eden lest they “take from the Tree of Life and live forever” (Genesis 3:22). This theme of eternal life being a gift granted or denied carries through the books of the Bible all the way to the end of Revelation where those thrown into the Lake of Fire are deemed to have undergone the “second death” (Revelation 20:14-15). In the middle of all of this we have Jesus clearly stating that God can indeed ‘destroy both body and soul in Gehenna” in Matthew 10:28.

When the Rich Young Ruler asks Jesus what he must do to “inherit eternal life” in Mark 10:17, Jesus does not tell him “Oh, you already have eternal life, what you need to worry about is Hell Fire”, but instead instructs him on what is needed to enter the Kingdom of God. Even the well-worn John 3:16 indicates that eternal life is what is at stake in believing in Jesus and that the alternative is to simply perish. Why does Jesus, in the vast bulk of His teachings,  tell us that eternal life is what is at stake instead of Heaven and Hell? He does warn about Hell of course, but the nature and duration of Hell can be debated, as we have seen so far.

Paul too, never seems to assume that immortality is a given. In 1 Corinthians 15:54 Paul writes about a time where “this mortal will put on immortality” and writes to Timothy that God is “the only One who has immortality” (1 Tim. 6:15-16). Another interesting passage is Romans 2:6-8 which is reminiscent of Daniel 12:2-3.

“He will repay each one according to his works :  eternal life  to those who by patiently doing good  seek for glory, honor, and immortality;  but wrath and indignation to those who are self-seeking and disobey the truth, but are obeying unrighteousness;”

Just like in Daniel, Paul states that the righteous will inherit eternal life and the wicked wrath and indignation. But notice that in neither of these passages does it explicitly state that the wicked will experience God’s wrath in a state of conciousness. At least in these passages it could be easily said that the wicked will not inherit eternal life or anything like it. And eternal indignation or contempt could easily mean the contempt of the memory of those who have long ago been destroyed in the Lake of Fire.

Of course, there are a small handful of passages which might seem to indicate eternity for the wicked, such as Matthew 25:46. I am going to look at these passages in another post sometime next week, as there are some keywords that need to be examined to determine whether eternal damnation was really in mind here.

When the overall biblical witness appears to state that eternal life is a gift, should we not approach those very few scriptures that seem to indicate otherwise in an attempt to see if we’re reading them incorrectly? I do not buy into those who state that the righteousness of God necessitates eternal punishment for the wicked. I can’t find sound reasoning or exegesis in that hypothesis at all.  As I wrote a couple of days ago, I believe that God’s benevolence completely rules that out.

And if we’re talking about the doctrine of Conditional Mortality, I do not believe that adopting that stance necessitates Soul Sleep as many advocates of Conditional Mortality posit. In fact, although I think that conditional mortality screams from the scriptures, I do not think that soul sleep does. If anything, soul sleep whispers from the pages of the Bible, and I think that it is highly unlikely  and requires the dispensing of and twisting of a large number of passages that indicate otherwise.

As I am not prone to Universalism (even though I would like to be pleasantly surprised), I would have to accept that there is indeed some sort of eternal “hell” of some sort in wait for those irredeemables if indeed it could be proven that the soul is inherently immortal. However, I think that the witness of scripture seems to indicate otherwise; that eternal life is a gift to be granted at the Judgment Seat of Christ.

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Filed Under: Heaven, Hell

Hades in The Gospels – Part 2 of 2 (Lazarus and The Rich Man)

November 10, 2010 By Randy Olds 18 Comments

"The Rich Man Going to Hell" by David Teniers the Younger (c. 1647)

We come at last to what many who hold to view of hell as eternal conscious torment will hold up as ironclad proof of their claims. Eventually any discussion on hell will come around to  the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man found in Luke 16:19-31. “How can you possibly refute such hard evidence for hell”, they will say. “The Rich Man is clearly in hell, Jesus even describes the flames he is tormented by.” Traditionalists eyes will light up as they whip out their Bible and turn to the middle of the third gospel to prove their point. The image above of a demon leading the Rich Man to Hell is what many envision in this parable.

Using Luke 16 to prove hell, however descriptive the language therein, is very problematic. First, even if this parable did prove hell, all it would prove is that rich people go to hell and beggars go to Paradise. Secondly, the place in question here is Hades, which is the intermediate state, and has no bearing on the final eschatological disposition of the damned. Third, the place described in this parable much more closely resembles the Greek Hades and some of the places described in apocalyptic pseudepigrapha than anything found in the Old or New Testaments. My final objection is that focusing on Lazarus and the Rich Man as Jesus’ “Lesson about Hell” entirely misses out on the point that Jesus was making in this parable.

So what is this parable about? Well, first I want to unpack this story a little bit.

I have read a number of articles that link the Rich Man with Caiaphas, the High Priest. These articles normally claim that the Lazarus in this parable is the same Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead in John 12. After carefully considering all of the evidence I am convinced that this is a valid claim. A decent article with all of the scriptural references as well as references to the proper locations in Josephus’ Antiquities can be found here. I do not agree with all of the conclusions reached in the article, but the points made about Caiaphas being the Rich Man and Lazarus being Lazarus are solid. The descriptions of the clothing of the High Priest (purple and fine linen) can clearly go back to the descriptions in Exodus 28 and the five brothers from his fathers house clearly seem to echo the five brothers-in-law of Caiaphas. Add to that the fact that Caiaphas was a Sadducee and the entire point of the story revolves around Lazarus’ resurrection, something that the Sadducees denied, and I would think that the Pharisees would know precisely who Jesus was fingering in this parable.

In the parable, Jesus was obviously still addressing the Pharisees and He was telling them a story to make a point.  The point of course is found in verse 31 and is that even if a person were to come back from the dead as Lazarus had they would still not be convinced of what He was telling them. Much like many other parables Jesus was using imagery  from the culture and beliefs of His audience so that His audience would remember the story. In this case, He used popular Jewish myths that had arisen concerning the Underworld to center His story around.

As I pointed out in Hell and Hellenization, during the post-exilic period Greek ideas had penetrated into the Jewish mindset.  And as I brought out here and here, Intertestamental writings like 1 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Zephaniah more closely resembled the Greek Hades than anything in the Bible. Jewish writings from throughout the first century continued to show that the Pharisees and other Jewish sects pretty much believed in an Underworld precisely as Jesus is describing in this parable.

But was Jesus accurately describing what He perceived to be a true depiction of the Underworld? I don’t think that Jesus intended to validate the myths that the Pharisees believed in any more than Paul intended to validate the deity of Zeus at Mars Mill in Acts 17. Throughout the Gospels Jesus always taught about the judgment at the resurrection and never taught about anything having to do with the intermediate state. In fact, throughout the previous parables in Luke 15 it is the resurrection that is clearly in view. Jesus consistently taught about the Kingdom of God and the resurrection, and I see no reason we He would have felt the need to dispel the Jewish myths at this time. I believe that Jesus was using the vivid images from 1 Enoch to drive home the point that continued resistance to the Kingdom of God could mean missing out on the resurrection of the dead at the eschaton. In fact, provided that Lazarus is in fact Lazarus, then resurrection is in the background of this parable all along!

As we saw in my posts concerning Gehenna (I will get into more of this as we move through the New Testament), it is at the final Judgment where the dead are thrown into “Hell”. The fact that Luke uses the language of Gehenna elsewhere is a clear indicator that Gehenna and Hades are not the same place, as I pointed out in my Introduction to Hades.  And although the Catholics have teachings on “Particular Judgment”, what sense does it make to be thrown into Hell to be resurrected and judged a couple of thousand years later, only to be thrown into an altogether different “Hell”? Additionally, nowhere else in the Bible is there a teaching anything like this concerning a place of punishment immediately after death. From Daniel 12:2 to Revelation 20:15, judgment is consistently placed at the eschaton, not at death.

It is amazing to me how people look for “history” in this parable rather than “story”. In none of Jesus’ other parables do we do this. For instance, there have never been any archeological digs attempting to find the vineyard found in the Parable of the Landowner of Matthew 21. Nor do we try and locate on a map the location of the estate found in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. We automatically recognize these parables as “Story”  and do do not attach any historical or geographic significance to them, and instead look for the underlying elements and lessons. But with the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, people seem to get all bumfuzzled, miss the entire point of the parable and simply regard this as proof of Hell. And what is even of more puzzlement to me is how people associate this “Story” with the disposition of souls in eternal hell, when the language used clearly points toward the intermediate state rather than at the eschaton, and a mythological one to boot!

I don’t think that this parable was meant by Jesus to teach us anything about hell or even about the intermediate state in Sheol/Hades. It was simply a parable much like all of His other parables with a hidden lesson that He wanted for us to dig out. Unfortunately, later theologians took this parable along with other Jewish mythologies and crafted a doctrine of Hell around it, something I rather doubt that Jesus ever intended. If there is to be a Hell at the Judgment for the wicked, I believe that we are going to have to look elsewhere for descriptions of it.

In my next post on Hell, I am going to look at a doctrine known as Conditional Mortality, something necessary if the annihilationists are to make their claim. I’m then going to examine a little word known as aion that we will be finding in the Gospels as well as terms such as “unquenchable fire” “outer darkness” and “weeping and gnashing of teeth”.  I figure it will take me three or four more posts to examine the rest of the allusions to Hell in the Gospels. I can then run swiftly through the rest of the New Testament looking for Hell (there is not much there) and finish up with Revelation. I’ll then move on to Christian apocrypha and then to the Patristics.

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Filed Under: eschatology, Hades, Hell, Jesus Christ, The Bible, theology

Hades in The Gospels – Part 1 of 2

November 7, 2010 By Randy Olds 6 Comments

There are four passages in the Gospels where we find the Greek word Hades coming from the mouth of Jesus. I find three of them to be of little value to the discussion on Hell, but for the sake of covering all of my bases I want to give them brief treatment in this post. The fourth, which is the infamous parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, I will devote a seperate post to next week.

The first two passages are the parallel passages of Matthew 11:20-24 and Luke 10:13-15. In these passages Jesus is denouncing the towns where he had performed most of His miracles but had seen no repentance. After passing woes on Chorazin and Bethsaida, Jesus says, “And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be cast down to Hades. For if the miracles done in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained until today. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land or Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.”

The language in these passages clearly does not indicate that the inhabitants of Capernaum are going to be sentenced to an eternity in hell. In fact, when you take into account the fulfilled prophecies of Ezekiel 26:4, 14 28:20-24 against Tyre and Sidon as well as the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19, it would appear that Jesus is passing similar judgment upon Capernaum along with Bethsaida and Chorazin. Jesus could have as easily used Sheol here but as we’ve seen in an earlier post, Hades had pretty much replaced Sheol in the  common vernacular by New Testament times. That the cities themselves would be eventually “cast down” and destroyed is also a historical fact.

Amazingly, there are some “Hellfire and Brimstone” advocates that want to assert that these two passages indicate degrees of punishment in hell. These will say that the inhabitants of Capernaum are suffering worse torments than the ancient inhabitants of Sodom, and that these passages not only prove that but would also indicate that other sinners torments in hell will be likewise judged.  I’m sorry, but I simply can’t find that reading in these passages no matter how hard I look for it. In my opinion this is eisegesis at its finest and is simply not to be found here.

The third passage where Jesus speaks of Hades is in Matthew 16:18 where Jesus tells Peter that the gates of Hades will not overpower the Church. Although “Gates of Sheol” is used on several occasions in the Old Testament (Job 17:16 Isaiah 38:10), using it here does not quite seem to fit with the context of the passage. However, I was fortunate enough to come across a fairly lengthy discussion of the passage here and it’s parallel in Mark 8:27-30 in the book that I’m currently reading by Ben Witherington.

On pages 116-120 of The Indelible Image, Witherington explains that this great climax in the Gospel narrative where Peter confesses Jesus as the Messiah is even more significant because of the location that Jesus chose to reveal Himself to the Disciples. As Witherington spends four pages on this, I’m just going to try and hit the high points as it relates to our discussion.

First is the fact that Caesarea Philippi had originally been named after the Greek god Pan, and the location that Jesus chose in this city for this event was right next to an entrance to an underground stream that was thought to have led to the river Styx, which led to the Greek land of the dead, Hades. The second factor that Witherington highlights is that this city was populated by numerous statues of the gods and even of the emperors who called themselves sons of the divine Julius Caesar.

Witherington essentially says that Jesus intentionally chose Caesarea Philippi and this location to the Gates of Hades as the place where Peter would have his “ah-ha!” moment in order to parody the gods of the culture (the Caesars) as well as their gods and culture. Jesus was setting the scene to make Peters revelation all the more dramatic!

Makes sense to me.

In short, I don’t think that any of these three passages have anything to do with hell as a place of torment. The first two passages appear to be denoting Hades in the same sense as Sheol in the Old Testament, which is simply the abode of the dead. Nothing else. The third passage might indicate a mocking of the Greek gods and their mythology because the One True God has appeared on the scene.

In my next post on hell I am going to deal with the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man found in Luke 16:19-31. This passage in Luke has been a favorite or those who hold to a view of hell as being eternal conscious torment. I think that there are very good reasons to think otherwise.

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Filed Under: Hades, Hell

An Introduction to Hades in The New Testament

October 29, 2010 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

Continued from a previous post.

In The Greek New Testament, the word Hades is found ten times, with four of them coming from the mouth of Jesus. Unfortunately, the King James as well as some other translations of the Bible render “Hades” as “Hell”. The purpose of this post is to serve as a brief introduction to Hades before we look at the individual New Testament passages that speak about this place as it may or may not relate to Christian views of Hell.

By the first century C.E. the Hebrew word Sheol and the Greek word Hades had become essentially interchangeable. The Septuagint (also known as the LXX), which was the first Greek translation of the Hebrew bible and was completed sometime during the second century B.C.E., translated the Hebrew word Sheol as Hades 64 times in its text. So when we see the New Testament writers using Hades, it is synonymous with the Old Testament Sheol.

As I explained in my post on Hell in The Old Testament, early Jewish belief about what happened in Sheol is very vague, and whether or not there was continued activity by the spirits in Sheol is somewhat debatable from what we can extract from the early portions of the Old Testament. From before Christ all the way to the present day, what the Old Testament scriptures can tell us about life after death (I am referring here to the intermediate state, not the resurrection) has been debated by Christian and Jewish theologians alike.

There is another very interesting development concerning the transition from Sheol to Hades that we find within the Septuagint. As I just mentioned, Sheol was translated as Hades 64 times in the Septuagint. However, there are seven other times where we find  the translators of the Septuagint choosing to use Hades in place of of other Hebrew words and phrases indicating the abode of the dead. In Job 33:22 the Septuagint translates the Hebrew word for The Pit as Hades, and in Job 38:17 they translated the phrase for the gates of death as Hades.

Another good illustration of where the Septuagint translators used Hades to indicate the abode of the dead is in Proverbs 2:18.  The NIV reads:

“For her house leads down to death and her paths to the spirits of the dead.”

However, the Septuagint reads Hades into this passage. I have included the Greek Septuagint text from Biblos.com, as well as an image from an LXX online translator that I have found to be very helpful.

ἔθετο γὰρ παρὰ τῷ θανάτῳ τὸν οἶκον αὐτῆς καὶ παρὰ τῷ ᾅδῃ μετὰ τῶν γηγενῶν τοὺς ἄξονας αὐτῆς

Click on image to enlarge Septuagint text

Some theologians will assert that the translators of the Septuagint were inspired to make such changes, much like some King James Onliests will state that the King James translators were Divinely inspired. I remain rather doubtful of both of these groups. However, most biblical scholars agree that the Septuagint was fairly well read by the New Testament authors, so it is fairly easy to see how Sheol was replaced by Hades in the New Testament texts, as well as possibly even in the worldviews of the New Testament authors.

And as I explained in my post on the Greek Hades, the Greeks had a very robust view of the afterlife during the same time period that the Hebrew scriptures were being written. During the Intertestamental period, the Jewish views of Sheol and the Greek views on Hades appear to become somewhat intermingled, especially in 1 Enoch, but in other Intertestamental literature as well. By the first century C.E., the Jewish conception of Sheol had in fact become very similar to that of the Greeks views of Hades. Whether or not this was a result of progressive revelation from God or in fact was the result of Hellenization is debatable.

I think that it is important to differentiate Gehenna from Hades. Whatever conclusions that we may come to about Gehenna, Gehenna is not Hades. Whereas Gehenna has been interpreted by many Christian theologians to be the final eschatological destination for the wicked, Hades in most of the New Testament passages indicates the immediate destination for the recently deceased, just as Sheol was in the Old Testament.

As we have seen in previous posts, the initial Jewish beliefs seemed to indicate that the righteous as well as the wicked inhabited Sheol/Hades, and it was not until we encountered some of the Intertestamental writings such as 1 Enoch that separate portions of Hades began to appear. In these writings as well as later Jewish texts, the Underworld was separated into two and sometimes even three compartments, much like the Underworld of Greek mythology. For the righteous there was Paradise which was also known as Abraham’s Bosom. For the wicked, a fiery chamber awaited, or an underground prison  with sometimes quite inventive punishments.  In some texts, a third and even lower portion of the Underworld is described which is where fallen angels (or Watchers) like Azazel are held until final judgment. This lowest portion of Hades is sometimes equated with Tartarus as is found in Greek mythology and  in 2 Peter 2:4.

Some theologians assert that the change that we see from Sheol in the Old Testament to the Hades of the Intertestamental writings is an example of progressive revelation, and that God was gradually revealing more and more about what went on after death as time went on. Other theologians insist that all of this was more consistent with the cultural diffusion that I discussed in my post on Hell and Hellenization, and that some of the views held by many of the Jews of Jesus’ day were the result of Greek mythological and philosophical influences on the Hellenized Jews.

For my next couple of posts, I only want to look at what Hades meant to Jesus prior to His crucifixion and resurrection. I don’t want to engage the post-resurrection views of Hades quite yet as that will further complicate the discussion. I will get to those later views of the New Testament writers and later theologians after I have dealt with the Gospel materials. What I want to deal with first is what Jesus most likely believed about Hades and examine what He said about death and any possible afterlife prior to His resurrection.

Did Jesus perceive the dead  as being conscious and aware in some sort of Underworld as we have seen in other mythologies as well as in some of the Intertestamental writings, or did He believe the dead to simply be “asleep” while awaiting the resurrection? Did Jesus perceive an Underworld to exist with separations for the righteous and the wicked like we see the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, or was He simply using common Jewish perceptions of the afterlife to make a point about something else? When Jesus spoke of Hades was He talking about Hell or something else?

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Filed Under: Hades, Hell, The Bible, theology Tagged With: , ,

Gehenna in The Gospels – Part 5 of 5 (Summary)

October 20, 2010 By Randy Olds 1 Comment

After taking an in-depth look at the passages where Jesus refers to Gehenna in the Gospels, it becomes quite clear that our Lord did not always use Gehenna with the same context or meaning. Although there are times that He seems to use Gehenna as a metaphor for the coming conflagration of Jerusalem at the hands of Rome at times, more often than not He seems to be using the word for a far off place of Final Judgment. N.T. Wright echoes the idea that care must be used when interpreting Jesus’ use of Gehenna:

“The extent to which [Gehenna] is used in the Gospels metaphorically for an entirely non-physical place of torment, and the extent to which, in its metaphorical use, it retains the sense of physical conflagration such as might accompany the destruction of Jerusalem by enemy forces, ought not to be decided in advance of a full study of Jesus’ meaning.” 1

Where I will disagree with Wright is his use of “place of torment” for Gehenna.  Although Gehenna has traditionally been translated as Hell, from what we’ve seen so far, Gehenna seems much more likely to indicate a place of consuming fire. The fires or Gehenna are described in some of these passages as eternal or unquenchable, but in none of these passages is an eternal existence within those fires by those who may end up in Gehenna detailed.  Thus far the case for the annihilationist would seem quite strong, and there is even a bit of wriggle room for the Universalists in most of these passages to assert that Gehenna could be meant f0r purification.

Additionally, I think that it is a gross assumption to assume that all of these passages are meant to signify the destruction or Jerusalem in 70 C.E. In fact the only verses that seem to positively indicate the 70 event would be Matthew 23:15 and Matthew 23:33. There are a couple of others that could be stretched to be read in that light, but it takes some exegetical gymnastics that I am not willing to take part in.

However, it also takes a good deal of exegetical gymnastics to read eternal conscious torment into the passages that we have just studied. To come up with that doctrine we are going to have to come up with something more than what we have read so far. I am not sure that we are going to find it, at least not in the Bible itself.

In my next two posts, I am going to look at the Greek word Hades as it is used in the Gospels. In the first post I am going to examine Matthew 11:23, 16:18  and Luke 10:15 of which I believe that Jesus is not speaking of Hell at all but is rather referring simply to the Hebrew Sheol, or the grave.  After that post, I am going to deconstruct one of the classic Hell passages that would seem to many to be absolute proof of eternal conscious torment in hell. That is of course the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. I have spent hours studying this parable and you might be surprised at the results. Again, I do not believe that Jesus was talking about Hell here at all, but that will have to wait a few days.

Questioning Hell Main Page

  1. N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, p. 455 [↩]
Filed Under: Gehenna, Hell, Uncategorized
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