"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.
Questioning Hell Main Page
“It is a parable, therefore it isn’t history” is, of course, a non-sequitur similar to another famous one: “It is poetry, therefore it isn’t history”. The end conclusion is that there can never be a relationship between moral lessons and wisdom on the one hand, and reality on the other. (See the parable of Rehoboam.) Another problem is that the spiritual realms are outside of time – which is a created dimension – so you can’t invoke chronology in any definitive way. The fact is that at least one man resided in something rather like what we call Hell.
But what do you think of John 11 where Lazarus (I am going to guess that there is more here than a name coincidence) is raised from the dead and the Jewish leaders proceed to plot to kill him also? It seems to me that the Apostle John has already anticipated your argument!
I agree in principle that a story being told as a parable does not empirically rule out real historical sources underlying the parable, however, that does not mean that this parable proves that existence of Hades as told in the parable.
I do agree that the Lazarus in the parable most likely is the same Lazarus that Jesus raised from the dead in the Gospel of John. But does that mean that the parable is recounting Lazarus’ experiences while Jesus was dalllying in Jerusalem for two days? I don’t quite understand the point that you’re trying to make.
We are shifting all over the map with the meaning of the word ‘parable’. At one level we could say that it is any story from which a moral lesson could be derived. As used directly in scripture, the story involves actors who are symbolic of something that is not directly the nature of the story, as in a ‘seed’ symbolizing the ‘word of God’. The message is coded. If we stick to the latter definition, then the story of the rich man and Lazarus isn’t a parable. Yes, the rich man is symbolic in general, but he is symbolic in exactly the same way as he was and there is exactly nothing coded or cryptic about the message. To call this a parable is to change the definition of parable. I have no problem with changing the definition of parable, but you can’t then expect that the properties of the original definition should pertain to the redefined parable. At the same time, I think it is plausible to assume that all the parables that Jesus told were historical, since he is God. We are raised in the modernist era where changing definitions on the fly is the norm for the highly educated, making philosophy and theology conceptually impossible to engage in.
Since I have heard this argument before – that the story of Lazarus and the rich man is a parable – I think it is good to ask where it leads. If the words of Christ can be so easily dismissed, what is left? The answer is that Christ becomes an empty shell to be manipulated as a puppet by some intellectual. Yoder was a classic example who argued that the Bible provides only the corrupted words of Christ, but he as a scholar could re-derive the true intentions. Many who were seeking to follow Jesus ended up following Yoder instead, who was simply acting as a puppet master for a fake Christ that he constructed.
Since you are fleeing Armstrongism (I don’t even know what that is), I think it would be quite sad to see you launch off into another cult. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as the parable goes!
So you take Lazarus and the Rich Man to be a historical retelling of an actual event where Lazarus went to Abraham’s Bosom and conversed across the chasm with the Rich Man?
I have considered the possibility of this, and have not entirely ruled it out. Not least of the problems presented by dismissing the story altogether is reconciling the words of Jesus to the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in Paradise”. Paradise is often equated with Abraham’s Bosom in rabbinical literature, and I definitely can’t dismiss Jesus’ words from the cross. Additionally, Jesus’ descent into Hades as depicted by Peter seems to indicate some sort of “real” realm where something(?) like depicted in this parable might be going on.
I guess a large part of the problem that I have with viewing Lazarus and the Rich Man as History is that in doing so I feel that it forces us to consider some elements in Greek Mythology as well as the Pseudepigrapha as being divinely revealed. 1 Enoch, the Apocalypse of Zephania and others paint a similar picture of Hades, and if we take some of the elements of these apocalypses as being divinely revealed, then I’m not entirely sure what that does to our theology. Do you believe that these apocalyptic writers as well as the Greeks, not to mention other cultures with similar views of the Underworld, received some degree of divine revelation as to the nature of the underworld? I’m not sure how such similar pictures of the Underworld could have simultaneously evolved without divine revelation.
For starters, the underworld notions were all over the middle east. Thus, it is unlikely the Greeks invented their notion of Hades, but rather adopted it from somewhere else. At another level, neither classical pagan literature nor Patristics like Augustine mention the Greek notion. The beliefs of the philosophers was that death would produce disembodied souls which would gradually dissipate. Thus, the assumption that the Greeks had a fully developed notion of Hades that might have been borrowable seems to me unwarranted. My guess is that the cumulative Greek literature on this subject amounts to a few scattered lines. Of these, there will be similarities and differences with the Christian notion. If we exaggerate the similarities and ignore the differences …
If I do accept that the Greeks somehow discussed this notion prior to the Jews, the Bible provides many strange examples of revelation: God speaks to Cain in Genesis 4, who was hardly a decent person. Then there is Balaam in Numbers 22 and the fortune telling girl in Acts 16. We simply can’t put things into neat little boxes where revelation is excluded.
The Underworld notions that the Greeks had are predated by the Sumerians by as much as a thousand years and seem to have infused many of the religions of the ANE. The Epic of Gilgamesh depicts an Underworld very similar to Hades with a gatekeeper, followed by a “man of the river” and a “man of the boat”. The river in the Sumerian underworld closely resembles the River Styx in the Greek version as does the Hades exhibited in the the Apocalypse of Zephaniah (1st Century B.C.E). Interestingly enough, the Aztecs in Mexico featured an Underworld very similar to those found in ANE religions. The dating of these many different sources fall well before we see this featured in Luke 16.
I have read through the Greek and Sumerian literature with the depictions of the Underworld and it consists of quite a bit more than a “few scattered lines”. There are a number of theologians who hold to a literal view of Lazarus and the Rich Man who admit that the similarities between the views of the Greeks as well as what is found within the Pseudepigrapha are too similar to Luke 16 to be coincidental and therefore they acquiesce that the Greeks and their Sumerian predecessors received some degree of divine revelation, something that I am reluctant to do.
Among respected theologians who have written that Lazarus and the Rich Man is a parable and not to be taken literally include Martin Luther, E.W. Bullinger and N.T. Wright. I don’t see how not taking this parable would put you in “cult” status.
I did read the Epic of Gilgamesh and a bit more of the Sumerian legends. The main thing I concluded was that there was almost certainly an original story that someone decided to mock along the way. Your observation regarding the Aztecs seems to me in line with this. I have read extensively from classical Greek literature – although not the early materials – and not come across a notion of Hades.
Checking my MacArthur reference, he claims that the Lazarus of Luke isn’t the one of John, citing chronology. I don’t see that as compelling since Luke likely compiled similar material non-chronologically.
Do you think that in this story Jesus intends for the Pharisees to believe in a literal Hell? Or is he just teasing them?
Hesiod’s Theogeny as well as the Odyssey have some detailed depictions of Hades which closely resemble what I am speaking of. There are other instances as well, but I can’t come up with them off the top of my head. Have you read my post on Hell and Hellenization?
I do think that Jesus intends for the Pharisees to believe in a literal Hell, and part of the point of the story is to challenge their presuppositions about exactly who it would be in Hell. The Pharisees had a very set idea about who would and wouldn’t end up in Hell, and of course they thought that they were immune. I believe that Jesus simply used the Pharisees conception of Hell in the parable. His point was not to give a lesson on the nature of Hell, but to challenge their ideas of who would have a place in Heaven and who would not.
Yes, I should have gone thought that link first. It was helpful and informative. I found a link to Hesiod’s works here which allow for quick searching to the passages on Hades. Certainly it is more like Sheol, but it still doesn’t appear to be a highly developed notion.
We also have to note that the Biblical usage of Sheol predates Hesiod by many centuries. Simultaneously, the large majority of Greek literature is gone, plus there were undoubtedly variants. Would it have been possible for the group of seventy translators to simply have chosen the word Hades for translation because it was close enough?
Having done a fairly intensive (but not exhaustive) word study on the Hebrew Sheol as well as other words for “the grave” “the pit” and the “abyss” as well as on the Greek word Hades and associated terms I think that the Septuagint translators probably chose the word that most closely brought out the essence of the Hebrew Sheol. What is debatable is whether or not the Hellenized Jews adopted other ideas central to Hades as is present in the mythologies. From my studies on some of the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha, it would appear that at least some of the sects may have, although how widespread this cultural diffusion was can not be ascertained with any degree of certainty.
The question I eventually asked myself was whether the story itself actually says that this state of torment is eternal.
That was part of the point here. Whether or not we read this story literally or not is beside the point. The story is specifically about the intermediate state and not the final one. Even if the story is a literal depiction of that intermediate state, there is no way that it can be interpreted as eternal conscious torment.
As xWCG recently pointed out, from Daniel to Revelation, judgment is placed at the eschaton and not at death. Whatever punishment in “Hell” turns out to be will take place after the Final Judgment. I tend to think that whatever Sheol/Hades as the intermediate state might be, it is not nearly as much like Dante’s Inferno as it is like the Old Testament depictions of Sheol.
Precisely.
There seems to have been a bit of debate on whether or not Christ’s parables/stories are historical as well as teaching something.
I have always been taught that a chief charateristic of Christ’s parables/stories is that they were all instantly recognisable as being truthful/realistic/possible….. as opposed to fantasy/make believe……ie the listening audience would relate to them to them as genuine [ but not necessarily historical] examples of human experience rather than as fairy stories.
Given this type of credibility and the fact that it was Jesus [God Incarnate] speaking then we would need to come up with some seriously convincing evidence that the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man is in any way different from the other parables/stories and that Jesus knowingly used a false example in this case.
I’m a newcomer to your blog who has been studying the Christian theology of hell for the last ten years. I’ve read some of your blogs and found them to be very informative. Regarding Lazarus and the rich man in your blog, I didn’t see any reference to the possibility that the parable refers to the Jewish War and subsequent destruction of Jerusalem. It seems evident that the parable does not refer to the concequences of righteous or evil living, because nothing is said about the character of either figure. The rich man is not said to be wicked, and Lazarus is not said to be righteous. The place of torment is not said to be a place of punishment. Abraham says that the rich man’s brothers can avoid their fate by reading the Hebrew scriptures, which say next to nothing about life after death let alone a place of eternal punishment, but do warn the readers in Daniel about the coming “abomination of desolation.” Jesus warned his listeners about the coming destruction of Jerusalem in Matt.24, and also possibly with his several references to the wicked being “thrown into Gehenna”. From Josephus we learn that the religious leaders ( the rich) chose to remain in the city to defend it (and their possessions). Most of them were slaughtered, and their bodies were probably thrown into the Valley of Hinnom (gehenna). Many of the poor escaped to the countryside (Abraham’s bosom). If this parable was an actual literal event, the “great gulf” isn’t all that wide because the occupants of both sides can converse with each other. Also, the story would teach that all rich people are going to punishment and all poor people are going to a reward.
Hello,
First I would like to thank you for your most informative blog on this subject and others,which must surely be of help to many who are in search of Christianity. You have certainly been a help to me.
On this parable while it may well – and probably does- have the symbolic import you and others outline ( the interpretation put forward by your last respondent, Jim, I find very interesting ) never the less, the parable does appear to presuppose an intermediate state of either suffering or bliss in the bosom of Abraham as a setting for the moral or theological lesson being conveyed.As you point out, this idea of an after life was current among the pharisaic sect , as was the idea of a bodily resurrection, so important for Christianity. Christ would have known the truth of the after life and whether God’s judgement for the wicked was annihilation or conscious suffering. His parable assumes with out challenge a setting of conscious torment. Why would he use this myth to convey the point of the parable if it were untrue? It should be noted, that unlike Plato, the authors of the New Testament do not use myths to make philosophical points and that the use of the word myth in the context of modern theology must be handled with care, Bultmann after all , is not really sure whether Jesus thought himself the Son of God.
I am all in favor of allowing the Bible to interpret it’s own symbols. Considering that the target audience of this parable was the Pharisees, who we must presume were familiar with the Hebrew scriptures.
If we consider the Old Testament, the Pharisees would have been well acquainted with a very specific (and very famous) Jew who called Abraham father, had five brothers, and is even described as wearing clothing “dyed in the blood of the grape. He had Moses and the prophets. His mother was Leah, and his name was Judah, and his father prophesied that he would become a line of kings, “the scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from beneath his feet, until Shiloh come…” (Genesis 35:23, Genesis 49:11, 20).
If we consider the gospels and the context of that present day, there was indeed a connotation and a meaning behind being associated with dogs, even desiring crumbs from the rich man’s table. In Matthew 15 and Mark 7 we read of a Greek woman that asks Christ to heal her daughter. Jesus replies that he is sent to Israel, and that he should not cast the children’s bread unto dogs, and the woman replies that even the little dogs receive the crumbs that fall from their table. Christ responds to this faith and heals her daughter.
If the rich man is Judah, then who is this Lazarus that has not Moses and the prophets that desires the crumbs that fall from his table? In John 4:22, Jesus told the Samartian woman that “Salvation is of the Jews” but that there was a time coming when true worshipers would worship in spirit and truth. Jews had Moses and the prophets, but the gentiles did not.
In another parable in Luke 20, Jesus spoke of a vineyard where the workers stoned the messengers and killed the son. When he said that the lord of the vineyard would destroy those husbandmen and give the vineyard to others, his audience replied “God forbid.”
If the rich man is Judah, the Jewish nation, then his counterpart Lazarus would represent the Gentiles, or gentile peoples. One had Moses and the prophets, and the other did not. The Jews despised the Gentiles, but neither would they accept the prophets, the Messiah, or his signs… even if one came back from the dead.
I think Lazarus was chosen as a name either because:
1) Lazarus had already been raised from the dead (whom the leaders sought to kill, thus Jesus was rubbing salt in their wounds)
2) Jesus knew that he would soon raise an actual Lazarus from the dead (thus this was also a prophecy concealed in a parable)
The hell of this parable is not the Hebrew concept of death or the grave, but the Greek concept of hell (Hades). In contrast, Abraham’s bosom was a common Jewish metaphor for Jewish reward. In this story, the expected outcome of the Jew is reversed, finding himself in a Greek Hades while the gentile receives the reward of Abraham.
It is an obvious parable, no more meant to reinforce the Greek Hades than it is to teach that beggars are carried by angels to be hugged by Abraham when they die.
Abraham himself is a symbol that should be interpreted consistently with the other scriptures. Although the Jews took pride in being “sons of Abraham” Jesus said that the devil was their father, and we are later told that if we be Christ’s, we become Abraham’s seed and heirs to the promise. In this sense, Abraham is not literal, but symbolic of a covenant of faith and grace.
Jesus did come to offer salvation to both Jew and Gentile, and the Jewish nation (who had Moses and the prophets) suffered a reversal of fortune. They would not believe, even if one rose from the dead, Jerusalem was destroyed, they were scattered, and now a different people keeps not only the Old Testament but also a New Testament. The gentiles that desired the crumbs from the rich man’s table have been welcomed into the arms of Abraham.
If the Jew believed Moses and the prophets and accepted their Messiah they would also be welcomed, but the gentiles which received bad things in their lifetimes now are comforted.
And if Moses can be used symbolically in this fashion above, why not Abraham in a literal parable? Moses does not simply mean “the person Moses” but also the writings of Moses. Abraham does not simply mean the person Abraham but also his faith and covenant.
For those that would insist that Luke 16 contains only literal histories or that their elements must be taken literally, I would ask if they would also insist that we interpret all scriptures by the same standard? If so, then wouldn’t the parable of Judges 9 also prove that trees were sentient, talked with each other, elected kings, and consumed each other with fire?
Although I can point to many bible passages that even specifically state that the dead know nothing, feel no pain, are at rest, and the like, I cannot point to one single scripture that denies that trees are sentient. If we do not allow trees as conscious beings based on common sense, then why would we allow for the dead to be conscious in spite of numerous biblical statements to the contrary?
When we allow scripture to interpret scripture, much becomes clear. But this is not a teaching about any “intermediate state” (or lack thereof) or the judgment at the end of world. The characters are conscious and speak to each other because otherwise it would be a very “dead” parable, and how could we interpret its symbols without words?