Hello brothers and sisters,
Here is a verse a great many of you could recite from memory.
Psalm 139:8 (KJV)
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
Now read it the way most modern Christians would hear it.
God is in hell.
Not looking in from a safe distance. Not passing through on His way somewhere else. There. Present. Making Himself known in the place most of us were raised to picture as a furnace of fire and torment, staffed by demons, ruled by the devil, and as far from God as a creature can possibly get.
If that is what the word means, the verse makes no sense at all.
But David was not saying that. The Hebrew word he wrote was שְׁאוֹל (Sheol), the realm of the dead, the great gathering place where everyone goes. And his point is breathtaking once you can see it. There is nowhere, not the highest heaven and not the deepest grave, where a person can get out from under the presence of God.
The word “hell” did not translate that thought. It buried it.
Over the last two posts we watched two words cross a language barrier and pick up luggage. Hades absorbed an underworld. Soul absorbed a ghost. In both cases the word itself was sound, and we kept it, and we evicted the tenant.
This week is different. This week we are retiring a word for good.
Let’s dig in.
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Why This One Goes
I want to be clear about why this word gets a different treatment than the last two.
“Soul” translates something. Nephesh is on the page. Psyche is on the page. When your Bible says soul, there is a real word underneath it, and the only problem is the picture we attached.
“Hell” does not translate anything. Or rather, to be more specific, it doesn’t translate just one thing.
There is no single word in the Hebrew or the Greek that “hell” renders. What English Bibles have done instead is take one English word with all kinds of modern connotations and lay it over the top of four completely different biblical words, describing three completely different realities. Sheol. Hades. Gehenna. Tartarus. And then, by association, a fourth thing that is never called by any of those names: the lake of fire.
Four places and conditions. One English word.
You cannot reclaim a word like that, because there is nothing underneath it to reclaim. It is not a container holding the wrong thing. It is a patchwork lid laid over the top of four different containers, hiding the fact that there are four.
So it goes.
But before it goes, I want you to see where it came from, because the story turns out to be far more interesting, and far more honest about our own history, than I expected when I started digging.
The Concealed Place
The English word “hell” is not a borrowing. It did not wander into English from somewhere else. It is an ancient native word, inherited straight down the Germanic family tree. Old English had it as hel or helle, and it meant the nether world, the abode of the dead.
Its cousins are all over northern Europe. German Hölle. Dutch hel. Old Saxon hellia. Gothic halja. Old Norse hel. Every one of them descends from a single reconstructed ancestor that linguists write as haljō, meaning “the underworld,” and more literally, “the concealed place.”
The hidden place. The covered place. The place you cannot see into.
That root goes back further still, to an ancient word meaning “to cover, to conceal.” And here is something that stopped me cold when I found it. That very same root sits underneath a Greek verb, kalyptein, “to cover or hide.” Put the prefix apo, “away from,” in front of it, and you get apokalyptein. To uncover. To reveal.
Apocalypse.
Sit with that for a moment. “Hell” and “apocalypse” are not-so-distant cousins. One means the hidden place. The other means the unveiling. And as we are about to see, it was apocalypses, unveilings written in the name of apostles who never wrote them, that filled the hidden place with the pictures we inherited.
Notice, too, what the word did not originally mean. “The concealed place” is not a description of fire. It is not a description of torment. It is a description of a realm the living cannot see into, which is to say, it is a remarkably good match for Sheol and Hades. When the earliest English Christians reached for hel to speak of the realm of the dead, they were reaching for a word that fit.
The trouble came when they used it for everything else too.
The Goddess Who Came Late
Now, I owe you something.
At the end of the last post I promised that this trail would lead to a Norse goddess. And it does. But the honest account of her is not quite what that promise implied, and after the work we did on the Ugaritic material in the Genesis 14 study, I am not willing to hand you a tidier story than the evidence supports.
In Norse mythology as most people know it, Hel is both a place and a person. The place is a cold, dim realm where the ordinary dead go, the ones who did not die gloriously in battle. The person is its ruler, a grim figure who shares the realm’s name, a daughter of the trickster Loki in the best-known telling. If that sounds familiar, it should. It is almost exactly the Greek situation we looked at two weeks ago, where Hades named both a god and his house until the two blurred together. Two separate peoples, two separate mythologies, and the same move: the realm of the dead and its ruler sharing a single name.
So far, so tidy.
Here is where it gets complicated.
Almost everything we know about Hel the goddess comes from one man, an Icelandic scholar named Snorri Sturluson, writing around the 1220s. That is more than two centuries after Iceland formally accepted Christianity around the year 1000. Snorri was a Christian, writing down the mythology of his pagan ancestors, and he was organizing material that had come down to him in scattered fragments of older poetry.
And when scholars look at those older fragments, the picture shifts. The oldest poetry tends to speak of people being in Hel, which is a place, rather than with Hel, which would be a person. Several leading scholars of Norse religion have concluded that the goddess is most likely a late personification of the place, and Rudolf Simek, one of the standard authorities, goes so far as to say that nothing really supports a pre-Christian belief in her at all. He also observes that Snorri’s description of her hall stands squarely in the Christian tradition. One study of the medieval Scandinavian sources argues that the story Snorri sets in Hel draws more on Christian vision literature than on anything native.
Do you see what that means?
The popular assumption runs like this: pagan Norse belief in a goddess of the underworld leaked into English Christianity and gave us “hell.” But the evidence suggests the arrow may very well point the other direction. The fully developed goddess may be, at least in part, a product of the same medieval Christian imagination that was busy filling the underworld with detail, the very tradition we are going to trace in a few minutes.
So let me be precise about what we can and cannot say. The English word “hell” and the Norse word hel are genuine cousins, descended from the same ancestor, meaning the same thing: the hidden place of the dead. That link is solid. But English did not get its word from the Norse goddess, and the goddess as Snorri describes her may not have existed in anyone’s belief until after Christianity arrived.
So cousin, yes. But source, no.
That is a less exciting sentence than the one I promised you.
But it does have the merit of being true.
A Bishop Who Kept Them Apart
Here is a piece of this history that almost nobody knows, and it is my favorite thing I found while researching this post.
The very first translation of the Bible into any Germanic language was made in the fourth century by a bishop named Wulfila, whose name means “little wolf.” He was working among the Goths, and the Goths had no written language, so before he could translate the Scriptures he had to invent an alphabet to write them in. Then he translated, working from the Greek.
When Wulfila came to the Greek word ᾅδης (hadēs), he used the native Gothic word halja. The concealed place. The realm of the dead. Hades into halja, exactly the way the Alexandrian translators had carried Sheol into Hades, reaching for the ordinary word in his own language for the place where the dead go.
But when he came to γέεννα (geenna), Gehenna, he did something different. He did not use halja. He carried the foreign word across as it was, spelling it out in Gothic letters as gaiainna.
Two different Greek words. Two different Gothic words. He kept them apart.
The very first time a Germanic word for the underworld appeared in a Bible, the translator understood that Hades and Gehenna were not the same thing, and he refused to let one word swallow the other.
I should be honest that Wulfila was an Arian, which means his theology of Christ was badly wrong in ways the church rightly rejected. But his instincts as a translator, at least here, were excellent. And it is the same pattern we saw in Alexandria. The first translators chose well. The flattening came later.
How Four Became One
So when did it happen?
The answer is: gradually, and long before the King James Version. You may have assumed the KJV invented this problem. It did not. It inherited it, and then cemented it into the language for four hundred years.
By the Old English period, helle was already the English church’s word for the world of the dead in general. In the Middle Ages it was even used for the waiting place where the patriarchs and prophets were believed to rest until Christ’s atonement. The word was doing a great deal of work, and none of that work was sorted.
When William Tyndale produced his English New Testament in 1526, he rendered the rich man’s location in Luke 16 as “in hell in tormentes.” That is Hades. And in Matthew 5:22, he warned of “the daunger of hell fyre.” That is Gehenna. Two different Greek words, one English word. The Geneva Bible of 1560 did the same thing with both verses.
Interestingly, the problem did not go unnoticed. As early as 1598, an English writer named Henry Jacob, leaning on the Reformer Martin Bucer, was insisting in print that Hades and Gehenna “are not all one.” But the Bibles people actually read did not change.
Then came 1611.
Here is what the King James Version did with the four words. I want you to see the numbers.
Sheol: rendered “hell” 31 times, “the grave” 31 times, and “the pit” 3 times.
Hades: rendered “hell” 10 times, and “grave” once.
Gehenna: rendered “hell” every single time it appears, 12 times.
Tartarus: rendered “hell” in its only appearance.
Look at Sheol. Split exactly down the middle, half “hell,” half “grave,” with a few “pits” scattered in. The same Hebrew word, sometimes a hole in the ground and sometimes a place of torment, depending on which verse you happened to be reading. That is the fracture we watched Brenton make with Hades two weeks ago, except Brenton built on the KJV, so it is really the same fracture showing up again downstream.
And then look at what this does to one particular verse.
Revelation 20:14 (KJV)
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
Read that through the modern picture. If “hell” is the lake of fire, then this verse says hell was thrown into hell.
The sentence only makes sense if the two are different things. And they are. The word underneath “hell” here is Hades, the realm of the dead. At the final judgment, the realm of the dead is emptied, and then it is ended, and the lake of fire is something else entirely. The King James Version’s own wording carries the evidence that it had flattened two different realities into one word. Generations of readers simply never noticed.
The Repair, Half Finished
To be fair to the translators who followed, scholars did eventually notice, and they tried to fix it.
When the English Revised Version appeared in the 1880s, the revisers replaced “hell” with “Hades” throughout the New Testament wherever the Greek said Hades. In the Old Testament they restored “Sheol” in many places, though they lost their nerve in Isaiah 14 and kept “hell” there. The American revisers went further, and when they published the American Standard Version in 1901, they transliterated Sheol every single time, without exception.
Most modern translations have followed their lead, at least for those two words. Open the NRSVUE or the ESV or the NASB and you will generally find Sheol and Hades where the original has Sheol and Hades. Not universally, mind you. By one count the NKJV still renders Sheol as “hell” in nineteen places, and Psalm 139:8 is a good place to check your translation.
But here is the part that surprised me. The repair stopped halfway.
Gehenna is still “hell” in almost every English Bible on the market. Not just the old ones. The NRSVUE. The NKJV. The ESV. The NIV. When Jesus speaks of Gehenna, modern English readers still overwhelmingly read “hell.”
And Tartarus is still “hell” too. I had assumed my own preferred translations had fixed that one. They have not.
2 Peter 2:4 (NKJV)
For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment;
The NKJV does put “Tartarus” in a footnote, which is honest of it. The NRSVUE says “cast them into hell” and leaves it there.
So here is where English Bibles stand today. Two of the four words have been largely restored. Two are still hidden under the lid. Which means that most Christians reading most modern Bibles still have no way of knowing that Jesus’ words about Gehenna and Peter’s words about Tartarus are about two different things, neither of which is the realm where the dead are waiting.
Four Words, Four Places
So with the lid off, what is actually underneath?
I am going to give each one only a brief orientation here, because three of them get full posts of their own later in this series and I would rather wait and give you the full portrait when we get there.
Think of this as the legend on the map, not the map itself.
Sheol and Hades. One realm, two languages. We spent all of Part 2 on this, so I will only say it plainly again: when the Hebrew says Sheol and the Greek says Hades, they are naming the same place. It is where the dead go, all the dead, righteous and wicked alike, to wait. It is not the final destination of anyone. Revelation shows it giving up its dead for judgment and then being thrown into the lake of fire itself, which is to say, it has an expiration date. And as David reminds us in the verse we opened with, God is there.
Bible references: Genesis 37:35. Psalm 139:8. Luke 16:23. Acts 2:27. Revelation 1:18. Revelation 20:13-14.
Gehenna. This one is not a mythological realm at all, at least not first. It is a real valley you could walk to, just outside the walls of Jerusalem. The Hebrew name is גֵּי הִנֹּם (Ge Hinnom), “the Valley of Hinnom,” and in the worst years of Judah’s history it was the place where children were burned in sacrifice to foreign gods. Jeremiah thundered against it. And when Jesus wanted a word for the destruction awaiting the unrepentant, He reached for the name of that valley.
Mark 9:47-48 (NRSVUE)
And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.
The word under “hell” there is Gehenna. And Jesus is quoting the final verse of Isaiah, which describes the corpses of the rebels lying outside Jerusalem. What He means by it, and how the valley became a name for judgment, is next week’s entire post.
Bible references: Jeremiah 7:31-32. Isaiah 66:24. Matthew 5:22, 29-30. Matthew 10:28. Matthew 23:33. Mark 9:43-48. Luke 12:5. James 3:6.
Tartarus. This is the strangest of the four, and it appears exactly once in the entire Bible, in 2 Peter 2:4, as a verb: ταρταρόω (tartaroō), “to cast into Tartarus.” Notice who gets put there. Not human beings. The angels who sinned. It is a prison for rebellious spiritual beings, held in darkness until judgment. If you read the Divine Council series, you already know which angels Peter has in mind, and if you have not, the short version is that this is the fate of the Watchers who crossed the line in Genesis 6. Tartarus is not where people go. We will come back to it when we follow Christ into the realm of the dead.
Bible references: 2 Peter 2:4. Jude 6. Compare 1 Enoch 10:4-6 and 1 Peter 3:19-20.
The lake of fire. This is the only one of the four that comes close to the picture most people have when they say “hell,” and it is worth noticing that it is never called by any of the other three names. It appears only in Revelation. The beast and the false prophet are thrown into it. The devil is thrown into it. Death itself and Hades itself are thrown into it.
It is called the second death.
And notice one more thing, because the popular picture gets it exactly backward. In Scripture, the devil does not rule this place. He is sentenced to it. Jesus says the eternal fire was prepared for the devil and his angels. The image of Satan as the king of hell, enthroned and running the operation, has no biblical foundation whatsoever. He is not the warden.
He will be one of its prisoners.
What the lake of fire is, how long it lasts, and what happens to those thrown into it are among the most contested questions in all of Christian theology, and I have promised you a fair hearing of every serious position when we get there. For now, the point is simply that it is a distinct reality, and it is final, and it is not the realm where the dead are waiting today. Not any of the dead.
Bible references: Matthew 25:41. Revelation 19:20. Revelation 20:10. Revelation 20:14-15. Revelation 21:8.
There they are. Four words, four realities. A waiting place for all the dead. A valley of judgment. A prison for fallen angels. And a final fire.
Whatever you conclude about each of them, I hope you can see that they are not one place, and that a single English word was never going to be able to carry all four without crushing them together.
Where The Picture Came From
So far we have been talking about a word. But a word is not what most people are carrying around in their heads when they think about hell. What they are carrying is a picture. Flames and darkness. Levels and rings. Specific punishments for specific sins. Demons with pitchforks. A ferryman on a dark river. A sign over the gate telling you to abandon all hope.
That picture did not come from the word “hell.” And it did not come from Scripture. It was painted over the course of about thirteen centuries, and I want to show you the brushstrokes.
A second-century tour
The story starts with a book you may never have heard of. It’s called the Apocalypse of Peter.
It was written in Greek, probably in the first half of the second century, by someone using the apostle Peter’s name. And it does something no canonical book ever does. It gives you a guided tour of the place of punishment, with the torments laid out sin by sin.
The punishments are, as one scholar puts it, doled out “in kind.” The crime determines the torment. Blasphemers hang over fire by their tongues. Murderers are tormented by beasts while their victims watch.
Each sin has its own matching agony, and the reader is walked past them one after another.
Here is the unsettling part. This book was not fringe. Clement of Alexandria, one of the great teachers of the early church, treated it as Scripture and quoted it. The Muratorian Fragment, one of our earliest lists of the books the church accepted, mentions it alongside the Revelation of John, though it adds that some did not want it read in church. It came closer to the canon than most people would be comfortable knowing. And though the church ultimately set it aside, the idea it introduced, a tour of hell with punishments fitted to sins, did not go away.
A medieval bestseller
A century or two later came the Apocalypse of Paul, which took the same idea and ran much further with it.
It begins with Paul’s real experience in 2 Corinthians 12, where he says he was caught up to the third heaven and heard things he was not permitted to repeat.
The author of this apocalypse decided to repeat them anyway. All of them, and in great detail. In it Paul is taken on a tour of the place of torment, organized in levels, with punishments carefully keyed to particular sins. The text is fixated on balance, on making the punishment fit the crime with a kind of terrible symmetry.
At the end, Paul and the angels plead for the damned, and Christ grants them rest from their torments every Sunday.
That last detail tells you how far this book had wandered from the text it claimed to be expanding. But it did not matter. The Apocalypse of Paul became one of the most widely copied religious texts of the Middle Ages, translated into language after language, read aloud, preached from, painted on church walls.
It became the template for an entire genre of medieval vision literature, in which a monk or a knight is shown the torments of the damned and returns to tell everyone what he saw.
A Roman poet
Meanwhile, running alongside all of this, was the greatest poem of the Roman world.
Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the decades just before the birth of Christ, has a sixth book in which the hero Aeneas descends into the underworld, guided by a prophetess.
He meets the ferryman Charon at the river. He passes the three-headed dog Cerberus. He sees Minos sitting in judgment over the dead. He is shown the walls of Tartarus, where the great criminals suffer their punishments, and he walks through the bright fields of Elysium where the blessed rest.
Every educated person in medieval Europe knew this poem. It was the foundational text of Latin literature. And it gave the underworld a geography: a gate, a river, a guardian, a judge, regions for the damned and the blessed.
A Florentine poet
Now put all of that in the hands of a genius.
Dante Alighieri wrote the Inferno in the early 1300s, and coupled with its adjoining parts (Purgatorio and Paradiso) that form the Divine Comedy, it is, I will say without hesitation, one of the greatest works of literature ever produced by a human being.
In it, Dante himself descends through hell, which he builds as a vast funnel of nine circles narrowing toward the center of the earth, each circle holding a particular category of sinner suffering a punishment matched to the sin.
Dante even gives the principle a name, contrapasso, the counter-suffering, the punishment that mirrors the crime.
And who guides him? Virgil. The Roman poet himself, walking him down.
Then watch what Dante does in the second canto, when he hesitates at the start of the journey. He tells Virgil he is not worthy to make it, because only two others ever went before him. In Longfellow’s translation, the line reads: “I not Aeneas am, I am not Paul.”
Dante names his own precedents. Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s descent. And Paul. Scholars debate which Paul Dante means, the Paul of 2 Corinthians who was caught up into paradise, or the Paul of the apocryphal vision who was taken on the tour of torment. Many hear the second. I lean that way myself, since the journey Dante is about to take looks far more like the apocalypse than anything in Paul’s actual letters. But I hold it as a reading, not a certainty.
Either way, look at what is in that single line. The classical underworld and the Christian tour of torment, fused together in one man’s imagination, and set to some of the most beautiful verse ever written.
So when you meet Charon ferrying souls across the river, that is Virgil. When you meet Minos judging the damned, that is Virgil. When you descend through levels of punishment fitted precisely to sins, that is the apocalypses. And when you read the inscription over the gate telling all who enter to abandon hope, that is Dante.
Almost none of it is the Bible.
A score to settle
There is one more thing about the Inferno that I promised I would tell you.
Dante did not fill his hell only with figures from history and mythology. He filled it with real people, many of them his own contemporaries. Fellow Florentines. Political rivals. And at least one pope.
Here are the facts, and they are not in dispute.
Dante was a politician in Florence before he was a famous poet, and the city was torn between two factions, called the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs. Dante belonged to the Whites. In 1301 Pope Boniface VIII sent a French prince to Florence, ostensibly as a peacemaker.
The Blacks seized power.
Dante, as it happened, was in Rome at that very moment, part of a delegation arguing Florence’s case before Boniface himself. He never went home again. In 1302 he was sentenced to exile, and he spent the rest of his life wandering from city to city.
Now here is what Dante did with that.
The Inferno is set in the spring of the year 1300. Boniface was alive in 1300. He did not die until 1303. So Dante could not put him in hell without breaking his own timeline. Instead, in the nineteenth canto, among the popes punished for selling church offices, he has a previous pope, Nicholas III, buried upside down in a hole with his feet on fire. And when Dante approaches, Nicholas mistakes him for someone else. He thinks Boniface has arrived early.
Dante reserved the pope’s place in hell while the pope was still sitting on his throne.
He did similar things elsewhere. In the circle of the wrathful, he watches with open satisfaction as a Florentine from the rival faction, a man named Filippo Argenti, is torn apart by the other sinners.
Now, I want to exercise some restraint here. We cannot get inside Dante’s head. Everything I have just told you is documented. What Dante was feeling while he wrote it is an inference, not a fact. He may genuinely have believed Boniface was a wicked man who deserved judgment, and there are historians who would agree with him about Boniface. It is entirely possible that his convictions and his grievances were simply the same thing.
But the inference is not a hard one to draw. A man exiled from everything he loved, by a pope he blamed for it, wrote a poem in which that pope’s place in hell is waiting for him.
You can decide for yourself what that says.
Now, here is why it matters for us.
It tells us, unmistakably, that the Inferno is a human composition. Brilliant, devout, and moving, yes. But shaped by one man’s learning, one man’s sources, one man’s politics, and one man’s pain. It was never meant to be a map of anything you can find in Scripture.
(And if you want a footnote to the story, the city of Florence formally revoked Dante’s sentence of exile in 2008, almost seven hundred years after it was passed.)
What came after
The picture did not stop with Dante.
When Michelangelo painted the Last Judgment on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, he put Charon in it, swinging his oar at the damned, and Minos too. The ferryman from a pagan Roman poem ended up on the wall of the pope’s own chapel.
In 1667, John Milton gave us a Satan who would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, and from then on the devil was king of the underworld in the popular mind.
Notice that Dante, to his credit, did not do that. Dante’s Lucifer is frozen in ice at the bottom of hell, a prisoner, not a ruler. It was Milton who put him on the throne. In the nineteenth century, Gustave Doré’s engravings of the Inferno fixed the images in visual form for the modern world. And every film and cartoon and Halloween costume since has been drawing on that inheritance.
Now let’s stand back for a moment. I want to be careful to say this with a degree of charity.
Not one of these people was a villain. The authors of the apocalypses believed they were calling people to repentance.
Dante was a deeply serious Christian writing a poem about a spiritual journey to God. Michelangelo was painting for the glory of God in the holiest chapel in Christendom.
But a picture can be beautiful and sincere and still be a picture of a fiction. And for most of Western Christian history, the church has been looking at the painting and believing it was looking out a window.
If you’ve found this work insightful, enlightening, or even challenging, the most direct way to share it is by restacking. But you can also share it directly with any friend who needs to see that Sheol and the afterlife are nothing like what we were always taught.
Dig Deeper
If you want to see the four words for yourself, here they are, grouped by the word that actually stands in the original. Look each one up in your own Bible and note what English word your translation used. You may be surprised how often it is “hell,” and how many different things that one word is covering.
Sheol (Hebrew): Genesis 37:35. Job 14:13. Psalm 16:10. Psalm 139:8. Isaiah 14:9-15. Jonah 2:2.
Hades (Greek): Matthew 11:23. Matthew 16:18. Luke 10:15. Luke 16:23. Acts 2:27, 31. Revelation 1:18. Revelation 6:8. Revelation 20:13-14.
Gehenna (Greek, from Hebrew Ge Hinnom): Matthew 5:22, 29-30. Matthew 10:28. Matthew 18:9. Matthew 23:15, 33. Mark 9:43, 45, 47. Luke 12:5. James 3:6.
Tartarus (Greek): 2 Peter 2:4, its only appearance.
The lake of fire: Revelation 19:20. Revelation 20:10, 14-15. Revelation 21:8.
As a bonus exercise, read Revelation 20:13-15 in the KJV and then in any modern translation, side by side. Consider the connotations most modern readers bring. Consider that a great many modern readers conflate hell and the lake of fire. Now watch what happens to the sentence when the correct word is used and there’s no conflation between it and the lake of fire.
Questions For Reflection
The traditional English wording of the Apostles’ Creed says that Christ “descended into hell.” Knowing what you know now about what that word can and cannot mean, should churches keep that wording, change it, or simply explain it? What would be gained and lost in each case?
The Apocalypse of Peter was treated as Scripture by some early Christians and came close to being included in the canon. What do you think protected the church from adopting it in the end, and what might that suggest about how we evaluate vivid spiritual writing, visions, and testimonies today?
The apocalypses and Dante’s Inferno all used vivid images of punishment to call people to repentance. Is fear a legitimate tool in proclaiming the gospel? Where would you draw the line between an honest warning and a manipulation?
Wulfila kept Hades and Gehenna distinct in the fourth century. English Bibles merged them for centuries, and even after scholars flagged the problem, modern translations only fixed it halfway. Why do you think a known error can persist for so long, even among careful people? What does that suggest about how our own traditions protect themselves from correction?
Before reading this post, what did you picture when you heard the word “hell”? Now that you can trace where most of that picture came from, what, if anything, does Scripture actually give you to put in its place?
Let’s talk in the comments.
What This Sets Up
Three words down. And this time the word did not survive.
We have watched Hades absorb an underworld, and soul absorb a ghost, and now we have watched a single word swallow four biblical realities whole, while centuries of imagination painted over the top of all of them.
Starting next week, we stop clearing ground and start walking the actual terrain, one place at a time.
And we start with the one place on the whole map you could actually visit. A valley just outside the walls of Jerusalem, with a history so dark that the prophets could barely speak of it, and a name that Jesus took up and turned into the most fearsome warning He ever gave.
Before Gehenna was a doctrine, it was a place. Next time, we go there.
Until then, I pray the Lord blesses you.
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