A brief history of hell
Hell is mentioned sparingly in the Bible, with many references being either ambiguous or mistranslations. Each era since has refashioned hell in its own image, for better and for worse.
Given its prominence in imagery and storytelling, it is surprising that hell doesn’t appear much in the Bible. In fact, most of its references to Satan’s scorching domain are the result of later translators mapping their views onto older, and quite distinct, concepts of the afterlife. This means hell as we understand it today is an afterlife the biblical writers had no real conception of.
In the Old Testament, Sheol is a far cry from hell. Rather than a realm designed to punish sinners, Sheol is a place where all souls congregate and exist in listless nothingness. There is no pain or suffering, but neither is there joy or celebration.
Even in the New Testament, references to hell are sparse. Jesus, Christianity’s central figure, and Saint Paul, its founding missionary, did preach about existential comeuppance. But in our earliest Christian writings — Paul’s epistles and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew — neither warned of a hellfire awaiting sinners.
The fate befalling those who turned their backs on God wouldn’t be an eternal sentence. They would simply be annihilated. Many of Jesus’ parables warn of this.
This appears to have been the teaching of both Paul and Jesus. But it was eventually changed by later Christians, who came to affirm not only eternal joy for the saints but eternal torment for the sinners, creating the irony that throughout the ages most Christians have believed in a hell that did not exist for either of the founders of Christianity,”
Hell is mentioned sparingly in the Bible, with many references being either ambiguous or mistranslations. Each era since has refashioned hell in its own image, for better and for worse.
Given its prominence in imagery and storytelling, it is surprising that hell doesn’t appear much in the Bible. In fact, most of its references to Satan’s scorching domain are the result of later translators mapping their views onto older, and quite distinct, concepts of the afterlife. This means hell as we understand it today is an afterlife the biblical writers had no real conception of.
In the Old Testament, Sheol is a far cry from hell. Rather than a realm designed to punish sinners, Sheol is a place where all souls congregate and exist in listless nothingness. There is no pain or suffering, but neither is there joy or celebration.
Even in the New Testament, references to hell are sparse. Jesus, Christianity’s central figure, and Saint Paul, its founding missionary, did preach about existential comeuppance. But in our earliest Christian writings — Paul’s epistles and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew — neither warned of a hellfire awaiting sinners.
The fate befalling those who turned their backs on God wouldn’t be an eternal sentence. They would simply be annihilated. Many of Jesus’ parables warn of this.
This appears to have been the teaching of both Paul and Jesus. But it was eventually changed by later Christians, who came to affirm not only eternal joy for the saints but eternal torment for the sinners, creating the irony that throughout the ages most Christians have believed in a hell that did not exist for either of the founders of Christianity,”
