Jesus And Hell

[Neon Genesis]

There's one thing I don't get about the Christian belief in hell. In the OT, the Jews believed in Sheol, which simply means the grave and hell is a Christian invention. If Jesus was a Jew and not a Christian, would he have believed in Sheol instead of hell?

[highvoltage]

There's one thing I don't get about the Christian belief in hell. In the OT, the Jews believed in Sheol, which simply means the grave and hell is a Christian invention. If Jesus was a Jew and not a Christian, would he have believed in Sheol instead of hell?

 

This was the very thing that precipitated my deconversion. The biggest thing, anyway. The truth is, the Jews didn't really believe in an afterlife for most of their history. Some scholars would suggest that sheol was a sort of minimal afterlife, but others say it just means grave and that's it. As it so happens, during the period between the OT and NT, the Romans began to exert a lot of influence in Judea, which would have included influence from their religious beliefs. Many Roman pagan religions included belief in an afterlife, and these beliefs intermingled with the Jewish traditions culminating in the belief among some sects of Judaism by the time of Jesus that the dead were raised again to live in an afterlife. Well, that last part is what I put together for myself and is just my view of what I think happened. My bible professors when I was in college called the addition of belief in heaven/hell/afterlife "progressive revelation" when I asked them about it.

 

Unfortunately I don't read or speak ancient Greek or Aramaic, so I don't know what Jesus actually said about heaven and hell, but if the English translations are anywhere close to accurate then he wasn't speaking of sheol when he spoke of hell. He was talking about a literal place.

 

Funny how the Jewish Messiah would talk about saving people from hell (and allowing them to enter heaven) in the afterlife, when for most of recorded history God's chosen people knew nothing about either of those things.

[HRDWarrior]

This is an interesting topic, I hadn't heard that one before (shows how little I studied anything that was controversial to christianity). Good info though.

[Dagan]

The Jews adopted hell and hierarchies of demons from the Persians/Babylonians while they were in exile roughly 580 years before Christ. Judaism was significantly different after the exile than it was before. Zoroastrianismhad a massive influence on the Judaism of Jesus' time and long after the Persian religion died out, its central beliefs were preserved in Christianity.

 

Note:

 

"Active participation in life through good thoughts, good words and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep the chaos at bay."

 

"Ahura Mazda will ultimately prevail over evil Angra Mainyu / Ahriman, at which point the universe will undergo a cosmic renovation and time will end (cf: Zoroastrian eschatology). In the final renovation, all of creation—even the souls of the dead that were initially banished to "darkness"—will be reunited in Ahura Mazda returning to life in the undead form. At the end of time a savior-figure [a Saoshyant] will bring about a final renovation of the world, and in which the dead will be revived." (Does any of this sound familiar?)

 

"There will then be a final purgation of evil from the Earth (through a tidal wave of molten metal) and a purgation of evil from the heavens (through a cosmic battle of spiritual forces). In the end good will triumph, and each person will find himself or herself transformed into a spiritualized body and soul. Those who died as adults will be transformed into healthy adults of forty years of age, and those who died young will find themselves permanently youthful, about age fifteen. In these new spiritual bodies, humans will live without food, without hunger or thirst, and without weapons (or possibility of bodily injury). The material substance of the bodies will be so light as to cast no shadow. All humanity will speak a single language and belong to a single nation without borders. All will experience immortality (Ameretat) and will share a single purpose and goal, joining with the divine for a perpetual exaltation of God’s glory."

 

Pretty interesting, eh?

 

And FYI the Heaven and Hell and final judgment teachings in Zoroastrianism developed around 648–330 BCE, the time the Jews were in exile and heavily influenced by the Persian empire.

[Guest jlt1977]

It seems that the fascination with the afterlife is born of a later time than the roots of the OT. Belief as a condition of a secure afterlife is clearly a post gospel era phenomenon and the product of the politics of the church. Once the Greek influence took over and the NT docs where written and edited the power of controlling the afterlife became a much more prominent idea and became the basis for the authority of the church.