When was concept of hell invented

A traditionalist view of hell, however, does not necessarily mean fire and brimstone. But Jesus does talk about it as a reality and he doesn't seem to have any doubts about it.

How can you have a place that's bereft of God and yet it exists for eternity? That's kind of a theological impossibility. So, where do most evangelicals stand on the issue of hell? Sprinkle and Date suggest that it is difficult to know, since people are reluctant to publicly challenge traditional views. Still, the debate over hell shows no sign of dissipating among evangelical scholars.

If anything, the scope of the discussion appears to be expanding. Sprinkle, who recently co-edited a book, Four Views on Hell , raised theological eyebrows when he included an essay by theologian Robin Parry defending universalism—the view that all people will eventually be saved. For his part, Mark Galli believes that many evangelicals will choose to accept that hell is a paradox that can never be fully understood. One can move forward, happily, and live with that mystery.

From ancient Greece to the birth of Christianity, to medieval Europe and modern America, visit real locations believed to be portals to the underworld and witness a hair-raising vision of hell come to life. All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets.

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In the ancient Hebrew imagination, Sheol was a single dumping ground for all the world's dead. So where do we first get the idea of divine judgment, of God separating the good from the evil and sentencing them to opposing fates? The earliest biblical mention is in the book of Daniel written around B. Rather than a neutral afterlife, Daniel gives us the first description of what historian Alan Bernstein calls "moral death," where your eternal fate depends on how you lived your life.

Trumbower says that by the first century C. In the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples introduce a new term for hell, the Hebrew word Gehenna. According to Jewish tradition, Gehenna was a valley outside of the city walls of Jerusalem that doubled as a trash dump, where garbage was continually burned.

But when the New Testament talks about hell, it still mostly envisions hell as the place where evildoers are sent only after the Day of Judgment, not directly after death.

Take the Gospel of Matthew, for example, in which Jesus shares the parable of the sheep and the goats , in which the "King" separates the good and the evil in the last days as a shepherd separates his sheep from the goats. There is, however, one striking example in the gospels of hell as the place where the bad guys are sent right after they die to be tortured for their sins.

It's the story of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus found in Chapter 16 of the Gospel of Luke. In the tale, the rich man feasts while Lazarus subsists on the scraps that fall from his table, dogs licking his open sores.

When both men die, Lazarus the beggar is "carried to Abraham's side" in heaven and the rich man is sent the opposite way. The first real graphic descriptions of hell and its torments come outside of the New Testament canon in the Christian apocryphal texts of the second century C.

This may be simple, but it is not easy. Since your neighbor is anyone you know, see, or hear about, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan, true love means helping everyone in need, not just those in your preferred social circles.

Jesus was concerned principally for the poor, the outcasts, the foreigners, the marginalized, and even the most hated enemies. Few people are. Especially those with good lives and abundant resources. Most people today would be surprised to learn that Jesus believed in a bodily eternal life here on earth, instead of eternal bliss for souls, but even more that he did not believe in hell as a place of eternal torment.

It was where, according to the Old Testament, ancient Israelites practiced child sacrifice to foreign gods. The God of Israel had condemned and forsaken the place. In the ancient world whether Greek, Roman, or Jewish , the worst punishment a person could experience after death was to be denied a decent burial. Jesus developed this view into a repugnant scenario: corpses of those excluded from the kingdom would be unceremoniously tossed into the most desecrated dumping ground on the planet.

Jesus did not say souls would be tortured there. They simply would no longer exist. At one point he says there are two gates that people pass through Matthew The other is broad and easy, and therefore commonly taken.

The wrong path does not lead to torture. So too Jesus says the future kingdom is like a fisherman who hauls in a large net Matthew After sorting through the fish, he keeps the good ones and throws the others out. They just die. Or the kingdom is like a person who gathers up the plants that have grown in his field Matthew He keeps the good grain, but tosses the weeds into a fiery furnace. They are consumed by fire and then are no more. Still other passages may seem to suggest that Jesus believe in hell.

Most notably Jesus speaks of all nations coming for the last judgment Matthew Some are said to be sheep, and the others goats. The good sheep are those who have helped those in need — the hungry, the sick, the poor, the foreigner. So the punishment is annihilation. Because the fire never goes out. The flames, not the torments, go on forever. Because it will never end. Bush and Bill Clinton, proclaimed that he no longer believed in everlasting separation from God. The genocide in Rwanda, he said, had left him unable to fathom that all those innocent, murdered non-Christians would burn.

Pearson was roundly denounced and shunned, as thoroughly excommunicated as any Protestant can be. I admire the Universalists, but only to a point. I still worry more about the hell within than the one that might, or might not, offer me a place to stay later on. However grotesque, the child-detainment centers at the U.

Karma within the confines of a life span sounds great but looks false: so often, the wicked seem to be doing just fine. For all the barbarism of Hell as it is traditionally taught—its ludicrous time frame, its unfair and somewhat bigoted admissions policy—at least some of the right people turn up in it. What recourse is there, real or just hoped for, without it? But satisfaction arrives slowly, if at all. The bad guys are back onstage, back at their desks, back on the beat. Those movements sometimes seem to clash, in spirit, with another growing concern: prison abolitionism, which might be thought of as a kind of secular universalism.

Those of us who believe in an objective morality but wince at the idea of damnation should probably take a harder look at imprisonment, especially life sentences and sequestrations suffered by people like William Blake. Could we imagine a new justice, characterized more by mercy than by the threat of the pit? To redirect our creativity and train it toward Heaven—and, by extension, our notions of the good life on Earth—would require a kind of revolution in our thinking. Perhaps the sublime is so far beyond our comprehension as to leave us inarticulate, incapable of rendering its details.

It might be time to heed the prophet Isaiah and set the captives free. Hell is so much easier to picture. The recent U. This is, of course, a disaster. But, here, as almost nowhere else in the visible world, the lines of cause and effect, neglect and decay, sin and punishment, are plain. You sow the coal and reap the whirlwind. Heat the air, and let the icebergs roll on righteously, like a mighty stream.

First comes the flood, then comes the fire. It matters, very much, what you do. By Adam Gopnik.