For 14 years, I’ve been seeking to understand what the Bible says about hell, the Jewish background, and the church’s understanding. Here are the results.
You may be surprised how few references there are. The main word (Gehenna) occurs just 12 times. Another word (hadēs) describes the dead, and some versions have mistranslated this word as hell (e.g. Matthew 16:21 ESV; Revelation 1:18 KJV). And there’s a mythical synonym once (tartaroō in 2 Peter 2:4).
All the references to Gehenna are from Jesus, with one from his brother (James 3:6). What Jesus said is therefore the definitive teaching on hell.
Here are the passages where Jesus mentioned the word:
- Matthew 5:22, 29-30: Better to lose part of your body than have your body thrown into Gehenna.
- Matthew 10:28 || Luke 12:5: Fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.
- Matthew 18:9 || Mark 9:43-48: Better to lose a body part than have your body thrown into Gehenna.
- Matthew 23:15, 33: Children of Gehenna mislead God’s people, and can’t expect to escape.
Just four passages. How did it come to be such a big topic?
The Catholic view of hell
Those of us who’ve grown up in the Western Church (including the Reformed tradition and Evangelicalism today) inherited our view of hell from Roman Catholicism. In the Middle Ages, hell received a much more prominent place than you would expect. The church’s message was primarily about guilt, with the church claiming the power to justify people (through confession, penance, absolution, and the Mass).
Since Christ gave Peter “the keys to the kingdom,” the church claimed to determine people’s eternal destinies. You’ve probably heard the stories of Peter sitting at heaven’s gate deciding who goes in and who goes to hell.
Fear of hell, combined with a message of guilt, proved to be great tools for controlling the masses. The doctrine of purgatory allowed for some to pay for their sins after death, or a relative could pay the church to have them released from torment.
Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) was the official Catholic view of hell — a fiery place where the souls of the wicked suffer conscious torment unceasingly.
There are several inconsistencies between this view and what Jesus taught.
Gehenna was a real place
Did you know that Gehenna was the name of a place just south of the temple mount in Jerusalem? In Hebrew, it was Ge Hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom (since Hinnom and his sons originally owned the valley).
Gehenna was a dump where rubbish was burnt. It also had a very dark history including burning children in sacrifice, and burning the bodies of Jewish people after invasion. That’s why this valley became a symbol of judgment and destruction.
But it’s a real place, and normally our translations would bring the name across into English. Bethel can be translated “house of God” but we retain the name instead of translating it. Golgotha means “place of the skull” but we retain the proper name. To be consistent, Gehenna should also be retained in our translations because it’s a place name. We would have a much better chance of understanding what Jesus was saying if we knew what he was referring to. The picture above is of Gehenna.
Bodies were burned in Gehenna
The Catholic view (ECT) is that souls suffer in hell forever, assuming souls are immortal. But the notion of “immortal souls” comes from the Greek world. It was not part of the Jewish world of Jesus.
That’s why Jesus talks about bodies being thrown into Gehenna to be burnt. He says you’d be better to lose one part of your body (an eye or a hand or a foot) than to end up having your whole body burnt in Gehenna.
Just as some places have horrific associations for us, Gehenna was a place of horror. It was a place where people had burnt their own children as sacrifices. It was where the bodies of countless soldiers and civilians had been burnt when Babylon invaded. People remembered Gehenna as “the Valley of Slaughter” (Jeremiah 7:32; 19:6), a place of judgement and death.
If we take Jesus seriously when he spoke of bodies being burned in Gehenna, ECT makes no sense. Unlike the imaginary eternal souls of Greek thought, bodies do not burn forever. Jesus can speak of how the fires never seem to go out at the dump because more rubbish is always being added. But Jesus never intended us to imagine God miraculously sustaining each individual body so it kept burning without being consumed like some kind of burning bush. The Catholic view does not follow from what Jesus taught.
The wicked will be destroyed
Beyond the few passages that speak of bodies being burned in Gehenna, many other passages warn that the wicked will be destroyed. God is performing a global restoration, and ultimately every knee will bow and every tongue confess God’s anointed as our leader (Christ as Lord). But that does not mean every individual will be raised to life in his eternal reign. Those who cannot be renewed are lost forever.
It’s not universalism, as if everybody makes it in the end. The warnings Jesus gave are real. The wicked are destroyed.
A growing number of Bible scholars (especially since John Stott) view hell as annihilation. By speaking of bodies being thrown into Gehenna, Jesus meant some suffered destruction, ceased to exist.
Why does it matter?
Given how minor a theme hell is in the Bible, you may wonder why it matters. At stake is the way we represent God.
We drive people away from faith when we misrepresent God as an unrelentingly vengeful tyrant who expects us to forgive our enemies but tortures his forever. This is not the God revealed in Scripture and in the person of Christ.
We need to repent of manipulating people with guilt and fear, with ECT as Exhibit A. We have no place wielding such weapons in our presentation of the gospel. Paul never even mentioned Gehenna in any of his letters. Not a single gospel preacher in Acts threatens, “and you’ll go to hell if you don’t.” That is not the good news.
Universalism presents a weak view of God, a kind of Santa Claus who threatens to investigate if you’ve been naughty or nice but doesn’t take evil or justice seriously, so everyone gets the presents in the end.
Annihilationism presents a God who faithfully persists in his global restoration project, without forcing people to be renewed. Those who cannot be renewed are not forced to be part of the new creation. He gives them what they want — no place in his eternal reign.
I urge you to investigate what Jesus said about hell, in the context of his revelation of the Father. The danger of losing everything is real. At the same time, “your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish (Matthew 18:9, 14).
What others are saying
Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (London: SPCK, 2007), 188:
The most common New Testament word sometimes translated as ‘hell’ is Gehenna. Gehenna was a place, not just an idea: it was the rubbish heap outside the south-west corner of the old city of Jerusalem. There is to this day a valley at that point which bears the name Ge Hinnom. When I was in Jerusalem a few years ago, I was taken to a classy restaurant on the western slope of this famous valley, and we witnessed a spectacular firework display, organized no doubt without deliberate irony, on the site to which Jesus was referring when he spoke about the smouldering fires of Gehenna. But, as with his language about ‘heaven’, so with his talk of Gehenna: once Christian readers had been sufficiently distanced from the original meaning of the words, alternative images would come to mind, generated not by Jesus or the New Testament, but by the stock of images, some of them extremely lurid, supplied by ancient and medieval folklore and imagination.
The point is that when Jesus was warning his hearers about Gehenna he was not, as a general rule, telling them that unless they repented in this life they would burn in the next one.
Related posts (where Jesus spoke of Gehenna)
- Are we worse off if we live unselfishly? (Mt 18:7-10)
- Where’s God’s justice in an unjust world? (Mt 10:26-31)
- Ripping out an eye? (Mt 5:29-30)
- If you’re angry, are you a killer? (Mt 5:21-22)
Photo: Gehenna today (Allen Browne, 2014-05-19)
Seeking the kingdom 
Very interesting, this is the first time i’ve heard that Hades does not mean Hell, & that Gehenna was a physical place.
It’s popular culture for pastors to say ‘The gates of hell will not prevail.’ How did the mistranslation come about?
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Hi Francis. Great question.
The standard Greek lexicon (BDAG) defines Hades as “the nether world, Hades as place of the dead.”
In Matthew 16:18, Jesus promised that the gates of Hades would not prevail against his kingship. Why was that a threat?
Once Jesus is declared to be God’s anointed leader (16:16), his life is in danger from those who claim to be the leaders of God’s people (16:21). But Death will not overpower Jesus. If Hades is the fortress where the dead are locked away, Jesus has the keys.
Not only will he be freed, but he gives the keys to his followers. The resurrected and ascended king frees Death’s captives to be God’s kingdom.
So, this is Jesus announcing the gospel:
“I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades [the place of the dead].” Revelation 1:17-18.
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Hi Allen,
There is much to consider in this.
The traditional evangelical understanding, that usually follows a literal scriptural interpretation, has effectively missed the literalness regarding Hell. Irony?
Church history, and the present, also scream loudly regarding the fear/control narrative that is the natural conclusion of this interpretation.
And annihilation does wrap it up neatly, (minus the bow for the wicked).
Unfortunately I’m not able to wrap up my thoughts fully on my phone…
I will say that this God who without coercion gave his own life for the world, is not so much father Christmas, as simply our Father.
Whatever is actually in store for all mankind, I trust his Father Heart; firstly as his child, and then mankind as his children.
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Hi Andrew.
Irony indeed.
I certainly understand that it takes time to process this. It’s taken me since 2006, because I wanted to be certain I was doing justice to all that Scripture said.
Agreed: God’s heart is the heart of the matter.
Update 2020-09-03: Added the Tom Wright quote, in response to your question on FB.
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Thank you Allen. Very interesting and a good read. God gives us a choice. Life or death. To me it’s not rocket science. Choose life and worship the Father.
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Hi Allen. Very interesting dissertation . Paul lists the wicked who will not inherit the kingdom of God, also mentioned are those who perish. Where do these spend eternity?
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Hi Kerry. Good to hear from you.
Agreed that not everyone is given eternal life. Eternal life is not innate to us (the Greek idea of immortal souls). God is eternal, but we are mortal. The Bible consistently speaks of the wicked being destroyed. The language of perishing or being destroyed means exactly what it says: no place in God’s eternal reign.
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Hi Kerry. The word for perish in the NT is ἀπόλλυμι apollymi. (See particularly 1 Cor. 15) This means to be destroyed or to cease to exist, hence the word annihilation. There are many ideas that crept into Christian theology from the Greek philosophers, one of which is the idea that all humans had an immortal ‘soul’. This idea fed into to many things including the development of punishment of the body for sin, the ETC Allen speaks of, and a subtle disdain for the created world which still exhibits itself in the idea of the total destruction of the creation. The wicked don’t spend eternity anywhere, they ‘perish’, they cease to exist.
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Graham
ifthe wicked cease to exist. How exactly does that work? Do they die and thats it? Do they die and then are raised to be judges and die again? How do explain 1 Peter 3?
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Love the questions, Dave. Best way to think though how this works in practice might be to read Tom Wright, “Surprised by Hope” (SPCK, 2007).
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Think.. Jesus performed many miracles yet I would bet that few remembered what he did for them over the years. Jesus told people who he really was. Yet Ho Hum how many kept that faith. Even the people around lazarus didn’t believe jesus could bring him back from the dead. yet they thought that if Jesus was their at his death he would have save Lazerus. I believe that Jesus knew the fickleness of those around him and those he had cured and had to show them that he truly was the sin if God. In this we was deliberate in delaying his arrival to the mourners. He needed to show them that he was who he said he was not just a passing minstrel who could produce some magical acts. With Lazarus dead for a couple of days they said Lord he has been dead for a while and now stinketh you should have come sooner. To let these people know that he truly was the son of God he he waited deliberately to prove who he really was he then raised the long dead Lazarus > To the doubters ………Oh ye of little faith. Finally he showed himself to the disciples he had chosen and did so on ,any occasions cementing their belief. To the fact where they were willing to die for him in later life. This what we must be prepared to do in the face of many naysayers. Look at the stars Jesus said in my fathers house there are many mansions and there is a place for believers. Can we also be prepared to suffer for our King??
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Thanks for your comment, Dennis.
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Alan,
Very selective use of scripture. That is how heretical thinking is justified.
Just wondering how you can suffer eternally if you cease to exist.
Also interesting how this seems to be a copy and paste from ideas presented by a “Christian” theologian who is now an atheist
Alan Read and pray/ meditate on these versus
1. “but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”
Matthew 18:6 ESV
https://bible.com/bible/59/mat.18.6.ESV
2. “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.”
James 3:1 ESV
https://bible.com/bible/59/jas.3.1.ESV
ETERNAL SUFFERING
“But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!”
Luke 12:5 ESV
https://bible.com/bible/59/luk.12.5.ESV
“You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?”
Matthew 23:33 ESV
https://bible.com/bible/59/mat.23.33.ESV
“They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,”
2 Thessalonians 1:9 ESV
https://bible.com/bible/59/2th.1.9.ESV
“Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day— just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.”
Jude 1:5-7 ESV
https://bible.com/bible/59/jud.1.5-7.ESV
“and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,”
2 Thessalonians 1:7-9 ESV
https://bible.com/bible/59/2th.1.7-9.ESV
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Thanks for your comments, Jim.
I do understand it’s hard to read Scripture differently if you start with the assumption that God wants his enemies to suffer eternally. I can assure you that neither I nor John Stott nor others who hold this view are atheists: we’re very much in favour of trusting the God revealed in Christ.
Regarding the specific Scriptures you referenced, if you check the Scripture Index you’ll find that I have already posted on many of them (especially the ones from Matthew).
If you do wish to pursue this topic in more detail, let me recommend:
Kim Papaioannou, The Geography of Hell in the Teaching of Jesus: Gehenna, Hades, the Abyss, the Outer Darkness Where There Is Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013).
God bless and keep you. Allen.
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