Where Hell Came From

I have to say may, because it depends which Bible is in your hand, and I would rather you knew the difference than assumed you already had it.

Take Sheol first. Everybody goes there, the good man and the bad man, the king and the beggar; it is where your own Psalms say the wicked go down. It is not a punishment. It is simply being dead.

And notice what Tartarus actually is doing in your Bible: it shows up once, in a letter carrying Peter's name, in a passage about angels who sinned, borrowed whole from a mythology that was never Jewish at all.

I also want you to know that the newer translations have mostly fixed this, because I am not going to send you into an argument holding a complaint that is already out of date.

The translation was not done by outsiders. Jews made it for the enormous number of their own people who by then spoke Greek and no Hebrew, and it became the ordinary Bible of the Greek-speaking Jew, then of the first Christians; when your New Testament quotes the Old, it is usually quoting this.

There was no good Greek word for Sheol, so the translators reached for the nearest thing their readers would understand.

See what that choice did. Hades was not a neutral word. It was the name of a god and of his kingdom, and it came with furniture beyond the pit: a gate, drifting shades, judges of the dead. A Greek-speaking reader could not meet that word with a blank mind, any more than you can.

Nobody was lying. A translator has to choose something. But a Hebrew word meaning the grave was handed a Greek word meaning the underworld, and the freight came across on the same cart. Two thousand years later, it is still on it.

Job asks where the dead go and gets no comfortable answer. Ecclesiastes says flatly that the dead know nothing. And the reward promised for a good life, in that older material, is a long life, children, and land of your own, nothing more.

Here are the actual dates. In 587 BC Jerusalem was destroyed and its leading families deported to Babylon. In 539 BC the Persian empire took Babylon, and for the next two hundred years my people lived under Persian rule, taxed by Persian officials, permitted by a Persian king to rebuild the temple.

The religion of that empire, the religion of Zoroaster, already had what Jewish writing did not: a sharp war between light and darkness, a named adversary, a judgment of each person after death, and a resurrection at the end of the world.

The clearest statement of resurrection to judgment in your whole Old Testament is in Daniel, your latest book: many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to everlasting shame (Daniel 12:2).

You could walk to it. The name itself comes from Ge-Hinnom, the valley of Hinnom.

Ahaz, who reigned in Jerusalem in the seven hundreds BC, was the first of the two kings to do it, and the fire in that valley carried a name that is written right in the very verse everyone quotes about the place: Molech.

He did not do it because he was a monster in a story. He did it to buy something, paying with the most valuable thing he owned.

The enemy was already at his wall when that king of Moab took his eldest son, his heir, up onto it.

That is a man spending the most precious thing in the world to buy a god's help in a fight he was already losing. Hold on to that picture, because it comes back at the very end of this lesson.

Jeremiah did not just rename the valley. He insisted God had made no such request, not ever, and that the very thought had never entered God’s mind.

Then Josiah acted, and it was part of a great reform, not an isolated gesture: around 622 BC he went down into that valley and deliberately made Topheth unclean, unusable, religiously disgusting, so it could never be used that way again.

It was the clean-up, not the burning, that left the ground cursed. A king ruined a holy site on purpose, and what he left behind was a valley outside the city that every person in Jerusalem knew as the place where the worst thing had been done, and then buried.

You may have heard it was burning day and night, and that this alone is what I meant. Do not use that story. That story traces back only to a Jewish commentator writing in the twelve hundreds, with nothing from my own century to support it. It is a tidy story, and I would rather you had the real one, even though it is worse.

In 1 Enoch alone, written in pieces from roughly the third to the first century BC and hugely popular in its day, there is an accursed valley beside Jerusalem where the wicked are gathered at the end (1 Enoch 27), and a burning abyss the guilty are thrown into (1 Enoch 90).

Books written nearer my own lifetime, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, carry the same picture forward: a furnace, a pit, a fire prepared for the wicked.

I was not coining a word that day, and I was not merely gesturing at a hillside. I was using a word my hearers already had, one carrying a real valley and a real atrocity underneath it, with three centuries of judgment imagery layered on top.

Notice the audience too: this was said mostly in the long sermon on a hillside, to farmers and fishermen in Galilee, not to a crowd in Jerusalem.

The line about the eye and the hand is exaggeration of the kind I used all day long.

The line about destroying soul and body opens with a companion clause your Bible keeps too: do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. That word destroy means a thing coming to an end, not kept alive in pain forever.

And look at who I was speaking to in the last of these. Not to sinners, not to prostitutes, not to tax collectors, and not to the poor. It was aimed at the religious authorities, in the temple, in public, in the middle of a speech about men who load burdens onto other people and carry none themselves. Every one of those four sayings was aimed at the respectable, at the men standing at the front of the room.

The saying opens with a companion line too: if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is the fiercest thing I ever said, and I will not pretend it is gentler than it sounds.

In Isaiah's own scene, people come out of the city and look at the dead bodies of those who rebelled, and it is on those corpses, in that valley outside Jerusalem, that the fire never stops and the worm never dies.

Here is the story in full. A rich man dressed in purple ate well every day, and a beggar covered in sores lay at his gate, with only the dogs to lick his wounds and no one to bring him anything. Both men died. The beggar was carried to comfort. The rich man, in torment and in flame, begged for a single drop of water, and was told a great chasm stood fixed between them that nobody could cross.

Let me correct a sentence I have let stand too loosely: this is the one picture I ever gave of the world after death, and that is all it is. Anybody who tells you otherwise has not read the sixteenth chapter of Luke.

The chasm, the flame, the conversation shouted across the gap: I borrowed that scenery, the way you would borrow a street everybody already knows to tell a joke. I did not invent it.

The rich man is never said to have struck Lazarus, cheated him, or driven him away.

And the story's last line tells you its real purpose. The rich man asks for a warning to be sent to his brothers, and the answer is that they already have Moses and the prophets. The instruction was already in their scriptures. It always said to feed him.

So yes, I painted a fire, and I painted it as the last and most frightening illustration of the argument from the lesson before this one.

That great judgment scene with the six items does not end at the sixth item; this line is how it ends.

Aionios carries both senses of its root at once, belonging to the age to come and lasting without end, so a man who tells you it plainly means endless clock-time in the punishment half of that verse and something looser in the life half is arguing badly. So is a man who does it the other way round.

The reading that everybody is finally brought home was Origen's, taught in Egypt in the two hundreds and carried on by others after him, until a council condemned it in 553. It took the church five hundred years to rule that one out, which tells you how far from fringe it once was.

Now look hard at what the verse does not say. It does not say unending conscious torture. It does not say demons, or instruments, or levels, or circles, or a fire that keeps a body alive just to feel it. And it does not say what qualifies you to avoid it, because the passage already answered that, in the six items about feeding, clothing, and visiting.

So if you want to use this verse against me, bring the rest of the scene with it (Matthew 25:31–45).

The first text on that list stands behind all the others; it started the whole genre. It is the Apocalypse of Peter, written under Peter's name around the middle of the second century, the first Christian text to walk you through hell room by room. Blasphemers were hung up by the tongue, and murderers were thrown into a pit of vermin, watched by the people they had killed.

Why was it written, for Christians who were being killed? It is a consolation book: its comfort is that the people doing this to you now will be on the receiving end of it later, and the righteous will be allowed to watch. That is a very human thing to write while your neighbors are being fed to animals, and it is also the moment the appetite for revenge got welded onto the architecture of the next world.

It is not in your Bible, and that is not the interesting fact. The interesting fact is how it got into your church anyway. It was never a hidden manuscript. It was read as scripture in some churches, a teacher in Alexandria treated it as such, and it is listed in the Muratorian fragment, one of the earliest surviving lists of accepted books, with a note that some people would not have it read aloud.

The book that followed it, known in Latin as the Visio Pauli, was translated, abridged, and copied for a thousand years, mined for sermons the whole time. Its furniture came in through the side door: through a sequel, and then through the sermon, which was the only door most people ever used.

Dante Alighieri was a Florentine, thrown out of his own city by his political enemies, and he wrote the Inferno between about 1308 and 1320. Nearly everything ordinary people now picture, the numbered circles, a specific sin matched to a specific torment, named individuals standing in their own punishments, is his invention, not scripture's.

He wrote it in Italian rather than Latin, on purpose, so that ordinary people could hear it, follow it, and remember it, since serious books were written in Latin, for clergy only. It worked. By 1373 the city of Florence was paying the poet Boccaccio to lecture on it in public, and it was illustrated over and over for six centuries, until one exiled poet's invented geography was simply what hell looked like.

But most people could not read Dante either, or anything else. So look at where they actually sat. In parish churches across medieval Europe, painted on the wall above the arch at the front, the one every person faced for the whole service, every week, for a lifetime, was a Last Judgment, called a doom in England. Christ sat enthroned in the middle, the saved rose on one side, and on the other, in detail and with obvious relish, came the mouth of hell, the devils, the cauldrons, the hooks, and ordinary recognizable people, a king, a bishop, a miller, a well-dressed woman, being dragged into it.

They carved the same scene over doorways too, so you walked in underneath one. At Autun, in France, from about 1130, souls are weighed in a stone scale, and a pair of carved hands reaches out to seize a screaming man by the head.

That is where your hell comes from: not from me, and not really from a book, but from a painted wall facing a congregation that could not read, for thirty generations. Many of those walls were whitewashed over at the Reformation, though some have been uncovered again in the last century, and you can go stand in front of one.

He is Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, the most influential Christian writer between Paul and Luther. He makes this argument at length in the twenty-first book of The City of God, written around 426.

He is not arguing against unbelievers. He is arguing against other Christians: against the followers of Origen, who taught that everybody would eventually be restored, and against a group he calls the misericordes, the merciful ones, Christians who held that no baptized person would finally be lost, or that the fire would purify rather than destroy. There were enough of them that he spends chapter after chapter answering them.

Picture the mechanism itself: it is the same wergild table from Lesson 19, the one that sets a price by rank, only extended upward until it reaches God, and Augustine is running it six hundred years earlier, about the fire rather than about the price.

Augustine won not by a vote but by becoming the authority of the Latin West. For the next thousand years, when a European churchman wanted to know what Christianity taught, he read Augustine, and if he disagreed with Augustine he had to explain himself first. Owning the one authority everybody reads is a more complete victory than winning any council.

Follow the logic one step further than the settlement itself: if it has to come from something infinite, that means from God, which means a God who is also a man, which means the death.

Augustine's fire is exactly the premise Anselm's arithmetic needed, and that is no coincidence. The infinity argument was already sitting there in The City of God, applied to the punishment; Anselm simply applied the same argument to the payment.

And none of this is speculation, because the paperwork survives. A papal document of 1343 declared that the church held a treasury of surplus merit it could distribute. Another, in 1476, extended those grants to souls already in purgatory, so you could pay on behalf of your own dead mother. By 1517 the grants were printed slips with prices on them, sold across Germany by a friar working to a quota, the proceeds split between a building project in Rome and a young bishop's debt to a bank.

So the real sequence runs: the fire, then the price, then the counter, six hundred years and then another four hundred.

I also told them to sit down with the wrong people, because the kingdom I said was already arriving does not wait for good behavior.

Once that turned into a message about your destination after death rather than how you live now, it could be withheld as well as sold, and both of those, as the documents just described, turned out to be very good businesses.