Hell: A Shared Construction Project [8]

Accounts of the afterlife date back approximately four thousand years to a collection of clay tablets found in the Mesopotamian Valley [8]. In other words, humans have been hypothesizing about life after death at least since the beginning of documented civilization. Theories about the afterlife are various and far ranging, but most hold a few things in common. Here, I want to look at those theories that have helped to shape modern and contemporary concepts of the Christian afterlife, particularly of Hell, in American Evangelicalism. Two schools of thought that influenced early Christianity were Greek mythology and Judaism.

The Greeks

While many images and symbols seem to carry over into Christianity from the Greek afterlife – geographical locations in the sky and underground, rivers at the gate – it is functionally different. In Greek mythology, the Underworld served as a home to all souls of the dead (there was no division between good and bad souls), and punishment and reward did not yet belong strictly to the afterlife (gods and goddesses frequently punished living mortals as well) [8]. Punishments in Greek mythology, while frequently specific (e.g. Sisyphus eternally rolling a stone up a hill for trying to escape from the Underworld, Ixion bound to a fiery wheel for trying to rape Hera [8]), do not always seem to reflect the wrongdoings of the punished, the way we will see in later texts like Dante’s Inferno. Greeks did not begin to adopt ideas (from Persia and Egypt) that punishment belonged to the afterlife until around the 5th Century B.C., which would carry over into the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell.

Plato provides an alternative theory of the afterlife that would also be (perhaps more) important for early Christians. Plato gives a detailed account of the afterlife in the myth of Er in chapter 10 of The Republic, which involves a brief punishment of bad souls and then reincarnation of all souls after they drink from the River of Forgetfulness [8]. He gives a slightly different account in the Phaedo, where Socrates tells his friends that good souls may pass to the world beyond, while others are forced into the corporeal punishment of reincarnation [8]. Plato believed that the soul was the purest part of living things, held back by the impure materials of the flesh. Christians would later interpret this to mean that when placed in our bodies, we are cursed with Original Sin, and only freed of it through salvation by Christ. Many early Christians who were well read in Plato’s theory of the Forms would also apply this theory to Jesus Christ and God’s Kingdom on Earth [8].

The Jews

Unlike the Greeks and many of their neighbors, the Jews weren’t much concerned with the afterlife [8]. However, those hints of the afterlife we do find in Jewish texts hint at what’s to come. Hell is frequently compared to Sheol, which, while sometimes metaphorically likened to a prison or a state of despair, refers literally only to the body’s final resting place [8]. Sheol is mentioned frequently in the Old Testament, translated into English usually as “Hell”, “grave”, or “the pit” [8]. While “Hell” is probably more functional for Christian interpretations, “grave” is probably the most accurate.

Another Jewish concept that seems to me more comparable to the Christian Hell is Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom, a valley outside of Jerusalem that once served as a place of sacrifice for worshippers of Moloch, but later became a sort of town dump [8]. The dump was also used to dispose of the bodies of criminals, earning its reputation as the final destination for sinners, and, for sanitation purposes, burned perpetually [8]. Thus, the word Gehenna was also used as a metaphor for an unpleasant place or curse [8].

Before moving on to the early days of Christianity, there are a couple of interesting references to the afterlife in Jewish texts that I want to address. First, in the Book of Daniel (12: 2-3), the dead, at the time of the apocalypse, will rise, “some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt,” [8]. Here we see, not the afterlife, per se, but a form of eventual punishment at the end of time for the sins committed during the previous life. Second, in the Books of Enoch, which are not considered cannon, but have nonetheless been influential, God reveals the secrets of the world to Enoch, including ten heavens, the third of which contains both paradise and Hell [8]. This Hell is both icy and fiery, and contains the signature river that shows up in many versions of the world beyond and varieties of Hellish tortures [8]. Those who go to such a Hell will be those who break the Ten Commandments and those who are guilty of greed, lack of charity, child abuse, witchcraft, and magic. While we don’t see much focus of the specific sin of child abuse in Christianity, the others will most certainly play a part in deciding who goes to Hell.