Did Jesus Go to Hell?

“Today you will be with me in paradise.” Luke 23:43 . He did not say, “I will see you in hell.” Yeah, that would be a weird thing for Jesus to—

That would be so much better, though, if Jesus turns to the guy on the other cross and goes, “I’ll see you in hell.”

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are great. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. That it is. We get to learn some interesting stuff. So I’m kind of excited to talk about it.

Oh, I just thought of this. Sorry to interrupt, but I thought it would be fun to bring up here. I have received two very cool pieces of news over the last two days. The first one was the other day; the Society of Biblical Literature sent out its annual society report, right? And there was an article that was a spotlight on my work. And the article title was “Stitch Incoming.” And I remember doing this interview a few weeks ago. It was a fun interview. I really thought that article was fun. But then this morning, I got an email from somebody whose name I didn’t recognize, but he’s like, “Hey, I’m the editor of Biblical Theology Bulletin.” And I was like, “Oh, I recognize that journal.” And he’s like, “Just wanted to let you know we’re about to release this new issue. I attached a PDF of it for you.” But the essay that he has introducing the issue, all about public scholarship, uses you as the model for what public biblical scholarship could look like.

And I was like, “What?” So I thought that was really cool. So I’m not trying to toot my own horn or anything, but—

Oh, no, toot away, toot away.

But I got some pretty cool pieces of news, so I was really excited about both those things.

I think that’s really cool. I love it. I love it.

Yeah, I’ve managed to deceive everyone into thinking I’m an actual scholar, but I cannot deceive a handful of dudes on social media. Yeah, yeah, some of them have me pegged. I’m a fake scholar from head to toe.

But I mean, we don’t even know if those diplomas that you’ve shown everybody are even real. I could print up a diploma.

You can evidently just pay somebody to send you a fake one.

According to some guy on Instagram who has a pseudonym and, you know, has a picture of an eagle and an American flag or something in their profile photo.

In their profile photo.

Well, listen, I can just Photoshop a thing that says that I’ve got a degree from Oxford. That’s not hard.

But it’s embossed. It’s got gold.

Well, then there’s no way I can do it now. I know I’m out of luck. Getting myself onto their website would be a harder thing to do. I will say that. All right, let’s dive in here. We got two interesting topics that are kind of related to each

other, that we’re gonna go a little interrelated.

Yes. In the first one, we’re going to be talking about Jesus and a trip he may or may not have made right after he died. So we’re gonna see if Jesus actually descended into hell or Pismo Beach or—yeah, any place. We’ll see where he went. Probably Santorini, I’m gonna guess. It seems like a nice place. And then in the second half of the show, we are going to talk about hell in a different way. We’re gonna talk about Revelation and the hell that it describes, so we’re gonna have a lot of fun with this one. We didn’t stop to think about what we would name either of these segments. So that’s fine. We’re just gonna go with, “Here we go.” So here we go. Here’s the first segment.

All right, so this started because I was looking for interesting topics for us to talk about, and I stumbled on an article on a website called GotQuestions.org: “Bible Questions Answered.” Yes, they do have that tagline. And I was sort of mystified by the question that is the question from GotQuestions, because it was something I had never heard of before, but I think a lot of people have. I was just—I was not raised with this tradition. And the question is, did Jesus go to hell between his death and resurrection?

Well, I, every time I hear it, I think this is some role playing video game.

Yes, exactly. It’s neither of those things. It’s neither a boxer nor a role playing video game. It is a fifth century. Is that what we decided? It’s. It’s a Roman declaration, or rather it’s a. It’s a Latin declaration of, of a creed, which is just sort of an I believe statement. Right?

Yeah, yeah. So this is in order to demonstrate your fidelity to the, the faith, this particular group, you had to be willing to declare this creed. And then also it was something that would be repeated quite regularly.

And yeah, I, I found versions or I found the Apostles Creed listed on websites for both the Church of England and I think the Catholic Church. So it’s not, it’s still very much in circulation as, as a sort of an article of faith. And one of the lines in it says, you know, it says, it starts. It starts with the standard sort of, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Then it goes to I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, dot, dot, dot, blah, blah, blah. And then it gets to was crucified, died and was buried. He descended to the dead. Oh, no. Oh, I’m on the Church of England one. And it doesn’t say he descended to hell. The other one got a different one. Oh, come on. I’m on the wrong one. Many of them say he descended into hell.

Yes. And then rose again from the dead on the third day.

Rose again from the dead on the third day. And, and that Latin is descendit ad inferos, which. I don’t know, I got no Latin,

so I assume the inferos. Yeah. So, yeah. Which is prototypically associated quite directly with hell.

Right.

And it looks like this is a variation on something called the old Roman symbol or the old Roman Creed, which was an earlier and shorter version that might go back to the second century.

And that, that version says who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried on the third day, rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father and thus. And so. So that the, the descended into hell may have been inserted into this creed at some point between the second and fourth or fifth century.

Okay, so. Okay, so that’s a. What a fascinating thing to just shove in there in the middle. Do we have a sense of where that came from? Why that cropped up like, is it biblical? Does it come from the book itself?

Well, I think the, the clearest reference to this and, and this is something where we see this interpretation quite early. It comes from 1 Peter 3:18 . Now 1 Peter is probably early second century CE, maybe first quarter, maybe second quarter. So 2 Peter is probably somewhere between 120 to 150 CE. 1 Peter, it might be a little earlier than that. But in 1 Peter 3:18 we have this statement. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous, for the unrighteous. In order to bring you to God, he was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit. And then verse 19, in which also so in the spirit he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is eight lives were saved through water. And so we got a pretty peculiar little reference to Jesus in the spirit proclaiming something.

Yeah, to some spirits that are in prison. And there are a few different interpretations of this, but the, the GotQuestions article that you have goes through and, and makes a pretty interesting little play at trying to renegotiate what’s going on here and concludes, did Jesus go to hell? No, he went to Sheol slash Hades. Okay, which, which we might, we might be like. That sounds like a distinction without a difference. gotquestions.org what’s going on here. But what.

Yeah, we’ve. So we did a, a whole show about hell and Sheol and Hades. But give us a little refresher, just a quick refresher on what we’re talking about when we say those words.

So in the Hebrew Bible, you have no concept of hell as, as we understand it, you have Sheol, and in the King James Version, that is translated as hell every single time. But Sheol is a reference to the grave and the abode of all the dead. Because in prior to basically Greco-Roman period Judaism, good, bad, indifferent, somewhere in between, everybody went to the same place after you died. It was this murky existence in, in the underworld that was inhabited by questionable creatures. And your relationship with the living was unclear, but, you know, in the way they buried people seemed to suggest they thought their existence continued on in some sense and that there was even communion and communication that was possible back and forth across that divide. But Sheol is just the abode of all the dead that was located in the underworld. And then with the, the Enochic literature, First Enoch, Jubilees, other related traditions that are part of these texts that were written in Greco-Roman period Judaism.

You have this development of different places where people went after death based on their behavior in life. And, and this primarily arises in the Persian and Greco-Roman periods as Jewish thinkers are kind of contemplating the problem of evil and going, hey, a lot of good people are suffering our people persecution, oppression, and they are dying. And we’re not seeing them receive any kind of justice from God. Where is God’s justice for the righteous? And then they’re also seeing phenomenally wicked people, the people responsible for the oppression and the persecution and things like that. And they’re saying, hey, they’re not getting their just deserts either. What’s going on here? Well, maybe it’s in the afterlife that folks are getting their recompense, whether for good or for bad. And so in the Enochic literature, you have ideas particularly of the disobedient angels. First Enoch is in some sense kind of fan fiction for Genesis 6 .

And it’s extrapolating from that, this idea that these angels who descended and, and had offspring with human women and introduced the evils of warfare and makeup and everything like that. They, for, for their role in evils

of warfare and makeup.

The, the list is: warfare, makeup and, and you know, they’re imprisoned in a part of this kind of eschatological landscape. And then you also have these smooth places where, you know, the righteous people are waiting. And then you’ve got the unrighteous people who did not receive any judgment in life. And then you’ve got another smooth place where the unrighteous people who did get judged during life, they go to await their judgment or their allocation to some kind of final place where they’re going to be either destroyed or punished or whatever. And so you have ideas about different levels of the afterlife in the Enochic literature. And then we get into the New Testament and we’ve got three Greek words that are used to refer to some kind of place of postmortem divine punishment. You’ve got Haides or Hades, which is clearly borrowed from Greek, which is kind of is very similar to Sheol. It’s the abode of all the dead. But then you have, you know, Hades is subletted.

You’ve got Tartarus is the place where the bad people go to get punished. And you know, that’s where you don’t want to end up. And Tartarus occurs once in the New Testament in the book of one of the two letters of Peter. And then the other word is Geenna or Gehenna, which is a Greek transliteration of the Valley of Hinnom, which is. Became symbolically associated with evil and became this eschatological place where the, the bodies of the, the wicked are going to be stacked. And, and that’s where we get this idea that there’s this fire that never dies and, or the, the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies. And originally the idea was there are always new bodies being heaped into the pile so that the fire never runs out of fuel and the worms never run out of food. But then later that gets reinterpreted to mean if you go there, the fire will burn you and will never go away and the worms will eat at you and they will never go away. And so. Right. So these things are all changing.

The concept of the afterlife and punishment in the afterlife is constantly changing. And so what this article is trying to do is trying to weave it all together into this rich tapestry of something that we can just pretend has a plausible case for being consistent. And, and, and that’s where we’re going to get through this. No, no, he didn’t go to hell argument because they want to suggest that Hades and Sheol need to be equated. Right? And both of those are the. A temporary dwelling place for all of the dead. And then the idea is that this they talk about in Revelation 20:11-15 and we’re going to talk about those passages in the next part makes a clear distinction between Hades and the Lake of Fire.

We—we’ll get to that later. We’ll get to the chucking of Hades. So, you know, it’s Lake of Fire adjacent, though I think we could safely say it might not be there. But like, you know, it overlooks it. You’ve got a view if you get, you know, if you’re in a penthouse in Hades, you’re going to be able to see the Lake of Fire.

And they—they say that Sheol/Hades is a realm with two divisions: a place of blessing and a place of judgment. And—and so that’s where they’re going to tie in Lazarus and the rich man. This parable about how Lazarus dies and he goes off to the bosom of Abraham, and then the rich man is down and being tormented and just is begging Lazarus to—to let some water drip off his fingers into his mouth so he can be—he can be satisfied. And so we’re—we’re what is fundamentally a—a diachronic difference. Diachronic means through time. And so in other words, the ideas are changing as time goes on.

Right.

But because we were preserving the text from earlier, we get all of the ideas, and GotQuestions is trying to collapse that diachronic difference and smoosh it all together and say, no, it’s all perfectly consistent with everything else. And what they come up with is that Sheol/Hades is this temporary place where you have the two different divisions and then hell is not. Let’s see, Hell is… So they say that hell is not a correct translation of a bunch of things. Yeah, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Luke 23:43 . He did not say “I will see you in hell.” Of course not. You know, yeah, that would be a weird thing for Jesus to…

That would be so much better though if Jesus turns to the guy on the other cross and goes, “I’ll see you in hell.”

Hell, I would love to have seen Willem Dafoe look over and just glaringly say, “I’ll see you in hell.”

No, no, he said, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” So yes.

So paradise must be the—the division that has blessings in Sheol slash Hades.

So yeah, one problem with that claim is that just because Jesus said “I’ll see you today in paradise” doesn’t mean he didn’t also then go to hell.

Yeah, he’s like, “I got a four o’clock, he’s got three days.”

He can—he can boogie around all of the afterlife. He can check everything out. I don’t know.

That’s not including travel. But what they’re basically saying here is there’s Sheol slash Hades and there’s a good side and a bad side.

And then there’s—there’s hell. And Jesus did not go to hell. But we got this—this thing about Jesus preaching to the spirits in prison. Yeah. So what’s going on there? And so we’ve got two other articles on GotQuestions.org. One is—one is “Who were the spirits in prison?” So we’re talking about 1 Peter 3:18-20 , and—and here they give a few different options. Number one, the spirits in prison are fallen angels or demons. And this is an idea that is based on, again, 1 Enoch, the Enochic literature. Because one of the things it talks about is how the—these angels are going to be punished. In fact, I’ll read a tiny bit from 1 Enoch chapter 10. We’ve got—after the—the angels have done all these—these naughty things, God is like, commission some angels. So in chapter 10, then the Most High declared and the Great Holy One spoke and he sent Sariel—who’s Canadian Sariel—to the son of Lamech, saying, “Go to Noah and say to him in my name, ‘Hide yourself,’ and reveal to him that the end is coming, that the whole earth will perish.”

And then he commissions Raphael, says to Raphael, he said, “Go, Raphael, and bind Asael hand and foot and cast him into the darkness and make an opening in the wilderness that is in Dudael. Throw him there and lay beneath him sharp and jagged stones; cover him with darkness and let him dwell there for an exceedingly long time.” So you know what I mean? Yeah. And then use those sigla that—that I don’t know how to use. And then we’ve got the later on in chapter 21, from there… so now we’ve got Enoch is actually being given a tour of this eschatological hellscape. “From there, I traveled to another place more terrible than this one, and I saw terrible things: a great fire burning and flaming there. And the place had a narrow cleft extending to the abyss, full of great pillars of fire borne downward. Neither the measure nor the size was I able to see or to estimate.”

Then Uriel answered me, one of the holy angels who was with me, and said to me, Enoch, why are you so frightened and shaken? And I replied, because of this terrible place and because of the fearful sight. And he said, this is a prison for the angels; here they will be confined forever. So it certainly seems like 1 Peter 3 is riffing on this Enochic idea of these spirits in prison. And maybe it’s the angels. And so why is Jesus preaching to them? Like, there are a few different thoughts. One is that he’s basically going, yeah nah nah nah nah nah. You know, I… we won. More preaching at them than to. Yeah, yeah, more a victory lap. Another idea is that maybe they thought that the angels could repent and then they would be saved, they would be let out of this prison. That’s a possibility. Another understanding is that the spirits in prison are the… and here I’m reading from the Got Questions article again.

The spirits in prison are the human spirits of those who perished in the flood of Noah’s day. As for Christ preaching to them, there are three possible interpretations. One, Christ preached to them figuratively in and through Noah while they were in the flesh. So that’s where Jesus is the puppet master and Noah who is preaching is… and this is kind of a goofy reading of this. Christ in the spirit preached to the spirits in prison really means that Christ manipulated Noah like a little hand puppet to preach to the people who rejected him. That doesn’t make much sense. B. Christ preached to them literally being present with Noah through the Holy Spirit, who inspired Noah to proclaim the message of coming judgment. In other words, the premortal, preincarnate Jesus was there in spirit directly preaching to them. And C. Christ preached to them literally in between his death and resurrection. And the article doesn’t actually decide which of these is right, but it does conclude this way.

According to each of these interpretations, the spirits are called such because they existed in a spiritual condition. When Peter wrote they were no longer in the flesh, but lived in Hades slash hell. So in the previous article it was there’s Sheol slash Hades. And that’s different from hell, right? Here it’s. They were in Hades slash hell. So depending on which interpretation you prefer, one of them is that Jesus preached to the spirits that were in Sheol, Sheol-Hades, Sheol-Hades-hell. Hades slash hell. Yeah. So. And then the other.

Both. These are both articles from gotquestions.org?

so both of them from gotquestions.org and, and I’m just curious if now

we got more questions. Thanks. Got Questions.

Yeah. So the Did Jesus go to hell between his death and resurrection is a part of. You go to the content index. You go to Jesus Christ, you go to the cross and the empty tomb. And then the Who were the spirits in prison? You got to go to content index, books of the Bible, First Peter. But then you can also through Jesus Christ, the cross and the empty tomb, get to the question where was Jesus for the three days between his death and resurrection?

We got a third take on the same thing. Yes. And, and here we have the exact same Hades slash hell take.

Yeah, exact same as which, as the, the second. So remember, you got Sheol equals hell. Right. You got Sheol slash Hades does not equal hell.

Right.

And then you’ve got Hades slash hell. And now we’re gonna do another Hades slash hell. So at the very end we have. But they’re kind of again, they’re playing with different interpretations. There’s another interpretation of the First Peter passage. In this interpretation, the spirits are people currently in hell. But Peter is not saying that Jesus made a special trip to Hades slash hell to preach or proclaim anything. Rather, Peter is giving parenthetical information about something Jesus had done previously in history, namely that he had in spirit preached to the people in Noah’s day while they were still living on earth. So it’s still toying with these different interpretations, but ultimately identifies these spirits in prison as being in Hades slash hell. And it concludes, the only thing we know for sure, because definitely we know something for sure here, is that according to Jesus’s own words on the cross, he went to paradise. We can also say with confidence that his work of redemption finished.

Jesus did not have to suffer in hell. Okay, a little non-committal. I mean, it certainly seems like Jesus would have been able to visit without suffering. Yeah, particularly if he’s there in a preaching capacity. You know, he, he can buzz the guards at any moment and, and be

there sort of, as a, as a Doctors Without Borders sort of visit.

Yeah, yeah. So, but I want to go back a bit to, to the First Peter passage because the, so the GotQuestions people. They’re, they’re, you know, Christian apologists. They’re, they’re trying to provide a unifying framework for everything, you know, it’s not all that unifying. You know, you can’t be consistent all the time when you’re trying to assert that the Bible is consistent all the time. So sometimes Sheol and Hades are not hell, sometimes Hades is hell. But the, the scholarship identifies some, some closely overlapping interpretations and there’s a wonderful new commentary, multi-volume commentary on First Peter from the International Critical Commentary series. And talking about this, they say one theory, which can be traced as far back as the second century, and we have this view attested in Alexandria, maintains that between his death and resurrection, traditionally known as the triduum mortis, the immaterial soul of Christ went to the underworld where he preached to the souls of dead humans.

So according to this critical commentary about the earliest interpretation we have is the notion that Jesus went to hell and preached to the souls of dead humans. Within this group, proponents are divided over what was preached and the group to whom the message was directed. The vast majority maintain that Christ proclaimed a message of salvation to the generation of Noah that perished in the flood, although other recipients have also been posited. And then another interpretation that extends back to the time of Augustine, or Augustine, if you’re nasty. This theory arose out of a question posed to Augustine by Euodius, a friend and fellow bishop. Noting that the passage seemed to refer to Christ’s proclamation of the gospel in Hades, which it was assumed would have therefore been emptied of all of its inhabitants. Euodius asked for Augustine’s interpretation and what he said was if the Lord when he died, preached in hell to spirits in prison, why were those who continued unbelieving while the ark was a-preparing the only ones counted worthy of this favor, namely the Lord’s descending into hell?

For in the ages between the time of Noah and the Passion of Christ, there died many thousands or so many nations whom he might have found in hell. Or if he preached at all, why has Peter mentioned only these and passed over the innumerable multitudes of others? And so what he decided was that this wasn’t a universal thing. This was the idea was that the pneumata, the, the spiritual preaching might refer to human beings who received the message of the gospel during their lifetimes. More specifically, he suggested that during the time when the ark was being constructed, the pre-existent Christ preached a message of salvation through Noah. So we got that puppet master theory. Yeah, there we go basically. And then the third theory that’s mentioned in the commentary is one that has become quite popular in more recent scholarship since the rediscovery of First Enoch. The idea is that maybe these are the angels that were disobedient. And the commentary doesn’t really say we like this option, but does suggest that a lot of critical scholars these days are leaning in the direction of understanding Peter to be referring to the angels.

And, and I think there’s sense to be made of that. But again, it’s certainly not the earliest interpretation and I think it kind of complicates whatever GotQuestions.org is trying to do with their inconsistent little reconstruction of, of what these terms all refer to.

I mean, I think the point here, which is the point commonly with these sorts of things, with whenever we have, you know, when, whenever there’s something like this, like this, you know, this thing in Peter where it’s like what, what was he doing? We, we still have the question like it’s, it’s just going to be a question perpetually because there, because there is no obvious answer. And all of these theories are fine and interesting and, and valid and also unverifiable and completely guesswork. You know what I mean? Like it’s, it’s, you know, educated guesswork. But I, I think that the, the, the, the real answer is not to have an answer right. Like the real, the, the correct answer to this is like sure, maybe we do, we don’t know. We don’t know what, what a lot of it meant.

I don’t know.

Yeah, well, and, and that, that’s something I’ve, I’ve said an awful lot on, on my own channels that, you know, as long as you’re, as you’re looking at this critically and as long as you’re making a good faith effort to try to understand what was going on for these people on their own terms, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s a great foundation for doing whatever else. But, you know, just being transparent about the fact that, you know, at this point we’re just speculating, we don’t really know. We’ve, we’re making some educated observations, but that doesn’t definitively answer the question because, yeah, most of the folks who need a definitive answer need it because, you know, either there is social or actual capital at stake that they are trying to arrogate or because their, their own identity politics demand that they have some kind of confident answer. And, and they can’t shy away from that. And GotQuestions seems to be going from doing both sides of that because in one article it’s like, it’s definitely not that.

And then another article it’s like it could be that. Yeah. So.

All right, well, I think that’s great. We, we still have questions. GotQuestions.org so.

And they’ve, they’ve got other questions on this too. I just looked at a related question that says what is the harrowing of hell? And the harrowing of hell is the tradition about Jesus going down, okay, between his death and resurrection and emptying hell. And there are famous paintings from the Byzantine period of, of Jesus coming out of a cave, basically. And, and there are some door panels that are broken on the ground and that’s, and that is representative of the harrowing of hell.

Go, you’re free. Everyone out. Let’s, let’s go. Interesting. All right, well, speaking of hell, let’s, let’s move on to our next segment, segment number two. And in this segment, we’re going to be talking about Revelation and you.

The book of Revelation , the book of Apocalypse of John. Yes.

Yeah. Not, not the, not the concept of revelation, but, but the book that bears its name.

And I am interested in this because, because, yeah, we sort of teased a little bit of what’s going to happen in terms of things getting thrown into lakes of fire. But, but talk about how Revelation’s hell might differ from the concepts of hell that we’ve already talked about or, or add thereunto.

Well, we got the main term that is used here in the book of Revelation is Hades for hell. Okay. And hang on just a second. I want to see how many times this word occurs in the book of Revelation . So I’m just going to do a quick search for the occurrence of this term in the book of Revelation . Occurs four times.

We see it in Revelation 1:18 , Revelation 6:8 , Revelation 20:13 , and Revelation 20:14 . And so I’m—we’re looking really at Revelation 20 , verses 11 through 15. And in all of the other occurrences, Hades is associated with death. It occurs in a pair, Death and Hades, Death and Hades.

And in Revelation 1:18 , you have Jesus appearing to John where he’s, you know, in the spirit quote-unquote, on, on the Lord’s Day, and he sees Jesus and Jesus says, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And have the keys of death and of Hades. The idea seems to be that death and Hades are locations, prisons, places where people are confined. But he’s got the keys. He’s got the way to unlock this location. But then when we get to Revelation 6:8 , we’ve got a personification of the two. And I looked, there was a pale green horse, its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth to kill with sword, and famine and pestilence, and by the wild animals of the earth.

So it’s like, it’s like a superhero sidekick situation.

Yeah. And, and so they’re, they’re personified. In one, they’re a place, then there’s a lock on them. In another, they’re these personified horsemen.

And then we get to Revelation 20:13 and 14. And then it’s kind of back to being a place because John says, I saw a great white throne and the one who sat on it, the earth and the heaven fled from his presence, and no place was found for them. So here we’re getting metaphorical again. Heaven and earth are like—and run off and can’t find a place to hide, evidently.

And all were judged according to what they had done. So it sounds like all the dead, wherever they’re hiding, it’s an olly olly oxen free. Everybody come forth from wherever. So you know, we’ve got our Pirates of the Caribbean, all your shell-encrusted people are coming up from the sea, right, and marching out. And Death and Hades give up their dead as well. And then, so we’ve had this Lake of Fire that is associated with this place of punishment with Satan and all this, and Satan and the false prophets get tossed into the Lake of Fire where they will be tormented forever. And then after Death and Hades give up their dead, it says, then Death and Hades were thrown into the Lake of Fire.

Oh wow. Okay.

This is the second death, the Lake of Fire. And anyone whose name was not found written in the Book of Life was thrown into the Lake of Fire. And okay, so there’s some inconsistencies here as well. We’ve already seen a personified and a non-personified representation of this pair, Death and Hades. And now we seem to be back to the non-personified. They’re a place; they have the dead inhabiting them and they give them up and then they get yeeted into the Lake of Fire, which is the second death, but is also supposed to be like eternally tormenting folks.

So I, I, we seem to be going back and forth between this eternal conscious torment and annihilationism because Death and Hades are not represented as personifications here. And even if they were, that would just be metaphorical. Yeah, like somebody was trying to tell me, no, no, they’re personified, so obviously they’re going to be tortured forever. I was like, what sense does it make to have these places personified and then say, and then we’re going to torture the personification of the place just to be mean? Yeah, it’s like, what did they do?

That looks like a nice place. I’m going to, I’m going to turn it into a person and then torture it forever.

Yeah, like they, they didn’t do anything wrong. So it doesn’t make sense that Death and Hades are going to be eternally tortured. It makes a lot more sense to suggest, hey, remember those places? Death and Hades? The places where people go after they die. No more death, no more need for them, right? Therefore they’re being destroyed, they’re being annihilated. Death and hell, poof, are going away.

As a metaphor, it makes a lot of sense to say this. You know what, what Jesus has done or what God is doing is, is now sort of getting rid of the concept of death and of Hades and whatever. Like you can, you can let go of those ideas. Let’s just throw them into the inferno, inferno and yeet them into the sun.

Because you know, this is not something that’s going to happen anymore. People are not going to die anymore. We don’t need a location to store, to house the dead because they’ve all been given up to be judged and then they have elsewhere to be. And so even if you do want to understand them as being personified in some sense, I think the notion that, you know, the personified death is going in a Lake of Fire for eternity… like who? I don’t know anybody who’s going to get their jollies off of that. And, and if you are, you’re messed up. Yeah.

And also just the concept of death as like… if the idea here is that the concept of death as we understand it… I mean, I guess, I guess we’ve already established that in this case it’s not death as we understand it, it’s death as a place. I’m wrapping my head around it, I’m working on it. But like, so it’s not… so we’re not talking about death as in the end of human life or the end of life. We’re talking about death as the place that a person, a spirit, would go after they die.

Well, and that’s, and that’s Hades. Because when you look at ancient mythology, it’s not like… you know, death is not this abstract thing. Death is actually journeying to the underworld. So it is a, it is a place.

And, and we tend to think of it in more slightly more scientific, kind of biological terms. But anciently there were a lot more things that were, that were oriented along like a source-path-goal kind of metaphor or an inside-outside or a directional metaphor like the concept of truth.

In the Bible, particularly in the New Testament, but also to some degree in the Hebrew Bible, truth is a path. You walk in truth, you depart from the truth, you return to the truth. And so you’ve got to think about truth more as a path that is representative of behavior. And so similarly, you’ve got to think about death not as a change of condition, but a change of location. And so that’s why death is represented as a location here. And I wanted to read from my favorite commentary on the Book of Revelation ; it is from the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary series. And Koester is the author, K-O-E-S-T-E-R, of the Revelation volume that was published in 2014. And let me just find where it talks about this. The final judgment ends the work of death and Hades.

They are sometimes pictured as places that can be locked or opened with a key, as we saw in Revelation 1:18 . And they are also depicted as sinister beings that hold people captive, as we saw in Revelation 6:8 . Before the judgment, they quote, unquote, give up their dead, which means they have no absolute right over people. They do God’s bidding by relinquishing those they hold. Then God deals with them as he dealt with the beast, false prophet, and Satan by throwing them into the lake of fire. Fire, the end of death is the counterpart to resurrection. As God brings the dead to life, he also terminates death’s power to hold anyone captive. In the New Jerusalem, death has no place. So even here, the focus is not on, let’s torment this guy forever. The focus is on the. The influence is over. The presence is over. The. The role of that thing is over. Judgment ends with the opponents of God in the lake of fire, which is also called the second death. Revelation refrains from using terms like physical death and spiritual death, and assumes that both death and resurrection affect the whole person.

Ordinary death affects both the righteous and the wicked, whereas the second death afflicts only those condemned by God.

Okay, there you go.

Conversely, those allied with evil may now elude condemnation, but their future is the second death in the lake of fire, along with Satan, the beast, the false, false prophet, Death and Hades. John’s visions disclose the divergent outcomes of relationships with God and God’s adversaries. And then he goes on to talk about how some people argue that Revelation depicts condemnation as annihilation rather than ongoing suffering. But one can imagine a political system and death coming to an end, but it is hard to see how they could suffer torment.

Yeah, right. That is, that is. It’s. Yeah, it’s a very odd thing.

Yeah, so it’s. It’s the. I think the problem is we want this to be a. A rich, unified tapestry that this all fits together and that it all makes sense as if it is some vision of things that are going to take place in the future, when really it’s just a jumbled up collection of apocalyptic imagery. And I don’t think the author is like, oh, wait a minute, I got to change that to make it consistent, because I did the thing over here. Now it all flows together. I think the author was like haha, and then this, and then this. Because the idea is just John the

Revelator has a very, a very sort of beatnik sensibility. It’s almost a gonzo journalism, what’s his name thing. Yeah, you, you know who I’m talking about. Anyway, yeah, it’s. It. He flows. He doesn’t, he doesn’t go back and revise. He’s. He’s not heavy into editing. He’s just whatever’s coming out is coming out sort of. Sort of dude.

Which I think makes it a problem when we have people today in, in our modern world who try to create this, this unifying framework that gives everything a place and everything fits together. As with gotquestions.org and everybody else who wants Revelation, you know, who. Every, every time there’s a car accident, somebody’s like ah, this is the, this is the beast from, from Revelation. And somebody was like the, the trains that were derailing. There you go. They were like ah, this is, this is the, the. The serpent with the, with the tail like a scorpion from, from this part of Revelation. They think this is actually some kind of prophecy about things that are going to happen in the future. It’s really just scary story time.

Like when, when you taking it literally

It very much, to my mind, misses the point. Like if you try to take it as, as these are literal things that I’m predicting are literally going to happen and look the way I’m describing them, you miss everything that he’s trying to say in it. Now, I think a lot of what he’s trying to say is nutballs myself. I think he might have been a little bit goofy. But if you want to understand it, if you want to understand what he was trying to say, taking it literally is not going to get you anywhere near it. It’s very clearly metaphor. The guy can’t even decide whether two things are a place or people. That to me is plenty to just say, let’s look at this as a metaphor. Let’s chill out a little bit with the literal.

And I think the reason there are so many people who are just allergic to recognizing that fact is because they want to try to make the text as useful and meaningful as possible to them. And right now there’s an awful lot of utility in mapping whatever’s in the text onto current events so that we can pretend we have some kind of insight into what’s coming next. And that is horrifically dangerous when on a geopolitical level we have bad actors who are trying to represent genocide as something not only that is prophesied to happen in the future, but that is something they should be excited about.

Like the dehumanization that results from gleefully anticipating war and genocide because it means you’re finally going to feel vindicated about believing in this stuff.

Right. And it means that if it happens, then Jesus’s return must be right around the corner or whatever.

And who knows how lucky we are—

to live in this generation.

And who knows how many people have their fingers on levers of power that are going to use them because they think they are going to facilitate that lucky, lucky event that we all get to be a part of. Just seeing the number of people who are like, “What Trump said about Gaza… Oh, yeah, it’s happening, it’s happening. Everybody get ready.” Like, that is scary, scary delusion.

It’s also important to note that that’s something that has been happening for centuries, over and over again. People are like, “Aha, look at this. See, we’re in the last days here in 1666. Look at this, you know, the London fire proves that we are in the final days.” Or, you know, the plague is one of the things. This is not new. And yeah, they’ve been wrong every time up until now. I don’t know why you think you’re the right one when everybody else has been wrong every time they’ve made these predictions about “We are the ones who are finally going to see Revelation, Revelation come to life.”

Yeah, yeah. And something I’ve mentioned in a lot of videos: Revelation is late 1st century CE Jewish apocalyptic imagery written by followers of Jesus. And it has nothing to do with anything that happened after the text was written.

Right.

And oh my gosh, the heartache, the suffering, the literal human lives lost needlessly because people tried to use this as a map for the future. Just please give it a rest.

Well, and also not for nothing, but there was hemming and hawing about whether to even include it in the canon. Like, Revelation only made it barely in under the wire, right?

Yeah, mainly because of Athanasius of Alexandria, who thought it was a useful rhetorical bludgeon against his enemies within the Christian community. Because the earliest Christians were like, “Who’s this John dude? He was up in the night. What was he smoking?”

Was he in a cave? What was happening here?

But you had folks who were like—I think Justin Martyr, around 150 to 160, was the first to say, “Hey, I bet this was the same John that wrote the Gospel of John .” And other people were like, “Can you read, Justin? This guy’s Greek is awful. This is not the same author.” And so you had Christians who were denying that this was John the beloved disciple. You had a bunch of them that were pointing out, “There’s no revelation in here. This is just bizarre, grotesque imagery. This is not uplifting. This is not the Gospel.” And as we talked with Bart Ehrman about this as well, you had all this excess.

And so that a lot of people are like, “That’s not my Christianity,” in—in the early centuries. And, yeah, it took a while. It took Athanasius of Alexandria to write his Festal Letter and—and tie his little canon off with the bow that is the Book of Revelation . And then, stealing a page from the Book of Revelation , he closed out his—his canon list by saying curses to anybody who adds to or takes away from—from these. Yeah. So, yeah, it’s—it’s a mess, but I think—and—and I think—let’s see. I’m trying to think of which—who omitted it from their canons. There were—there were a few people, but I think it wasn’t even until, like, the Council of Trent that it was formally recognized as canonical by the Catholic Church. I may have to revisit that. I don’t know if that’s true, but, yeah, there’s—it was not popular for the earliest generations of Christians because it conflicted with what they—

—what they were seeing in the Gospels and—and what they wanted to get out of Christianity.

Darn you, Athanasius. You could have saved us all a big headache if you were just—

Yeah, all right. Countless, countless lives. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for that. I think that is fascinating. And if you friends listening or viewing at home decided that you think it’s fascinating and would like to help make this show happen and be a part of our, our ever-growing team of patrons, we would love for you to do so. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma to do that. You just sign up there if you choose to. You can, you know, at a certain level you can receive an early and ad-free version of every episode. You can—you can get the After Party where we have extra bonus content every week. We answer patrons’ questions and we talk about our lives and just—it’s—it’s a good time. Little free-form, little, little hippie-dippy. Gotta love it.

A little beatnik stuff.

Yeah, yeah, man, we’re—we’re getting all kinds of crazy up in there. All right. So if you’d like to reach out to us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Did Jesus Go to Hell?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology