At the very beginning, whilst warning humanity against the perils of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God neglected to say a word about incurring his eternal wrath, and securing for themselves a seat in the hot place. (And, no, “you will die” has nothing to do with some sort of spiritual death or postmortem punishment.)
Moses, when warning Israel of the consequences of breaking the Law, again, failed to utter a single, solitary word about hell or eternal perdition.
Jesus, in all of his teachings, never said a word about a “hell” that looks anything like what the majority of Protestant Christian believe in and preach today. No, despite the oft repeated myth that he taught twice as much about hell as he did heaven, Jesus never actually uttered the word hell, but is recorded as using the word Hades 11 times, and the word Gehenna 11 times. And even then, that’s not 11 separate uses of each word, but 11 uses of each word spread over 4 Gospels. That means it is often merely one Gospel writer re-telling the same story, and often the words are used more than once in the course of the same address. All in all, Jesus uses each word just a handful of times, which would be the most irresponsible thing imaginable for the son of God himself to do, if, in fact, all humans are born damned by default.
It cannot even be said for certain whether Hades and Gehenna are synonymous, as they were not always used as such historically. Hades is essentially the Old Testament Sheol, with a little Greek mythology thrown in there for good measure. Sheol can never once be justifiably translated as “hell” in the Old Testament, and so it shouldn’t be assumed, then, that it’s New Testament equivalent means “hell.” In the most famous of Jesus’ uses of Hades (the parable of Lazarus and the rich man), not a word is uttered about original sin, the necessity of faith in Jesus for salvation, or anything else smacking of the Christian doctrine of hell. Rather, it is used to illustrate a role reversal, as the wealth-loving religious leaders believed their status and riches to be a sign of God’s approval, and the destitution of the poor as being a sign of the opposite. The parable (which it clearly *IS, yes, even despite the use of the proper name, Lazarus) is meant, it seems, to illustrate that what man believes God to value is not, in fact, what God values. Furthermore, when dealing with such an important issue, you would think something akin to a quick “altar call” message would be present. You know, forsake your sins, believe in Jesus, and you can avoid this fate type of thing. Instead, though, the rich man who finds himself in Hades is told, essentially, that his brothers could avoid a similar fate by heeding Moses’ and the Prophet’s words. And no self-respecting Protestant on the planet would be OK with claiming one can avoid hell by observing the words of Moses and the Prophets. If Jesus meant hell the way we use the word today, he failed to tell us both why we deserve it and how we can avoid it.
None of Jesus’ uses of the word Gehenna bear any genuine similarities to the modern notion of hell either, but instead seem to be more of a warning against a future, physical judgment of some kind, as he warns his listeners in Matthew 23 that many of them will find themselves physically in Gehenna within a generation. Considering the fact that many of these same ones did, in fact, according to Josephus, have their bodies thrown in the Valley of Ben Hinnom (Gehenna) in the aftermath of Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of the Romans, it seems very unlikely that anything more than this event is being alluded to, even when Gehenna is used apocalyptically, and with a little dramatic flair added.
All in all, *if Jesus preached about hell, it invalidates the modern doctrine of hell, as the two bear no resemblance to one another. And even then, he failed to give us any warning or hope of salvation from it that looks anything like what is preached today.
The apostle Paul, whose writings have influenced Christian thought, probably more so than even the words of Jesus, failed to speak even once of Gehenna, and uses the word Hades only to speak of death itself having lost its fearful grip on humanity via Christ’s resurrection. And yet this same Paul, who failed to speak of hell even once (and I say that with perfect knowledge of the existence of passages like 2 Thess 1:9), also claimed to have “fully preached the Gospel” (Rom 15:19) and to be “free of the blood of all men” (Acts 20:26). How can one have fully preached the Gospel and be free of the blood of all, if they failed to spell out, even one time in their lengthy epistles, the nature of hell and of how to be saved from it? We think it’s there because we read our presuppositions into scripture as though they were givens, but they aren’t, and we shouldn’t.
All in all, if eternal torment is real, everyone from God himself, to Moses, to Paul, and full circle back to Jesus, failed to adequately spell it out, warn against it, and provide us with a way to escape it. We read into scripture what we already believe, but had we not already believed these things, we would be hard pressed to find them there. So, it would seem that either God is a failure, or that we, as humans, assume too much. I’ll go with number two!
~Jeff Turner