The Myth of Hell
"Be not carried away by varied and strange teachings; for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by GRACE...be sound in the faith...pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the merely human commands of those who reject the truth." (Hebrews 13:9; Titus 1:15-15)
Please don't believe the "strange teachings" about hell. It is a terrible fiction created by the church that has been attributed to Christ Jesus. In the "strange teaching", God and Jesus will send the great majority of people into a place of unending torment for eternity. That is not the God of the Bible, nor His Son Jesus, who love their enemies and are spoken of in terms of grace, mercy, justice and compassion for sinners. The Jesus of the Bible was sent by God NOT to condemn the world but to SAVE it. (Luke 9:55; John 3:17).
God nor Jesus mentions a place of eternal torment and certainly never threatened anyone if they chose not to follow their teaching. There is no word found in the Bible for such a place in its original languages of Aramaic, Greek, or Hebrew.
Please don't believe the "strange teachings" about hell. It is a terrible fiction created by the church that has been attributed to Christ Jesus. In the "strange teaching", God and Jesus will send the great majority of people into a place of unending torment for eternity. That is not the God of the Bible, nor His Son Jesus, who love their enemies and are spoken of in terms of grace, mercy, justice and compassion for sinners. The Jesus of the Bible was sent by God NOT to condemn the world but to SAVE it. (Luke 9:55; John 3:17).
God nor Jesus mentions a place of eternal torment and certainly never threatened anyone if they chose not to follow their teaching. There is no word found in the Bible for such a place in its original languages of Aramaic, Greek, or Hebrew.
During the second century church leaders began to interpret references to fire and judgment in the New Testament to mean that people who did not convert to their version of Jesus theology would not simply die--they would be thrown into a fire that would burn eternally. They based their interpretation on the pagan descriptions of the underworld at the time.
The first adoption of the pagan myth by a Christian writer seems to be in the extra biblical book called the Apocalypse of Peter, probably written around 125 AD. It contains a variety of punishments awaiting sinners in hell which descriptions clearly came from Homer, Virgil, Plato, and the Orphic and Pythagorean traditions.
This hell myth wasn't in the Old Testament or Christian tradition before this time. There were places in the Jewish Talmud (oral commentary and traditions put into written form and finished around 200 AD) that included this myth, but it is found nowhere in the Tanakh (written word of God - Old Testament).
In the New Testament Jesus does refer to "Gehenna", the valley of Hinnom, where garbage burned continually, corpses were sometimes deposited, and in OT times, people had been sacrificed. However, he was NOT referring to the Greek mythological hell as everlasting torment for people as accepted by the Greeks and some Jewish Rabbis. Jesus and Paul both condemned the traditions of men and Jewish myths. (Matthew 15:9; Titus 1:14-15)
The first modern complete English translation of the Bible was finished in 1526 and by that time the hell myth was so well rooted in Jewish myth and church tradition that where the translators saw "Gehenna," they simply inserted "hell" as the translation. That led to the misconception about hell being taught in the New Testament and in Jesus' teachings.
I feel sure Jesus finds that cruelty heretical and when he returns will overturn the pulpits, bible schools and seminaries where that myth is taught and burn up the Christian authored books on the subject as well as those portions of the Jewish Talmud which have perpetuated the myth.
Again, the heretical concept of a hell of eternal conscious torment was not taught by Moses or any of the Old Testament Propheets, nor was it taught among Christians before the church added it in the second century AD. It is simply not a part of the plan of God found in the Bible.
This hell myth wasn't in the Old Testament or Christian tradition before this time. There were places in the Jewish Talmud (oral commentary and traditions put into written form and finished around 200 AD) that included this myth, but it is found nowhere in the Tanakh (written word of God - Old Testament).
In the New Testament Jesus does refer to "Gehenna", the valley of Hinnom, where garbage burned continually, corpses were sometimes deposited, and in OT times, people had been sacrificed. However, he was NOT referring to the Greek mythological hell as everlasting torment for people as accepted by the Greeks and some Jewish Rabbis. Jesus and Paul both condemned the traditions of men and Jewish myths. (Matthew 15:9; Titus 1:14-15)
The first modern complete English translation of the Bible was finished in 1526 and by that time the hell myth was so well rooted in Jewish myth and church tradition that where the translators saw "Gehenna," they simply inserted "hell" as the translation. That led to the misconception about hell being taught in the New Testament and in Jesus' teachings.
I feel sure Jesus finds that cruelty heretical and when he returns will overturn the pulpits, bible schools and seminaries where that myth is taught and burn up the Christian authored books on the subject as well as those portions of the Jewish Talmud which have perpetuated the myth.
Again, the heretical concept of a hell of eternal conscious torment was not taught by Moses or any of the Old Testament Propheets, nor was it taught among Christians before the church added it in the second century AD. It is simply not a part of the plan of God found in the Bible.