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Sometime after finishing Bart Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted, it hit me. Two realizations arrived together and never left me.

First: my theology was doing violence to what the biblical texts actually said. The original languages and contexts told a different story than what I'd been taught.

Second: Christian traditions today ignore the Bible's historical context when it's inconvenient. They renegotiate meaning to support doctrines the texts never claimed.

That became a turning point. I started examining everything I'd accepted as inerrant biblical truth. Doctrines from childhood. Beliefs I carried into adulthood. Hell was one of them. What I found was fascinating if not disorienting.

The Gap

Here's what most Christians have been taught: Hell is a place of eternal conscious torment. Unbelievers go there when they die. Fire, darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth. Forever. It's one of Christianity’s most recognizable doctrines. Preached from pulpits, painted in medieval art, yelled toward random bystanders from busy street corners, woven into evangelical theology.

There’s a problem: the word “hell” doesn't appear in the original biblical texts. Not once.

What does appear are four different words with different meanings: Sheol (Hebrew), Hades (Greek), Gehenna (Greek), and Tartarus (Greek, used only once). English Bibles translate all of these as “hell.” But they aren't the same thing.

Sheol appears 65 times in the Old Testament. It's consistently described as the place where all the dead go. Righteous people. Wicked people. It didn’t matter. You were going there. Jacob expected to go to Sheol when he died (Genesis 37:35). So did Job (Job 14:13). Ecclesiastes describes it as a place where “there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom” (9:10). Darkness, silence, inactivity. Sheol isn't punishment. It's death. Everyone goes there. No separation between believers and non-believers. No fire. No torment. Just the end of earthly life.

Hades is the Greek equivalent used in the New Testament, roughly corresponding to Sheol – a general “place of the dead.” The Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) translated Sheol as Hades. Like Sheol, it's described as a neutral holding place, not a torture chamber.

Gehenna is different. It appears 12 times in the New Testament. Eleven of them in Jesus' teaching. Gehenna isn't a theological concept. It's a real place. The Valley of Hinnom (Ge-Hinnom in Hebrew, which becomes Gehenna in Greek) was a ravine south of Jerusalem. During the monarchy, some Israelite kings sacrificed children there to the god Molech (2 Kings 23:10, Jeremiah 7:31). By Jesus' time, it had become Jerusalem's garbage dump. Refuse, dead animals, executed criminals' bodies, all thrown there and burned. The fires burned constantly. The imagery was visceral and immediate. A place of destruction. Of waste. Of what gets consumed and gone.

When Jesus uses Gehenna, he's using a metaphor his audience would instantly recognize. Things thrown there aren't preserved in torment. They're destroyed.

Tartarus shows up once in 2 Peter 2:4. It refers to where rebellious angels are held. Borrowed from Greek mythology – the prison of the Titans. It has nothing to do with human destiny.

So when your Bible says “hell,” which word is actually there? In most Old Testament references, it's Sheol. The neutral realm where all the dead go. In Jesus' warnings, it's usually Gehenna. The garbage fire where things are destroyed. The unified doctrine of eternal conscious torment isn't assembled from these texts. It's imposed on them through translation.

If the modern doctrine of hell isn't in the original texts, where did it come from?

The Historical Journey

The early church didn't have a unified doctrine of hell. For the first five centuries after Christ, Christian thinkers held competing views. Some taught universal reconciliation. Some taught conditional immortality. Some taught eternal conscious torment. There was no consensus.

Out of six major theological schools operating between 170-430 AD, only one taught eternal torment: the Latin school in Carthage, North Africa. Four others taught universal reconciliation through restorative judgment. The diversity was real and documented.

Then came Tertullian (160-220 AD). A native Latin speaker who converted around age 40. He was the first major Christian writer to systematically argue for eternal conscious torment. His argument rested on Greek philosophy: the immortality of the soul. He cites Plato directly by writing, “Every soul is immortal”. If the soul cannot die, then it must exist somewhere forever. Heaven or hell were the only options.

Tertullian's view wasn't dominant yet. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) came along and changed that. Augustine systematized eternal torment and made it official Roman church doctrine. His influence was huge. He shaped medieval and Reformation theology. He directly influenced Calvin and Luther.

Augustine had a problem. He didn't know Greek well. He admitted he hated studying it. His understanding of the New Testament came through Latin translations, not the original Greek. When he encountered Greek concepts about the afterlife, he filtered them through Platonic philosophy. Particularly the idea that the soul is inherently immortal and cannot cease to exist.

Augustine acknowledged his view was a minority position. He wrote in the Enchiridion: “It is in vain, then, that some, indeed very many, make moan over the eternal punishment, and perpetual, unintermitted torments of the lost, and say they do not believe it shall be so.” Even as he promoted eternal torment, he admitted many Christians rejected it. Augustine's influence won anyway. His theology became the foundation of Western Christianity.

Translation choices often followed institutional need. The Latin Vulgate was translated by Jerome around 400 AD. It rendered Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna all as “infernus.” Hell. The King James Version in 1611 continued this pattern. All these terms are congealed into one English word: “hell.” The theological consistency was intentional. Differentiating between these terms would have undermined established doctrine.

Then came Dante Alighieri. His Inferno was written around 1320. It gave Western Christianity the imagery that still dominates our conception of hell. Nine circles. Specific torments matched to specific sins. Satan trapped in ice. Dante's work was poetry, not theology. But the medieval imagination took it literally. The vivid descriptions became the default picture of hell in Western culture.

Dante wasn't writing doctrine. He was writing allegory. A meditation on sin and its consequences. But his imagery was so powerful that it became inseparable from the theology. When modern Christians think of hell, they're often thinking of Dante's hell, not anything the biblical texts describe.

The pattern is clear. Greek philosophy provided the foundation. The immortal soul that cannot die. Augustine systematized it into doctrine. Latin translation choices cemented it into scripture. Dante gave it imagery that captured the imagination. Each step moved further from what the original texts actually said.

And that pattern hasn't stopped. Modern translators are asked why they keep translating Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna as “hell” despite knowing they're different concepts. The answer is revealing. They cite “theological consistency.” The institutional need to preserve established doctrine overrides textual accuracy. The same mechanism that created the doctrine continues to defend it.

The Implications

So what do we do with this?

The data is clear. The modern doctrine of hell isn't in the original biblical texts. It developed over centuries through a specific process: Greek philosophy about immortal souls, Latin translation choices, institutional consolidation under Augustine, poetic imagery from Dante that became literalized. Each layer added something the texts themselves didn't say.

Evangelical responses tend to fall into two camps. One defends eternal conscious torment by doubling down on the immortality of the soul. This position leans heavily on Greek philosophy. It argues that because the soul is immortal, it must exist forever. Either in heaven or in hell. The problem is that this foundation isn't biblical. It's Platonic. The Bible nowhere teaches that all souls are inherently immortal apart from God's gift of life.

The other camp acknowledges the biblical evidence and moves toward conditional immortality or annihilationism. This view argues that the wicked are punished and then destroyed. Not preserved in eternal torment. Even prominent evangelicals like John Stott came to this position late in life. He wrote that he found the concept of eternal torment “emotionally intolerable” and that Scripture points toward annihilationism rather than eternal conscious torment.

But here's what both camps reveal: translation matters. Doctrine matters. And the distance between what the texts say and what we've been taught to believe they say can be massive.

The institutional resistance to retranslating these terms tells you everything you need to know about what's at stake. If modern Bibles started transliterating Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna instead of rendering them all as “hell,” the average reader would immediately notice something. These aren't the same place. They don't describe the same fate. And that would require re-examining centuries of theology.

The question becomes one of authority. Are we interpreting what the Bible actually says? Or are we defending what the church has taught the Bible says? Those aren't always the same thing.

When the data contradicts what you've been taught, you have to decide what matters more: textual accuracy or theological tradition. The institutional church made its choice centuries ago. It chose consistency over accuracy. It chose preservation over correction. And it's still making that choice today.

The mechanisms that gave us this doctrine are still operating. Translation choices that prioritize theological consistency. Resistance to scholarship that challenges established teaching. The assumption that what we've always believed must be what the Bible has always said.

But the Bible doesn't say what we've been taught it says about hell. The original texts describe death, destruction, the grave. They use a garbage dump as a metaphor for what gets thrown away and burned up. They don't describe torture chambers or eternal conscious torment.

If you want to take the Bible seriously, you have to reckon with that gap. You must to decide whether you’re going to keep defending a doctrine built on Greek philosophy and medieval poetry, or whether you’re going to listen to what the texts actually say in their original languages and contexts.

That's an uncomfortable position. But it’s an honest one.