Hell According to Luke
The implication of the parable of Luke 16:19–31 is clear, there was never any hope of salvation for the rich man, even when he was alive.
* “Dives. (Dīʹvēs) Name sometimes given to the rich man of whom Jesus spoke in Luke 16:19–31. Dives actually is the Latin word for “rich” used in Luke 16:19 in the Vulgate translation. The idea that this was the name of the man emerged in medieval times.” James Newell, “Dives”, in Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 433.
Neither Heaven nor Hell
hell (n.)
also Hell, Old English hel, helle, "nether world, abode of the dead, infernal regions, place of torment for the wicked after death," from Proto-Germanic *haljō "the underworld" (source also of Old Frisian helle, Old Saxon hellia, Dutch hel, Old Norse hel, German Hölle, Gothic halja "hell"). Literally "concealed place" (compare Old Norse hellir "cave, cavern"), from PIE root *kel- (1) "to cover, conceal, save." 1
The following study is an examination of the Lucan concept of the afterlife presented in the Third Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19–31). In specifying that it is the concept presented in the parable that is in focus below, I am signalling to the reader that I concur with contemporary biblical scholarship in regarding the general form and motif of the rich man and Lazarus passage as a fictitious framework borrowed from known first century Jewish narratives. Luke’s Jesus is presenting a theological allegory critical of the moral condition of the self-righteous living in his day. He is not giving a paranormal report on the current state of the dead.2
The primary thesis of this study is that Lazarus’ paradisal place at the side of Abraham (v. 22), and the rich man’s infernal place of torment (v. 23), are not the final resting places called “heaven” and “hell,” as is generally supposed. Rather, they are two disparate sections of the same underworld, where all Jewish souls were believed to be interred until the general resurrection and final judgement of the dead at the conclusion of the Mosaic Covenant Age.3 This thesis is adduced from the finding that neither the common understanding of many in the contemporary church regarding the setting of this parable, nor the use of the name hell for the place Luke called hadēs, holds up under exegetical examination.
Hell in the KJV
Hell. Hell (from a Germanic root meaning “to cover”) is the traditional English translation of the Hebrew word Sheol, found sixty-five times in the Hebrew Bible, and of the Greek word Hades, used sixty-six times in the Apocrypha and ten times in the New Testament. In the NRSV [and other modern versions] these words are simply transliterated into English, and the translation “hell” is reserved for Gehenna.4
Today’s English-speaking churchgoer can be forgiven for still believing that the rich man of Luke 16:19–31 was suffering in the eternal flames of hell. After all, from the moment the Bible was first translated into English,5 this is the impression the paraenetic teaching of the Roman Catholic, and the Protestant, churches have intentionally left in the minds of the faithful. Moreover, that is where the 1769 Blayney standardised Oxford revision of the 1611 King James Bible (KJV),6 the single most influential translation on the doctrine of popular English-speaking Christianity, says he was – as the first of the four readings below shows.
Luke 16:23
KJV: And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
STR: kai en tō hadē eparas tous ophthalmous autou huparchōn en basanois hora ton Abraam apo makrothen kai Lazaron en tois kolpois autou.7
NKJV: And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
NRSV: In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side.
Notice that, unlike the KJV, the two updated versions, the 1982 New King James Version (NKJV), and the 1989 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), have opted to transliterate, rather than translate the original Greek name for the parabolic rich man’s location, calling it “Hades,” instead of “hell.”
Typically, these types of mismatches between the older and newer New Testament translations indicate a significant hermeneutical shift in the thinking of Greek scholars, and a concomitant development in the dominant theological ideas within Christian academe, just like the one at Matthew 24:3, which we examined in a previous study.8 There, where the Greek literally says “the end of the eon (aiōn),” the KJV translated “the end of the world,” while the current versions essentially transliterated with the synonymous “the end of the age.” Given how the long-term negative impact of the KJV’s rendering of aiōn as world has been on the laity’s understanding of the Parousia, it is not unreasonable to presume that the impact of its translating hadēs as hell at Luke 16:34 will have been just as injurious and enduring to its view of the underworld.
Hades and Gehenna in the Modern Versions
[In Luke 16, verses] 22–31 are not concerned with the final fate, but with the state immediately after death. That is … confirmed by the use of the word [hadēs] (v. 23); since the New Testament draws a sharp distinction between the intermediate state of [hadēs] and the final [geenna]. Hence it is the intermediate state which is in question here.9
While the effort on the part of the modern translators to distinguish between the different referents of the NT terms hadēs and geenna is laudable, it has proven to be largely unsuccessful, given the persistent conflating of hades, Gehenna, and hell in the minds of many believers today. The typical modern English reader, while unversed in the historical development of theological terminology in first century Palestine, does know that, in general usage, hades and Gehenna are euphemisms for hell, and so naturally assumes that all three are referring to the same place of final punishment of the damned. Particularly when he sees either of the two modern transliterations in those verses he has traditionally associated with the medieval English translation.
Commendably, several lesser known modern versions have tried to overcome the conceptual synonymity between hades and hell, by using more dynamic equivalent glosses at Luke 16:23. For example, the New Living Translation (NLT) begins the verse with, “and he went to the place of the dead;” the International Standard Version (ISV) offers, “in the afterlife;” while the New American Bible opts for the somewhat grandiloquent, “and from the netherworld.” Less helpfully, albeit understandably, the Aramaic Bible in Plain English risks exacerbating the whole issue further with the English transliteration of their Semitic version, “And suffering in Sheol.”
Yet, in spite of these attempts, the traditional associations between the three terms are maintained even in the majority of these lesser-known versions, because they, too, follow the more popular translations by continuing to use the term hell whenever it is believed a NT author has in mind a final, post-Judgement Day resting place, where the wicked are cast into a fiery lake of everlasting punishment.10
Of course, for most modern versions, this is certainly no longer the case at Luke 16:12, but it still is for some, such as the NET Bible, the Contemporary English Version, and God’s Word Translation, to name a few.11 Presumably, they all conclude, along with Reicke in the Oxford Companion to the Bible, that this is one of the three uses of hadēs in the NT where, because “punishment is the point, … Hades corresponds to Gehenna (Matt. 11.23; Luke 10.15; 16.23).”12 And so, for all practical purposes, we are right back where we started.
In the final analysis, regarding the modern versions and hadēs and geenna, while their updated glosses reflect a correct understanding of the context in which the NT authors’ first century vocabulary was used, their various traditional eschatologies prevent them from universally discarding with the term hell altogether. Therefore, despite their efforts to be more precise in their word choices, semantically, the modern versions offer little more than a distinction without a difference.
Hades and Sheol
Originally the Greeks thought of Hades as simply the grave, a shadowy, ghostlike existence that happened to all who died, good and evil alike. Gradually they and the Romans came to see it as a place of reward and punishment, an elaborately organized and guarded realm where the good were rewarded in the Elysian Fields and the evil were punished.13
Whether Jesus was the actual narrator of the Rich Man and Lazarus parable, or it was a purely Lucan amalgam of common rabbinical proverbs, the obviously intertestamental source material would have been narrated in the Semitic vernacular, that is, the underworld in the original account would almost certainly have been the Hebrew Sheol. Given the many shared characteristics between this first century Sheol, and Luke’s parabolic underworld, his choice of the LXX term hadēs, over the Semitic-Greek transliteration geenna, is ample proof that, as the Hebrew apocalypticists expanded the operation, location, and topography of Sheol far beyond its original biblical forms, in their Greek literature, the characteristics of hadēs was expanded accordingly.14
The lexicographers tell us that the term hadēs was originally the Ancient Greek name for the god of the underworld, and that through metonymy it eventually came to signify the realm over which he ruled.15 In spite of this pagan pedigree, or perhaps because of it, the placename hadēs entered postexilic Semitic-Greek parlance as a synonym for the Hebrew Sheol, having, at that time, a near-identical semantic range and flexibility.
Both words can signify the physical grave or death (Gn 37:35; Prv 5:5; 7:27), and both originally referred to a dark underworld (Jb 10:21, 22) where existence was at best shadowy (J 38:17; Is 14:9). Sheol is described as under the ocean (Jb 26:5; Jon 2:2, 3) and as having bars and gates (Jb 17:16).16
As with other common NT Greek terms, such as sunagōgē (“place of assembly”), angelos (“messenger”), and diabolos (“slanderer”), the word hadēs eventually made its way into the Alexandrian Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew Tanakh, which Porter calls “the Bible of the early church and of Judaism until the late first century A.D.”17 Once there, the already evolved pagan ideas of hadēs were embellished even further by the inventive monotheists of late BC Judaism, in much the same way that the syncretistic theologising of Northern European Christianity quickly altered the original Germanic concept of hell from a simple subterranean unseen place, into the medieval abattoir of Lucifer and his imps.
Dissatisfaction with the frank finality of the soul’s internment in the Hebrew Bible’s Sheol spurred the indefatigably legalistic minds of the day to concoct a plethora of arcane manoeuvres whereby pious Israelites might escape the unimaginable tedium of an eternal underworld, up to and including physical resurrection from the grave.18 Many were hopelessly inconsistent with their own Scriptures, but almost all were dedicated to seeking a more fitting end for those pious Jews who, like themselves, had lived righteously in this world, particularly the OT Patriarchs, whose public veneration increased exponentially in the post-exilic period. The better systems were ingenious harmonisations of the temporal moral categories established by the Law of Moses, the Judgement language of the Last Day Prophets, and a comingling of tantalising Greek and Persian ideas brought in from the Diaspora about an immediate retribution of the wicked after death.19
To this eschatological meal was added a large measure of the deforming leaven of Hebrew racial purity, the social categories of which the elite thought-leaders of that day devoted themselves studiously to devising and maintaining.20 Even in the underworld, it seems, it would be impossible for a son of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob to escape the damning stigma of his insufficiently pristine genealogy. A great deal of the shock generated in Jesus’ audience of Pharisees,21 by the reversal of post-mortem fortunes in his parable, resulted from the story’s subversion of precisely these societal expectations relative to the degrees of blessedness experienced by both characters above ground.
Paradise in Hades
In the later Jewish literature, we meet with divisions within Sheol for the wicked and the righteous, in which each experiences a foretaste of his final destiny (Enoch 22:1–14). This idea appears to underlie the imagery of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Lk. 16:19–31.22
Alongside their reimagining of hadēs, in their frenzy of apocalyptical speculation around a Last Age return of the Edenic state, the Jewish theologians got busy elevating the Greek term paradeisos, an Old Persian loanword referring to an “enclosed park,” from the mundane to the sublime. Appearing at LXX Genesis 2:8 as a translation of the Hebrew gǎn (“garden”), paradeisos served ably as a metaphor of the sinless state of pre-Fall mankind, and as an eschatological antonym of the later conception of Sheol, the place where “only the ungodly were now sought.”23 However, while the superlative character of this eschatological paradise, and its inhabitants, was unanimously agreed upon by the first century AD, various elaborate, and often competing doctrines arose to describe its form and function. Many of these sought to solve the sociologically unpalatable idea of the souls of the righteous dead being required to spend interminable eons before the general “Resurrection of the Just” (Dn 12:1–3) in the same miserable underworld as the disembodied hoi polloi.24
One such solution was offered in the pseudepigraphical Book of Enoch (Eth. En. 22), wherein Sheol is divided into four smoothed out hollows: Three darkened hollows containing the myriad spirits of doomed sinners; and a single supernaturally illuminated hollow for the far less numerous spirits of the righteous, commodiously outfitted with a “bright spring of water.”25 This much revised paradeisos also enriched the Koine vocabulary of the Third Evangelist. Comparing the similarities between the comfortable post-mortem setting for Lazarus and Abraham, and the bright paradisal corner of Enoch’s otherwise dark underworld, it seems reasonable to conclude, along with Fensham, that this is the self-same destination where Jesus promises to meet the god-fearing criminal in the Lucan account of his Crucifixion (Lk 23:43).26
Hellish Traditions
hell (n.)
In Middle English, also of the Limbus Patrum, place where the Patriarchs, Prophets, etc. awaited the Atonement. Used in the KJV for Old Testament Hebrew Sheol and New Testament Greek Hades, Gehenna. Used figuratively for "state of misery, any bad experience" at least since late 14c. As an expression of disgust, etc., first recorded 1670s.27
It goes without saying that, between the 1600s and today, the language, culture, and worldview of the English-speaking church has evolved to such a radical extent that, in the absence of any formal theological training, the ideation and application of the seventeenth century church’s doctrines of hell would strike the modern believer as, at best, unchristian, and at worst unhinged. From the Enlightenment onward, the distaste for these doctrines increased to the point where, today, the thought of an all-loving Jesus consigning billions of forensically innocent non-Christians to the same merciless dungeon as inveterate murderers, rapists, and child-molesters, seems so patently unfair, it borders on sadistic psychopathy.28 Even the idea of the most unrepentant of sinners having to endure the relatively limited time of torture between death and Kingdom Come seems unnecessarily excessive; but such notions were a mainstay in the fire-and-brimstone sermons of pious preachers from the days of the early church until well into the 1900s.29
For much of Christian history the condemnation of unbelievers and evil-doers to the eternal torments of hell has not only been a formal item of Christian belief but a powerful and vividly portrayed aspect of the way in which the church has sought to ensure conformity of belief and reformation of life. But today it is questionable how many Christians … hold to that belief in anything like the same sense. Some, who would still hold to a division after death between the saved and the unsaved, prefer to speak of annihilation by exclusion from God’s presence rather than of torment. Others would … declare themselves agnostic about any form of post-mortem existence and understand any talk of hell as a poetic evocation of the horror of alienation from the way of God in the present. Many other examples could be given of beliefs which have at one time been a cardinal element in Christian teaching, but which have now been largely set to one side or transformed out of all recognition.30
The hyper-equalitarian social milieu in which the contemporary churchgoer is steeped, and its overweening moral squeamishness, would strike the Jacobean divines who penned the KJV as equally unchristian and unhinged. Doubtless, King James’ handpicked translators would think it not only right, but proper, for the Divine Magistrate to torture whomsoever he wished, in whichever manner he wished, for however long he wished; a position that is, with regards to the judicial prerogatives of the Lord, eminently compatible with that of the Scriptures. Yet, because of the particularity of the milieux in which they were steeped, many of the aspects of the KJV translators’ conceptions of hell, which are incompatible with ours, are just as incompatible with the biblical conceptions of Sheol and Hades; their scholarly pretentions, and personal reveries, notwithstanding.
The divines of the first decade of seventeenth-century England were alert to the glamour of antiquity, in many ways consciously archaic in phraseology and grammar, meticulous in their scholarship and always looking to the primitive and the essential as the guarantee of truth. Their translation was driven by that idea of a constant present, the feeling that the riches, beauties, failings and suffering of Jacobean England were part of the same world as the one in which Job, David or the Evangelists walked. … The King James Translators could write their English words as if the passage of 1,600 or 3,000 years made no difference.31
Of course, the passage of time did make a difference, particularly with the church in England. The long process of reformation from Roman Catholicism to Anglican Protestantism began in the lifetimes of the KJV translators. Their theological worldview, although nominally Protestant, was still informed by Catholic thinking. With regards to the doctrine of the afterlife, and the abode of the dead, they thought largely in medieval Catholic terms, such as Purgatorium (“Place of Cleansing”), Limbus patrim (“Limbo of the Fathers”), and Limbus infantium (“Limbo of Infants”).
PURGATORY Centuries-old dogma of the Roman Catholic Church. The term itself is derived from the Latin purgare, which means “to cleanse” or “to purify.” The Council of Lyons in 1274 articulated the doctrine. The Council of Florence in 1439 defined it as both penal and purificatory in nature. In 1563 the Council of Trent recognized the validity of suffrages performed for the benefit of those in purgatory. … Related to purgatory there are two additional specialized abodes for the dead. Limbus infantium is reserved for infants who die before baptism. … Old Testament saints were consigned to Limbus patrum prior to Christ’s atoning work, after which they were translated to heaven.
Roman Catholics appeal to Matt. 12:32; 1 Pet. 3:18–20; 4:6; and 1 Cor. 3:15 for biblical support of the dogma. They also appeal to 2 Maccabees 12:38–45 in the OT Apocrypha for support. None of these texts explicitly articulates a doctrine of Purgatory; the doctrine is formed from extrabiblical tradition.32
The artificial irritant around which these dubious pearls formed was the belief that Christ descended into hell between his death and his resurrection, in order to lead the pre-Christian saints to heaven. First articulated in the fourth century AD, in various creeds, and in the writings of the ante-Nicene fathers, the idea eventually became known as the “Harrowing of Hell,” and was a popular theme in the plays and paintings of the Middle Ages.33 As with Purgatory and Limbo, serious theological consideration was given by the contemporaries, both Catholic and Reformed, of the KJV divines, as to the motive and manner of Christ’s harrowing of hell.
The “harrowing of hell” … is based on New Testament references to resurrection “from the dead,” not just “from death” (Matt 17:9; Luke 24:5; Acts 4:10; Rom 4:24; 1 Cor 15:20). The idea … continued to be developed throughout church history. For example, medieval writers like Abelard spoke of Jesus’ power invading hell, and Aquinas described Jesus’ mission to deal with saints and sinners in Purgatory and Limbo (Summa Theologiæ III.52.2, 4–8). Luther described Jesus’ descent in twofold terms: 1) as vicarious identification with the sinner, and 2) as victor over hell (Luther, “Tourgau Sermon on Christ’s Descent into Hell”; see Kolb and Nestingen, Sources and Contexts, 245–55). Calvin especially emphasized the vicarious suffering of our torments (Institutes II.16.8, compare Heb 5:7–8). However, Bucer and Bezer saw this descent as a mere metaphor for “grave.”34
So, what the KJV committeemen had in mind when they translated hadēs as hell was as different to that of the NT authors, as it is to ours today. Which is not to say there were no similarities at all. Obviously, since the seventeenth century doctrines developed from the descriptions of the afterlife, actual and supposed, dispersed throughout the Roman Catholic canon, shared characteristics with the concepts of the original authors are bound to exist. In the case of the limbo of the patriarchs, who can fail to see the points of correspondence with the setting of the Lucan parable? The great patriarch; the purgatorial heat, the grave imagery, the expanses, the chasm, and the anguished confinement; they are all there, certainly. However, what is not there is what reveals to us the millennium-and-a-half wide gulf fixed between the hell of the KJV divines, and the hadēs of the Evangelist: Christian hope.
That is because the whole thrust of the parable is a hard stab at the self-righteousness of those Jews who, in rejecting John the Baptist’s call to repentance, also rejected God’s Old Testament promise of eternal life in his coming Kingdom (Lk 7:28–30). The implication of that for the rich man is clear, there was never any hope of salvation for him, even when he was alive. Neither his Jewish heredity, nor his Jewish upbringing, provided him with genuine saving faith, so he died as he lived, constitutionally deaf to the spirit of the Law, and condemned by its letter. A lifetime of instruction in the commandments, of breathing the atmosphere of Torah observance, had failed to inculcate in him any sense of covenantal obligation to alleviate the suffering and poverty of his fellow Jew. In the horrifying, post-mortem moment of absolute clarity, when he saw Abraham, the great patriarch of the Jewish race, and the beggar Lazarus, feasting together as sumptuously as he was wont to do in life, the tormented rich man understood that, not only was his final condemnation on the future day of judgement certain, but so, too, was that of his similarly impenitent brethren. Indeed, at the end of Luke's withering narrative, we learn the fate of any Jew who was deaf to Moses and the Prophets, and therefore incapable of recognising, and believing, the one greater than Moses (Acts 13:27, 38-39, He 3:3), who was soon to rise from the dead (Lk 16:30–31).35
Conclusion: The Lucan Afterlife
It is clear from the above examination of the grammatical-historical background of the afterlife presented in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, that the Lucan hadēs is not the traditional fiery hell of the overly imaginative seventeenth century English divines, but is instead the intermediate netherworld found in the speculative Greek literature of first century Jewish writers. The unbridgeable partitions of Luke’s parabolic hadēs are clearly based on such evocative creations as the four hollows in the book of Enoch; and the otherworldly reversal of fortunes reveal is undoubtedly a reworking of the same reversal found in stories like the “rich publican and poor scholar,” which was a favourite of Alexandrian Jews in Palestine.36
However, even in the absence this study, the textual evidence against the post-mortem setting of the parable being the final resting place of the damned is fairly conclusive. To begin with, there is the significant absence of God in the convivial quarter, where Abraham and Lazarus were happily socialising. If the unrighteous rich man was in his final resting place, then righteous Lazarus must have been in his, too. But surely it is inconceivable that the same writer who penned Stephen’s martyred glimpse of heaven, and included his seeing “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Ac 7:56), would write such an extended picture of heaven as this parable, yet fail to mention the most magnificent feature of the place. Would he be so irreverent as to include God’s messengers (Lk 16:22), but exclude God himself?
Also working against the idea that the rich man is in the final abode of the damned is the narrative’s internal pre-Resurrection timing (v. 31). If the events being described in the parable are taking place prior to the Ascension of the Son of Man, then they are definitely taking place well before the same Son of Man returns to render final Judgement on Israel (Lk 17:28–30; Mt 25:31; Rv 20:7–13). Obviously, the rich man cannot be damned to hellfire before the day he is to be damned to hellfire (Ac 17:31; cf. Rv 20:15) – an irrational notion that collapses further into absurdity at Revelation 20:14–15, where it is prophesied that the death the rich man just experienced, and the hadēs wherein he now suffers, are themselves to be “cast into the lake of fire” just before he is.
No, these intertextual incompatibilities can only be rationally understood if the Lucan parable is presenting the intermediate state between the death of the rich man’s body, and the final damnation of his soul. This is true even though the parable’s setting is only a literary construct, based on the popular beliefs of the afterlife in Jesus’ day. Without internal coherence, it would have none of its vivid power, and lost all of its rhetorical effect. If the parable was internally inconsistent, the earliest theologians of the church would never have made it the central plank of their post-mortem doctrines of Purgatory, Limbo, and the Harrowing of Hell.
Finally, with regards to the English-speaking church, the traditional doctrine that insists the rich man was in hell is ironically undone by the very English term “hell” itself. As we saw from our study, even when first used, it was an unsuitable anachronism, imposing an incompatible medieval semantic domain onto an early first century Semitic-Greek word. At the time of the parable’s composition, hadēs could not possibly have conveyed to Luke’s first century Greek readers the fifteen hundred years of European speculation and mythologising that the word hell conveyed to the first readers of the parable in English, never mind the extra five centuries of Enlightenment-induced theologising the word hell now conveys to Luke’s twenty-first century English readers.
See for example Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, (London: SCM, 1954), 128–29; I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1978), 633–34; Richard J. Bauckham, “Eschatology,” in New Bible Dictionary (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1996), 337; Warren Prestidge, Life, Death and Destiny, 2nd revised edition. (Auckland, N.Z: Resurrection Publishing, 2010), 42–43.
For a fuller discussion of the end of the Mosaic Covenant Age, see my study, “Baptism at the End of the Mosaic Covenant”, and my YouTube video “The King of Contexts.”
My emphasis. Bo Reicke, “Hell,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), 277.
“Parts of the Bible had been translated into Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, but not until the end of the fourteenth century had there been a complete text.” Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2004), 248.
Samuel Macauley Jackson, ed., The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. II (New York; London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908–1914), 199.
This is my transliteration of Stephen’s 1550 Textus Receptus: With Morphology. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2002. Since the STR Greek text in my Logos edition has no punctuation or diacritics, I decided, for the sake of clarity, to represent the heavy breathing marks from the Nestle Aland text of this verse with “h,” capitalise abraam and lazaron, and place a full-stop at the end.
For a deep-dive into the difficulties with the Matthew 24:3 KJV translation, see the post “Excursus – A World of Difference”.
My emphasis. Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, 129.
Such as the ESV at Mt 5:22, 29; 5:30; 10:28; 16:18; 18:9; 23:15; 23:33; Mk 9:43, 45, 47; Lk 12:5; Jm 3:6; 2 Pt 2:4.
Luke 16:23 in these three versions, and the others mentioned above, can be read at Biblehub.com.
My emphasis. Reicke, “Hell,” 277.
Peter H. Davids, “Hades,” in Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1988), 912.
“Some notions of future hope for the righteous [in Sheol] do exist [in the OT] (Hos 13:14; Ps 16:10; 49:15 [MT 49:16]; Job 14:13; 1 Sam 2:6). Many of these themes will be picked up by the subsequent literature, including the NT.” Lunde, “Heaven and Hell,” 1:309.
Davids, “Hades,” 912. The “locked gates of Sheol imprisoning the dead,” a metaphor for the finality of death, is referenced in the NT at Mt 16:18.
Stanley E. Porter, “Septuagint/Greek Old Testament,” in Dictionary of New Testament Background (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2023), 1099.“
Belief in the resurrection of the body had been a fundamental part of Jewish thinking at least from the second pre-Christian century. Once the view had become orthodox, Judaism quite forgot that it was new and soon was easily convinced that it had been taught in the Scriptures from the beginning.” Morton Scott Enslin, Christian Beginnings, Parts I&II. (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1938), 114.
J. Jeremias, “ᾅδης,” TDNT, 1:146–147. Also, see J. Lunde, “Heaven and Hell,” DJG 1:307–11.
Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (Chatham: W & J Mackay & Co Ltd, 1969), 270.
“The editorial comment in 17:1 reminds us that the audience for this parable is still the Pharisees; there has in fact been no break in the teaching of Jesus since v. 15.” Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, 632.
My emphasis. D. K. Innes, “Sheol,” in New Bible Dictionary, 3rd Edition. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1996), 1092.
J. Jeremias, “Παράδεισος,” TDNT, 5:765–6.
“It is a common late-Jewish conception that the righteous and the wicked can see one another in the intermediate state.” Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, 129.
Robert Henry Charles, Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 2:203.
F. C. Fensham, “Paradise,” in New Bible Dictionary, 3rd Edition. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1996), 870.
Along with inducing theologians into “tracing the evolution of a lofty idea of God from crude primitive origins,” in order to defend against the caricature of God as a “timeless tyrant, … the Enlightenment did a further service to Christianity by ridiculing hell.” John McManners, “Enlightenment: Secular and Christian (1600 -1800),” in Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 282.
“The preaching of hell fire … seems so unchristian now in its use of the weapon of fear.” McManners, “Enlightenment,” 297.
Maurice Wiles, “What Christians Believe,” in Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 566–67.
Nicolson, God’s Secretaries, xii.
My emphasis. Robert Stewart, “Purgatory,” in Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 1350.
F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. rev. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 475, 742.
My emphasis. Dale A. Brueggemann, “Descent into the Underworld, Critical Issues,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016, n.d.).
“In order to know that the rich should not live in luxury while the poor starve, a revelation from beyond the grave is not necessary because the scriptures are sufficient.” Richard J. Bauckham, “Lazarus,” in New Bible Dictionary (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1996), 679.
Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, 128.