Heaven Knows Where Hell Came From

Most Christians probably think that their religion came with heaven and hell as a fully developed part of the package ...

The Last Judgement And Its Outcomes Occupy Many Religions

... but of course they would be very wrong.

 

Judaism at the time of Christianities creation as a breakaway sect, did not have the concept of a hell. In fact they taught that nothing would be decided about your fate, until the messiah arrived, and then a last judgement would be made of all souls. 

 

The Jewish apocalypticists believed that on that Day of Judgement, the righteous would be saved and go to heaven, but the wicked would not go to any punishment, other than that they would be annihilated forever. In fact the Old Testament contains no references to the traditional Christian afterlife. Jesus himself was firmly in this tradition of Judaism, and his only recorded words on the subject of the afterlife in the New Testament were "fear the one who can annihilate both the soul and body in Gehenna".

The concept of Hell (and the idea that you would go either to heaven or hell, and before Judgement Day), were much later concepts, which were not accepted by all sects. Now it has to be remembered that the most common lingua franca in the Palestine area at this time (and for many more centuries) was Greek, which anyone with an education, or who was trading, would have spoken, (not Latin, or even the Aramaic that natives such as Jesus would have spoken at home), so the early New Testament stories were written and recorded in Greek (often by ex-Pagans, rather than Jews), which was also the most influential language on the cultural and philosophical thoughts in the area ... that included on Jewish religious ideas.

 

In point of fact, it was amongst the Jewish scholars that the idea of an immediate post mortem, reward or punishment (before the Day of Judgement) first appeared, in a Jewish apocryphal book the '4 Maccabees' which is thought to be from the first or second century AD. This said that those judged as wicked "will not simply stay dead, but will be punished, tortured ... ". 

 

This concept, over the next couple of centuries transferred into the Christian tradition, which was being practised and developed, mainly by former Greek or Roman pagans who already had the concept of the immortality of the soul, but with no real background on the physical resurrection of the body (which the apocalyptic Jewish tradition stressed). So the idea of immortal souls, meant eternal punishment after death for the wicked, and with eternal rewards for the righteous, and this idea was finally cast into stone by the fourth or fifth century Apocalypse of Paul, which listed the eternal punishments of hell with some relish, fallen angels, fires and forked spears et al.

So oddly, in the intervening centuries, it could well be argued that few professed adherents of Jesus, actually believe in his stated views on the afterlife. Of course the greatest irony of all of this, is that those Christian sects that did stick to the stated words and teachings of Jesus on the after life, (that the unsaved are not tortured forever in hell, but their bodies and souls are annihilated on the Day of Judgement), have often been persecuted or condemned as heretics, exactly for doing so. 

 

In the 19th century alone, the Jehovahs Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Christadelphians and others were treated as heretical by the mainstream Christian religions, for holding to that concept. When you think how many Christian people have died fearing hell, its odd that its not actually a real Christian teaching, but something tacked on as almost an afterthought centuries later.