He Descended into Hell (pt 1) |
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He Descended into Hell
In the course of the last couple of years I have had several e-mails concerning the clause "He descended into hell". The article "Did Jesus Really Die" skirts around the clause leaving an unsatisfactory gap in the Apostles' Creed Project. It is time to try and do something about the gap. Is it Biblical?Whereas it is not difficult to find biblical references for most of the credal statements, this one raises a question in the minds of many Christians.
It is my intention to attempt an answer to these questions in this article. Hell, Hades, SheolI will attempt to deal with the last question first as I believe that we can be confused in this whole issue by a rather mediaeval view of hell. Drawing from Jesus' references to gehenna, where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies, we have painted a picture of a perpetual inferno, Revelation's lake of fire, a place of eternal suffering and torture. We naturally question whether Jesus was cast into such a place of punishment. But that is not what the creed means. The original Greek of the creed says that Jesus "descended into hades". Now hades is simply a Greek translation of the Hebrew word "sheol" and sheol was not a place of eternal punishment, it was the place of the dead. Ps 115 v 17 says: The dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down into silence. (KJV) So sheol is seen as a place of silence for both the righteous and the unrighteous - a sort of waiting room. When Jesus told the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, (Luke 16:19-31), he described a situation in which both the protagonists went to the place of the dead. They were in different circumstances there. The rich man was in torment and Lazarus was "in the bosom of Abraham" yet, although they were at a distance, they could communicate. They were in the same place - though separated by a chasm. Where our English version says "hell" the Greek is "hades". Lazarus was "in the bosom of Abraham", not in heaven and the rich man was in a place of the dead, not in a lake of fire. Jesus' references to hell, where "their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched." (Mark 9:48) refer, not to hades but to Gehenna. Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, was Jerusalem's corporation rubbish tip. The refuse of the city was thrown into this valley and a fire burned there permanently to destroy the rubbish. Obviously, flies also bred there and there was no shortage of maggots - the worms that did not die. Jesus used this as a picture of punishment but it is not clear whether this punishment was in hades or in some future place. In 2 Peter 2:4 there is reference to God casting fallen angels into "gloomy dungeons". Here, the word for hell is "tartarus" which, again, is not a place of fire but of chains. "For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment . . . " is more literally rendered, "For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned but delivered them in chains of darkness, having cast them to the deepest abyss ( Tartarus ) to be kept for judgement". Tartarus, then, was also a place of waiting. Obviously they have been found guilty but they await the sentence which comes at the judgement. This judgement is graphically described in Revelation 20:11 - 15 when death and Hades and all whose names are not in the book of life will be cast into the lake of fire. When the Creed refers to Jesus descending into hell it is not to the fire that he descends but to the place of the dead - to sheol which, itself, will eventually go to the lake of fire which is the second death. This article is obviously going to be considerably longer than is appropriate for a single web page so I will stop here and continue in a follow up article. (All full biblical quotations in this article are taken from the New International Version and have been inserted into the text using "QuickVerse for Windows" from Parsons Technology .) |