We have thus briefly explained all the
passages in which Gehenna occurs. Is there any hint that it denotes a place of
punishment after death? Not any. If it mean such a place no one can escape
believing that it is a place of literal fire, and all the modern talk of a
Hell of conscience is most erroneous. But that it has no such meaning is
corroborated by the testimony of Paul who says he "shunned not to declare
the whole counsel of God," and yet he never in all his writings employs
the word once, nor does he use the word Hadees but once and then he signifies
its destruction, "oh Hadees, where is thy victory?" If Paul believed
in a place of endless torment, would he have been utterly silent in reference
to it, in his entire ministry? His concealment is a demonstration that he had
no faith in it though the Jews and heathen all around him preached it and
believed it implicitly.
A careful reading of the Old
Testament shows that the vale of Hinnom was a well-known and repulsive valley
near Jerusalem, and an equally careful reading of the New Testament teaches
that Gehenna, or Hinnom's vale was explained as always in this world, (Jer.
12:29-34; 19: 4-15; Matt. 10:28), and was to befall the sinners of that
generation, (Matt. 24) in this life, (Matt. 10:39), before the disciples had
gone over the cities of Israel, (Matt. 10:23), and that their bodies and souls
were exposed to its calamities. It was only used in the New Testament on five
occasions, either too few, or else modern ministers use it altogether too
much. John who wrote for Gentiles and Paul who was the great apostle to the
Gentiles never used it once nor did Peter. If it had a local application and
meaning we can understand this, but if it were the name of the receptacle of
damned souls to all eternity, it would be impossible to explain such
inconsistency. The primary meaning then of Gehenna is the well-known locality
near Jerusalem; but it was sometimes used to denote the consequences of sin in
this life. It is to be understood in these two senses only in all the twelve
passages in the New Testament. In the second century after Christ it came to
denote a place of torment after death, but it is never employed in that sense
in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Apocrypha nor was it used by any
contemporary of Christ with that meaning, nor was it ever thus employed by any
Christian until Justin and Clement thus used it (A. D. 150) (and the latter
was a Universalist), nor by any Jew until in the targum of Jonathan Ben Uzziel
about a century later. And even then it only denoted future but did not denote
endless punishment, until a still later period.
The English author, Charles Kingsley
writes (Letters) to a friend: "The doctrine occurs nowhere in the Old
Testament, nor any hint of it. The expression in the end of Isaiah about the
fire not quenched and the worm not dying is plainly of the dead corpses of men
upon the physical earth in the valley of Hinnom or Gehenna, where the rubbish
of Jerusalem was burned perpetually. "The doctrine of endless torment was
as a historical fact, brought back from Babylon by the Rabbis. It may be a
very ancient primary doctrine of the Magi, an attachment of their fire-kingdom
of Ahriman and may be found in the old Zends, long prior to Christianity.
"St. Paul accepts nothing of it as far as we can tell never making the
least allusion to the doctrine. "The apocalypse simply repeats the
imagery of Isaiah, and of our Lord; but asserts distinctly the non-endlessness
of torture, declaring that in the consummation, not only death but Hell shall
be cast into the lake of fire.
"The Christian Church has never
held it exclusively till now. It remained quite an open question till the age
of Justinian, 530, and significantly enough, as soon as 200 years before that,
endless torment for the heathen became a popular theory, purgatory sprang up
synchronously by the side of it, as a relief for the conscience and reason of
the church."
Canon Farrar truthfully says, in his
"Eternal Hope": "And, finally, the word rendered Hell is in one
place the Greek word 'Tartarus,' borrowed as a word for the prison of evil
spirits not after but before the resurrection. It is in ten places 'Hadees,'
which simply means the world beyond the grave, and it is twelve places 'Gehenna,'
which means primarily, the Valley of Hinnom outside of Jerusalem in which
after it had been polluted by Moloch worship, corpses were flung and fires
were lit; and, secondly, it is a metaphor not of final and hopeless but of
that purifying and corrective punishment which as we all believe does await
impenitent sin both here and beyond the grave. But be it solemnly observed,
the Jews to whom and in whose metaphorical sense the word was used by our
blessed Lord, never did, either then or at any other period attach to that
word 'Gehenna,' which he used, that meaning of endless torment which we have
been taught to apply to Hell. To them and therefore on the lips of our blessed
Savior who addressed it to them, it means not a material and everlasting fire,
but an intermediate, a metaphorical and a terminal retribution."
In Excursus II, "Eternal
Hope," he says the "damnation of Hell is the very different
"judgment of Gehenna;" and Hell-fire is the "Gehenna of
fire," "an expression which on Jewish lips was never applied in our
Lord's days to endless torment. Origen tells us (c. Celsus 6: 25) that finding
the word Gehenna in the Gospels for the place of punishment, he made a special
search into its meaning and history; and after mentioning (1) the Valley of
Hinnom, and (2) a purificatory fire (eis teen meta basanon katharsin,) he
mysteriously adds that he thinks it unwise to speak without reserve about his
discoveries. No one reading the passage can doubt that he means to imply the
use of the word 'Gehenna' among the Jews to indicate a terminable, and not an
endless punishment."
The English word Hell occurs in the
Bible fifty-five times, thirty-two in the Old Testament and twenty-three in
the New Testament. The original terms translated Hell, Sheol-Hadees occur in
the Old Testament sixty-four times and in the New Testament twenty-four times;
Hadees eleven times, Gehenna twelve times and Tartarus once. In every instance
the meaning is death, the grave or the consequences of sin in this life.
Thus the word Hell in the Bible,
whether translated from Sheol, Hadees, Gehenna, or Tartarus, yields no
countenance to the doctrine of even future, much less endless punishment. It
should not be concluded, however, from our expositions of the usage of the
word Hell, in the Bible, that Universalists deny that the consequences of sin
extend to the life beyond the grave. We deny that inspiration has named Hell
as a place or condition of punishment in the spirit world. It seems a
philosophical conclusion and there are Scriptures that appear to many
Universalists to teach that the future life is affected to a greater or less
extent, by human conduct here; but that Hell is a place or condition of
suffering after death is not believed by any and as we trust we have shown,
the Scriptures never so designate it. Sheol, Hadees and Tartarus denoted
literal death or the consequences of sin here, and Gehenna was the name of a
locality well-known to all Jews into which sometimes men were cast and was
made an emblem of great calamities or sufferings resulting from sin. Hell in
the Bible in all the fifty-five instances in which the word occurs always
refers to the present and never to the immortal world.
