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The Church's Development of the Hell Myth

Excerpt:

In the New Testament canon, Yeshua referred to "Gehenna," the valley of Hinnom, where garbage burned continually, corpses were sometimes deposited, and in earlier times, people had been sacrificed. He only referred to it to illustrate his lessons about spiritual growth and the Earthly realm--that the earthly body was meaningless and would be thrown on the garbage dump. Some suggest he was warning the entire Jewish nation that it must turn away from its Earthly focus and reform by being more concerned with spiritual growth and the inner person, and if it didn't, the Jews would be destroyed in fire. He was right, of course. Jerusalem and the temple were torched in 70 CE.

However, he didn't refer to a hell as everlasting torment for people who didn't swear allegiance to him. By the time of the first English translations of the New Testament, the hell myth had been so well rooted in church tradition that where the translators saw "Gehenna," they simply inserted "hell" as the translation. That led to the misconception about hell being in the New Testament and in Yeshua's teaching.

This steady evolution took Yeshua from a humble Jewish rabbi teaching about growing spiritually to love God and man, on to the Jewish Messiah whose followers would have eternal life by being in the kingdom of God he would establish imminently, and finally on to the Greek Christos man-god who would stand before humanity in judgment, hurling men, women, children, and infants not swearing allegiance to him into the torment of eternal fire. Yeshua would have found the judgment and cruelty ascribed to him distressing, and would have overturned the tables where the authors sat writing the myths.

Full article:

https://30ce.com/developmentofhell.htm

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