most priests i've heard from said the destination of most people's souls is hell, not purgatory, and that's biblical. heaven is the narrow path, and purgatory leads to heaven, not hell.
"}\n\nbe funny if purgatory led to hell, like what, an appetiser?
hell isn’t biblical
And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off. It is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
Mark 9:43-44
The Bible doesn’t have a doctrine or theory of Hell in any kind of meaningful sense, and all the rules came from theologians; but it’s not like the theologians were getting the core idea from nowhere.
okay, you\u2019re right, there is a thing called hell, but all of the traits of hell and how you get there are not biblical so in any practical sense relating to what someone says about hell isn\u2019t biblical
unless they are talking about having a bad hand like in Evil Dead 2 and not chopping it off and replacing it with a chainsaw
I picked this quote – there are certainly others – because “the fire that shall never be quenched” and “the worm dieth not” sound recognizably like medieval(/modern) conceptions of Hell.
I have no particular desire to stand up for Christian doctrine or Christian practice, of any stripe, being rooted in Scripture. Mostly it isn’t. But you can look at the New Testament and find “the hot place where you suffer forever if you’re bad.”
okay but as an ex-Christian with a bit of an interest in Scripture, it’s more complicated than that. this metaphor got real lost in translation, and the translation you’re using is bad to begin with.
so there’s three words in the Bible that get translated as “Hell”. I looked up the specific one in Mark 9, and sure enough, it’s “Gehenna”. Gehenna is a word with a long history, but by Jesus’ time, it meant “the place outside town where we burn trash and quarantine lepers”. like, if you look at the Vulgate Latin version, which came along before Dante, it reads:
et si scandalizaverit te manus tua abscide illam bonum est tibi debilem introire in vitam quam duas manus habentem ire in gehennam in ignem inextinguibilem; ubi vermis eorum non moritur et ignis non extinguitur
And if thy hand scandalize thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life*, maimed, than having two hands to go into [Gehenna], into unquenchable fire; where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished.
In the context of Mark 9, where Jesus has just healed an epileptic and is talking about not hurting children, Mark 9:33-34 means something more along the lines of:
“If your hand ~has a mind of its own~ and you can’t stop hurting people with it, you should cut the damn thing off and become a better person. Or climb into a dumpster that’s full of zombie worms and eternally on fire, because you’re trash.”
(*“Eternal life” in Jesus’ worldview is a complicated thing; he may have meant ‘heaven’, but he may have meant something more like 'enlightenment’ or 'gnosis’.)
Jesus liked his metaphors and parables, and he’d bring them in where he could, because they make ideas stick in people’s heads. And sometimes those parables included concepts from Roman culture- like the Graeco-Roman conception of Hell, which does have layers of eternal fire and torment for those who anger the gods. In the same way that someone who’s Christian might say “karma is a bitch” without believing in karma, Jesus used the dominant culture’s understanding of the afterlife to make his point. He may or may not have believed in a Tartarus-style hell- it’s impossible from this historical distance to tell- but most of the times that Jesus talks about the afterlife, it’s in an overblown metaphor or in a parable that is not meant to be understood literally, like the story of Dives and Lazarus.
the trouble is that … well, jaded ex-Christian here, but it’s real easy to control people with the idea of an afterlife. combine that with the fact that the idea of a Tartarus-style hell was such a dominant part of Graeco-Roman culture, and some syncretism happened. The writings of Paul and John The Revelator codified this understanding. Heaven and Hell ™ became an inextricable part of Christianity.
AND THEN DANTE AND MILTON HAPPENED. Between the two of them, they created such compelling visions of Hell that they changed Christian pop culture’s understanding of it forever. You cannot write a version of Hell without being influenced by them. You just can’t. Even if you’ve never read either Inferno or Paradise Lost, the versions of hell you’ve seen in pop culture owe a lot to them. But their hells- especially Dante’s Inferno- really don’t have a ~BIBLICAL BASIS~ . Inferno’s full of Greek/Roman symbolism that he pulled in just to make a better story. Greek and Roman gods show up as demons; Greek and Roman heroes show up as damned souls. It makes sense he’d pull from the Graeco-Roman version of Hell.
so any translation that happened after Dante and/or Milton- including the King James version, which is itself kind of a shitshow and I can talk about it more if you like- is going to be drawing from that cultural construct of a Fire And Brimstone Dantean Hell. but that construct was definitely not what Jesus was talking about, especially not in this case. Dante’s Hell didn’t exist in its current form. Tartarus was a place of fire and eternal torment, but it was for people who pissed off the gods, not for Sinners ™.
the concept of hell is something you can pull out of Jesus’ teachings, but only if you’re already expecting to see it there. if you were coming from the same cultural context as Jesus’s original followers, it’d be a squinch more difficult.