Post by @michaelgemar@cosocial.ca

2026-04-14 14:59 UTC

@MichaelTBacon @TerryHancock @futurebird I agree that other religions had some notion of an afterlife as reward and punishment — I should have been more precise that the Christian notion of hell as post-mortem punishment does not really have a precedent in the Old Testament, and comes from the Jesus in the Gospels (and elsewhere in the NT). The many specific gory details are post-Biblical, but the general notion of eternal conscious torment as punishment is NT.

Replies (1)

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop 2026-04-14 15:38

@michaelgemar @TerryHancock @futurebird Eternal conscious torment is not, to my knowledge, in the Gospels. I rely on things like Wikipedia and search engines, but in terms of things actually in the original Greek (and not King James embellishments), there's only one reference to anything like it, and it's "everlasting punishment" in Matthew 25, which isn't explained at all. (Permanent death could be an "everlasting punishment," after all.) Clearly there are very harsh words, particularly in Matthew, and there's the framework in the words to build Dante's Inferno on, but there have been plenty of Christian theologians, including some pretty major ones who were all about scriptural centrality, who have discarded the conventional notion of hell and said, yeah, that's not on. Which is pretty normal for religions. (Judaism went to Babylon and brought back a whole host of demons and angels.) But I don't think you can say it was all Jesus' invention. He mostly just references it.

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