Did Jesus Go to Hell?

Dan McClellan "Today you will be with me in paradise," Luke 23:43. He did not say, "I will see you in hell."

Dan Beecher Or nah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That would be a weird thing for Jesus to- That would be so much better though if Jesus turns to the guy on the other cross and goes, "I'll see you in hell."

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are great. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Dan McClellan That it is.

Dan Beecher And we get to learn some interesting stuff. So I'm kind of excited to talk about it.

Dan McClellan Oh, I just thought of this. Sorry to interrupt.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But I thought it might be fun to bring up here. I have received two very cool pieces of news over the last two days. The first one was the other day, the Society of Biblical Literature sent out its annual society report.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And there was an article that was a spotlight on my work. And the article's title was "Stitch Incoming."

Dan Beecher Yes, I saw that.

Dan McClellan And it was like, Dan McClellan, something about it. And I remember doing this interview a few weeks ago. It was a fun interview. I really thought that article was fun. But then this morning, I got an email from somebody's name I didn't recognize, but he's like, "Hey, I'm the editor of Biblical Theology Review." And I was like, "Oh, I recognize that journal." And he's like, "Just wanted to let you know we're about to release this new issue. I attached a PDF of it for you, but the essay that I have introducing the issue all about public scholarship uses you as the model for what public biblical scholarship could look like." And I was like, "What?" So I thought that was really cool. So I'm not trying to toot my own horn or anything, but- Oh, no, toot away. But I got some pretty cool pieces of news.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So I was really excited about both those things.

Dan Beecher I think that's really cool.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I love it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I've managed to deceive everyone into thinking I'm an actual scholar, but I cannot, apart from a handful of dudes on social media- I was going to say, not quite everybody ... who can see right through the facade.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Some of them have me pegged.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I'm a fake scholar from head to toe.

Dan Beecher Yeah. But speaking of which- We don't even know if those diplomas that you've shown everybody are even real. I could print up a diploma.

Dan McClellan You can evidently just pay somebody to send you a fake one- Yeah ... according to some guy on Instagram who has a pseudonym and has a picture of an eagle and an American flag or something- Yeah ... in their profile photo.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Well, listen, I can just Photoshop a thing that says that I've got a degree from Oxford. That's not hard.

Dan McClellan But it's embossed. It's got there's gold leaf on it.

Dan Beecher Well, then there's no way I can do it.

Dan McClellan You can't do it.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Now I'm out of luck.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Getting myself onto their website would be a harder thing to do. I will say that. All right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Let's dive in here.

Dan McClellan Let's do it.

Dan Beecher We got two interesting topics that are kind of related to each other that we're going to go through.

Dan McClellan Little interrelated, yes.

Dan Beecher In the first one, we're going to be talking about Jesus and a trip he may or may not have made right after he died.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So we're going to see if Jesus actually descended into hell.

Dan McClellan Or to Pismo Beach as a- Or to, yeah.

Dan Beecher Any place. We'll see where he went.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Probably Santorini, I'm going to guess. It seems like a nice place. And then in the second half of the show, we are going to talk about hell in a different way. We're going to talk about Revelation, and the hell that it describes.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So we're going to have a lot of fun with this one. We didn't stop to think about what we would name either of these segments, so let's just- Yeah.

Dan McClellan That's true.

Dan Beecher So that's fine. We're just going to go with here we go. So- Here we go. Here's the first segment. All right. So this started because I was looking for interesting topics for us to talk about, and I stumbled- Right ... on an article on a website called gotquestions.org.

Dan McClellan Your questions, biblical answers.

Dan Beecher Yes. They do have that tagline. And I was sort of mystified by the question that is the question from the Got Questions, because it was something I had never heard of before.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher But I think a lot of people have. I was not raised with this tradition. And the question is, did Jesus go to hell between his death and resurrection? So yeah, I was a little baffled. I was befuddled by this.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher So the article itself mentions that this idea sort of cropped up quick. One of the earliest references we have is from what's called the Apostles' Creed, which I can't hear without thinking of Apollo Creed, but I know that that's different.

Dan McClellan Well, every time I hear it, I think this is some role-playing video game.

Dan Beecher Yes, exactly. It's neither of those things. It's neither- Yes ... a boxer nor a role-playing video game. It is a fifth century, is that what we decided? It's a Roman- ... declaration, or rather, it's a Latin declaration of a creed, which is just sort of an I believe statement, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, this is in order to demonstrate your fidelity to the faith, this particular group, you had to be willing to declare this creed, and then also it was something that would be repeated quite regularly.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I found versions, or I found the Apostles' Creed listed on websites for both the Church of England and I think the Catholic Church. So, it's still very much in circulation as a sort of an article of faith.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And one of the lines in it, it starts with the standard sort of, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth." Then it goes to, "I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son," dot, dot, dot, blah, blah, blah. And then it gets to, "Was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead." Oh, no. Oh, I'm on the Church of England one, and it doesn't say he descended to hell.

Dan McClellan The other one- You got a different one.

Dan Beecher Oh, come on. I'm on the wrong one. Many of them say, "He descended into hell."

Dan McClellan Yes, and then rose again from the dead on the third day. Rose again from the dead on the third day.

Dan Beecher And that Latin is descendit ad inferos.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh. Which I don't know.

Dan Beecher I got no Latin, so I assume that it's- The inferno.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, yeah, which is prototypically associated quite directly with hell.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And it looks like this is a variation on something called the Old Roman Symbol, or the Old Roman Creed, which was an earlier and shorter version that might go back to the second century.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And that version says, "Who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried. On the third day rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father" and thus and so.

Dan Beecher So- Oh ...

Dan McClellan that the descended into hell may have been inserted into this creed at some point between the second and fourth, or fifth century.

Dan Beecher Okay. So- Okay. So that's a, what a fascinating thing to just shove in there in the middle. Do we have a sense of where that came from, why that cropped up? Is it biblical? Does it come from the book itself?

Dan McClellan Well, I think the clearest reference to this, and this is something where we see this interpretation quite early, comes from 1 Peter 3:18. Now, 1 Peter is probably early second century CE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Maybe first quarter, maybe second quarter. So, 2 Peter is probably somewhere between 120 to 150 CE. 1 Peter might be a little earlier than that. But in 1 Peter 3:18, we have this statement, "For Christ also suffered for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit." And then verse 19, "In which also," so in the spirit- Mm ... "he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey when God waited patiently in the days of Noah during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight lives, were saved through water." And so, we got- Huh ... a pretty peculiar little reference to Jesus in the spirit proclaiming something- Yeah ... to some spirits that are in prison. And, there are a few different interpretations of this, but the Got Questions article that you have goes through and makes a pretty interesting little play at trying to renegotiate what's going on here, and concludes, "Did Jesus go to hell?

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan He went to Sheol/Hades."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Which we might be like, that sounds like a distinction without a difference, gotquestions.org.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan What's going on here?

Dan Beecher But what they- Yeah, and so we did a whole show about hell and Sheol and Hades.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But give us a little refresher.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Just a quick refresher on what we're talking about when we say those words.

Dan McClellan So, in the Hebrew Bible, you have no concept of hell as we understand it.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You have Sheol, and in the King James Version, that is translated as hell every single time. But Sheol is a reference to the grave and the abode of all the dead. Because prior to basically Greco-Roman period Judaism, good, bad, indifferent, somewhere in between, everybody went to the same place after you died. It was this murky existence in the underworld that was inhabited by questionable creatures, and your relationship with the living was unclear. But, in the way they buried people seemed to suggest they thought their existence continued on in some sense, and that there was even communion and communication that was possible back and forth across that divide. But Sheol is just the abode of all the dead that was located- Right ... in the underworld. And then with the Enochic literature, 1 Enoch, Jubilees, other related traditions that are part of these texts that were written in Greco-Roman period Judaism, you have this development of different places where people went after death based on their behavior in life. And this primarily arises in the Persian and Greco-Roman periods as Jewish thinkers are kind of contemplating the problem of evil and going, "Hey, a lot of good people are suffering, our people- ... persecution, oppression, and they are dying and we're not seeing them receive any kind of justice from God.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Where is God's justice for the righteous? And then they're also seeing phenomenally wicked people, the people responsible for the oppression and the persecution and things like that, and they're saying, "Hey, they're not getting their just desserts either. What's going on here?" Well, maybe it's in the afterlife- Right ... that folks are getting their recompense, whether for good or for bad. And so in the Enochic literature, you have ideas particularly of the disobedient angels. 1 Enoch is in some sense kind of fan fiction for Genesis 6, and it's extrapolating from that, this idea that these angels who descended and had offspring with human women and introduced the evils of warfare and makeup and everything like that. They, for their role in- Those equal evils of warfare- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher and makeup.

Dan McClellan The list is two.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Warfare, makeup. And they're imprisoned in a part of this kind of eschatological landscape. And then you also have these smooth places where the righteous people are waiting, and then you've got the unrighteous people who did not receive any judgment in life, and then you've got another smooth place where the unrighteous people who did get judged during life, they go to await their judgment or their allocation of some kind of final place where they're going to be either destroyed or punished or whatever. And so you have ideas about different levels of the afterlife in the Enochic literature, and then we get into the New Testament, and we've got three Greek words that are used to refer to some kind of place of postmortem divine punishment. You've got Hades or Hades, which is clearly borrowed from Greek, which is very similar to Sheol. It's the abode of all the dead, but then you have Hades is subletted. You've got Tartarus is the place where the bad people go to get punished, and that's where you don't want to end up. And Tartarus occurs once in the New Testament in one of the two letters of Peter. And then the other word is Gehenna or Gehenna, which is a Greek transliteration of the Valley of Hinnom, which became symbolically associated with evil and became this eschatological place where the bodies of the wicked are going to be stacked. And that's where we get this idea that there's this fire that never dies, or the fire is never quenched, and the worm never dies.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And originally, the idea was there are always new bodies being heaped into the pile so that the fire never runs out of fuel and the worms never run out of food. But then later, that gets reinterpreted to mean if you go there, the fire will burn you and will never go away, and the worms- Right ... will eat at you, and they will never go away. And so- Right ... so these things are all changing. The concept of the afterlife and punishment in the afterlife is constantly changing. And so what this article is trying to do is trying to weave it all together into this rich tapestry of something that we can just pretend has a plausible case for being consistent. And that's where we're going to get through this, "No, no, he didn't go to hell," argument because they want to suggest that Hades and Sheol need to be equated.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And both of those are a temporary dwelling place for all of the dead, and then the idea is that this, they talk about in Revelation 20:11-15, and we're going to talk about those passages in the next part. It makes a clear distinction between Hades and the lake of fire, and so they're suggesting Hades and the lake of fire are not one and the same. So the lake of fire is not in Hades, but Hades is going to get chucked into the lake of fire, oddly enough. So- We'll get to that later. We'll get to the- Yeah, we'll get to that later ...

Dan Beecher chucking of Hades. So- It's lake of fire adjacent, though. I think we can safely say. It might not be there, but it overlooks it. You've got a view.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher If you're in a penthouse in Hades, you're going to be able to see the lake of fire.

Dan McClellan And they say that Sheol/Hades is a realm with two divisions, a place of blessing and a place of judgment. And so that's where they're going to tie in Lazarus and the rich man, this parable- Mm ... about how Lazarus dies, and he goes off to the bosom of Abraham, and then the rich man is down and being tormented and just is begging Lazarus to let some water drip off his fingers into his mouth so he can be satisfied. And so what is fundamentally a diachronic difference, diachronic means through time, and so in other words, the ideas are changing as time goes on.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But because we're preserving the text from earlier, we get all of the ideas. And GotQuestions is trying to collapse that diachronic difference and smoosh it all together and say, "No, it's all perfectly consistent with everything else." And what they come up with is that Sheol/Hades is this temporary place where you have the two different divisions, and then hell is not, let's see. So they say that hell is not a correct translation of a bunch of things.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Today you will be with me in paradise," Luke 23:43. He did not say, "I will see you in hell."

Dan Beecher Or nah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That would be a weird thing for Jesus to- That would be so much better, though, if Jesus turns to the guy on the other cross and goes, "I'll see you in hell."

Dan McClellan I would love to have seen Willem Dafoe look over and just glaringly say, "I'll see you in hell."

Dan Beecher No, he said, "Today you will be with me in paradise."

Dan McClellan Yes. So paradise must be the division that has blessings in Sheol/Hades.

Dan Beecher One problem with that claim is that just because Jesus said, "I'll see you today in paradise," doesn't mean he didn't also then go to hell.

Dan McClellan Yeah. He's like, "I got a 4:00 in hell."

Dan Beecher He's got three days. He can boogie around all of the afterlife. He can check everything out.

Dan McClellan I don't know. That's not including travel.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But what they're basically saying here is there's Sheol/Hades, and there's a good side and a bad side.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then there's hell, and Jesus did not go to hell. But we got this thing about Jesus preaching to the spirits in prison.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So what's going on there? And so we've got two other articles on GotQuestions.org.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan One is, "Who were the spirits in prison?" So we're talking about 1 Peter 3:18-20. And here, they give a few different options. Number one, the spirits in prison are fallen angels or demons. And this is an idea that is based on, again, 1 Enoch, the Enochic literature. Because one of the things it talks about is how these angels are going to be punished. In fact, I'll read a tiny bit from 1 Enoch 10. After the angels have done all these naughty things, God is like, "Ugh." Commissions some angels. So in chapter 10, "Then the Most High declared, and the great Holy One spoke and he sent Sariel," who's Canadian, Sariel- "... to the son of Lamech saying, 'Go to Noah and say to him in my name, hide yourself, and reveal to him that the end is coming, that the whole earth will perish.'" And then he commissions Raphael. Says to Raphael, he said, "Go, Raphael, and bind Asael hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness, and make an opening in the wilderness that is in Dudael. Throw him there and lay beneath him sharp and jagged stones, cover him with darkness and let him dwell there for an exceedingly long time."

Dan Beecher Aw.

Dan McClellan It's mean. Yeah, and then use those sais that- Right ... I don't know how to use. And then we've got later on in chapter 21 from there. So now we've got Enoch is actually being given a tour of this eschatological hellscape. "From there, I traveled to another place more terrible than this one, and I saw terrible things, a great fire burning and flaming there. And the place had a narrow cleft extending to the abyss, full of great pillars of fire borne downward. Neither the measure nor the size was I able to see or to estimate. Then I said, 'How terrible is this place, and fearful to look at.' Then Uriel answered me, one of the holy angels who was with me, and said to me, 'Enoch, why are you so frightened and shaken?' And I replied, 'Because of this terrible place and because of the fearful sight.' And he said, 'This is a prison for the angels. Here they will be confined forever.'" So it certainly seems like 1 Peter 3 is riffing on this Enochic idea of these spirits in prison, and maybe it's the angels.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so why is Jesus preaching to them? There are a few different thoughts. One is that he's basically going, "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah." "We won.

Dan Beecher You suck." More preaching at them than to them.

Dan McClellan Yeah. More a victory lap. Another idea is that maybe they thought that the angels could repent, and then they would be saved, they would be let out of this prison. That's a possibility. Another understanding is that the spirits in prison are the-- And here I'm reading from the Got Questions article again. "The spirits in prison are the human spirits of those who perished in the flood of Noah's day. As for Christ preaching to them, there are three possible interpretations. One, Christ preached to them figuratively in and through Noah while they were in the flesh." So that's where Jesus is the puppet master, and Noah, who is preaching is-- And this is kind of a goofy reading of this.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Christ in the Spirit preached to the spirits in prison" really means that Christ manipulated Noah like a little hand puppet- ... to preach to the people who rejected him. That doesn't make much sense. B, Christ preached to them literally, being present with Noah through the Holy Spirit, who inspired Noah to proclaim the message of coming judgment. In other words, the premortal, preincarnate Jesus was there in spirit, directly preaching to them. And C, Christ preached to them literally in between his death and resurrection. And the article doesn't actually decide which of these is right, but it does conclude this way. "According to each of these interpretations, the spirits are called such because they existed in a spiritual condition when Peter wrote. They were no longer in the flesh, but lived in Hades/hell."

Dan Beecher There you go.

Dan McClellan In the previous article, it was there's Sheol/Hades- ... and that's different from hell.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Here it's they were in Hades/hell. So depending on which interpretation you prefer, one of them is that Jesus preached to the spirits that were in Slades-/hell.

Dan Beecher Hades/hell.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then the other article- And these are both articles from GotQuestions.org.

Dan McClellan Both of them from GotQuestions.org.

Dan Beecher Okay. And I'm just curious, if you go- Now we got more questions.

Dan McClellan Thanks, Got Questions.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So the did Jesus go to hell between his death and resurrection is a part of, you go to the content index, you go to Jesus Christ, you go to the cross, and the empty tomb.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And then the who were the spirits in prison, you got to go to content, index, books of the Bible, 1 Peter. But then you can also, through Jesus Christ, the cross, and the empty tomb, get to the question, where was Jesus for the three days between his death and resurrection?

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan So we got a third take on the same thing.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Yes. And here we have the exact same Hades/hell take.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, yeah.

Dan Beecher Exact same as which?

Dan McClellan As the second. So remember, you got Sheol/Hades- Hades equals hell.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You got- Okay ... Sheol/Hades does not equal hell.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then you've got Hades/hell, and now we're going to do another Hades/hell. So, at the very end, we have, "But they're kind of, again, they're playing with different interpretations. There's another interpretation of the 1 Peter passage. In this interpretation, the spirits are people currently in hell, but Peter is not saying that Jesus made a special trip to Hades/hell to preach or proclaim anything. Rather, Peter is giving parenthetical information about something Jesus had done previously in history, namely that he had in spirit preached to the people in Noah's day while they were still living on Earth." So, it's still toying with these different interpretations, but ultimately identifies these spirits in prison as being in Hades/hell, and that it concludes, "The only thing we know for sure," because definitely we know something for sure here, "is that according to Jesus' own words on the cross, he went to paradise. We can also say with confidence that his work of redemption finished, Jesus did not have to suffer in hell."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan A little non-committal.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It certainly seems like Jesus would've been able to visit without suffering.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Particularly if he's there in a preaching capacity. He can buzz the guards at any moment and be right there.

Dan Beecher He's there sort of as a Doctors Without Borders sort of visit.

Dan McClellan It's a- Yeah. So, but I'm going to go back a bit to the 1 Peter passage because the, so the Got Questions people, they're Christian apologists. They're trying to provide a unifying framework for everything. They are. That is not all that unifying. You can't be consistent all the time when you're trying to assert that the Bible is consistent all the time. So sometimes Sheol and Hades are not hell. Sometimes Hades is hell.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But the scholarship identifies some closely overlapping interpretations. And there's a wonderful new commentary, multi-volume commentary, on 1 Peter from the International Critical Commentary series, and talking about this, they say, "One theory which can be traced as far back as the second century," and we have this view attested in Alexandria, "maintains that between his death and resurrection, traditionally known as the triduum mortis, the immaterial soul of Christ went to the underworld where he preached to the souls of dead humans." So, according to this critical commentary, about the earliest interpretation we have is the notion that Jesus went to hell- Yeah ... and preached to the souls of dead humans. "Within this group, proponents are divided over what was preached and the group to whom the message was directed. The vast majority maintain that Christ proclaimed a message of salvation to the generation of Noah that perished in the flood, although other recipients have also been posited." And then another interpretation that extends back to the time of Augustine, or Augustine if you're nasty. "This theory arose out of a question posed to Augustine by Euodius, a friend and fellow bishop. Noting that the passage seemed to refer to Christ's proclamation of the gospel in Hades, which it was assumed would have therefore been emptied of all of its inhabitants. Euodius asked for Augustine's interpretation, and what he said was, 'If the Lord when he died preached in hell to spirits in prison, why were those who continued unbelieving while the ark was a preparing the only ones counted worthy of this favor, namely the Lord's descending into hell? For in the ages between the time of Noah and the passion of Christ, there died many thousands or so many nations whom he might have found in hell. Or if he preached at all, why has Peter mentioned only these and passed over the innumerable multitudes of others?'" And so what he decided was that this wasn't a universal thing. The idea was that the pneumata, the spiritual preaching, might refer to human beings who received the message of the gospel during their lifetimes. More specifically, he suggested that during the time when the ark was being constructed, the preexistent Christ preached a message of salvation through Noah. So we got that puppet master theory.

Dan Beecher Yeah. There we go.

Dan McClellan Basically. And then the third theory that's mentioned in the commentary is one that has become quite popular in more recent scholarship since the rediscovery of 1 Enoch. The idea is that maybe these are the angels that were disobedient.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And the commentary doesn't really say, "We like this option," but does suggest that a lot of critical scholars these days are leaning in the direction of understanding Peter to be referring to the angels. And I think there's sense to be made of that. But again, it's certainly not the earliest interpretation, and I think it kind of complicates whatever gotquestions.org is trying to do- Well- ... with their inconsistent little- Yeah ... reconstruction of what these terms all refer to.

Dan Beecher I think the point here, which is the point commonly with these sorts of things, whenever there's something like this thing in Peter where it's like what was he doing? We still have the question. It's just going to be a question perpetually because there is no obvious answer, and all of these theories are fine and interesting and valid and also unverifiable and completely guesswork. You know what I mean?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's educated guesswork, but I I think that the real answer is not to have an answer, right? Like the real- Yeah ... the correct answer to this is, "Uh?"

Dan McClellan Sure.

Dan Beecher Maybe. We don't know. We don't know what a lot of it meant, so have fun with it.

Dan McClellan I don't know.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, and that's something I've said an awful lot on my own channels, that as long as you're looking at this critically, and as long as you're making a good faith effort to try to understand what was going on for these people on their own terms, then as far as I'm concerned, that's a great foundation for doing whatever else. But just being transparent about the fact that at this point, we're just speculating.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan We don't really know. We're making some educated observations, but that doesn't definitively answer the question because most of the folks who need a definitive answer need it because either there is social or actual capital at stake that they are trying to arrogate, or because their own identity politics demand that they have some kind of confident answer, and they can't shy away from that. And Got Questions seems to be going from doing both sides of that, because in one article it's like, "Definitely not that," and then another article it's like, "Eh, could be that."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, I think that's great. We still have questions, gotquestions.org, so we're- And they've got other questions on this, too.

Dan McClellan I just looked at a related question that says, "What is the harrowing of hell?" And the harrowing of hell is the tradition about Jesus going down- Okay.

Dan Beecher Well, there you go ...

Dan McClellan between his death and resurrection and emptying hell. And there are famous paintings from the Byzantine period of Jesus coming out of a cave, basically, and there are some door panels that are broken on the ground, and that is representative of the harrowing of hell.

Dan Beecher "Go, you're free. Everyone out."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "Let's go."

Dan McClellan Interesting.

Dan Beecher All right, well, speaking of hell, let's move on to our next segment, segment number two. And in this segment, we're going to be talking about Revelation, and you- The Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation.

Dan McClellan The Apocalypse of John, yes.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Not the concept of revelation, but the book that bears its name.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher And I am interested in this because we sort of teased a little bit of what's going to happen in terms of things getting thrown into lakes of fire. But talk about how Revelation's hell might differ from the concepts of hell that we've already talked about, or add thereunto.

Dan McClellan Well, the main term that is used here in the Book of Revelation is Hades for hell.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And hang on just a second. I want to see how many times this word occurs in the Book of Revelation. So I'm just going to do a quick search for the occurrence of this term in the Book of Revelation. It occurs four times.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan We see it in Revelation 1:18, Revelation 6:8, Revelation 20:13, and Revelation 20:14. And so we're looking really at Revelation 20, verses 11 through 15. And in all of the other occurrences, Hades is associated with death. It occurs in a pair, death and Hades. Death and Hades.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan In Revelation 1:18, you have Jesus appearing to John where he's "in the spirit" quote unquote on the Lord's day, and he sees Jesus and Jesus says, "I am alive forevermore, amen, and have the keys of death and of Hades." The idea seems to be that death and Hades are locations, prisons, places where people are confined, but he's got the keys.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan He's got the way to unlock this location. But then when we get to Revelation 6:8, we've got a personification of the two. "And I looked. There was a pale green horse. Its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed with him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth to kill with sword and famine and pestilence and by the wild animals of the earth."

Dan Beecher So it's like a superhero sidekick situation.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so they're personified. In one, they're a place, and there's a lock on them. In another, they're these personified horsemen.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then we get to Revelation 20:13 and 14, and then it's kind of back to being a place, because John says, "I saw a great white throne and the one who sat on it. The earth and the heaven fled from his presence, and no place was found for them." So here we're getting metaphorical again. Heaven and earth are like, "Ah!" and run off- ... and can't find a place to hide, evidently. "And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also, another book was opened, the Book of Life, and the dead were judged according to their works as recorded in the books." And then we have, "And the sea gave up the dead who were in it. Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan "And all were judged according to what they had done." So it sounds like all the dead, wherever they're hiding, it's an olly olly oxen free. Everybody come forth from wherever. So we've got our Pirates of the Caribbean, all your shell-encrusted people are coming up from the sea- Right ... and marching out, and Death and Hades give up their dead as well. So we've had this lake of fire that is associated with With this place of punishment, with Satan and all this. And Satan and the false prophets get tossed into the lake of fire where they will be tormented forever. And then after Death and Hades give up their dead, it says, "Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire."

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan Okay. "This is the second death, the lake of fire. And anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So there's some inconsistencies here as well. We've already seen a personified and a non-personified representation of this pair, Death and Hades, and now we seem to be back to the non-personified. They're a place. They have the dead inhabiting them, and they give them up, and then they get yeeted into the lake of fire, which is the second death, but is also supposed to be eternally tormenting folks.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, we seem to be going back and forth between this eternal conscious torment and annihilationism because Death and Hades are not represented as personifications here. And even if they were, that would just be metaphorical.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Like somebody was trying to tell me, "No, no, they're personified, so obviously they're going to be tortured forever." I was like, "What sense does it make to have these places personified and then say, 'And then we're going to torture the personification of the place?'" Just to be mean.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's like, what did they do?

Dan Beecher "That looks like a nice place.

Dan McClellan What did they do?

Dan Beecher I'm going to turn it into a person and then torture it forever."

Dan McClellan Yeah, they didn't do anything wrong.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So it doesn't make sense that Death and Hades are going to be eternally tortured. It makes a lot more sense to suggest, hey, remember those places, Death and Hades? The places where people go after they die? No more death, no more need for them.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Therefore, they're being destroyed. They're being annihilated. Death and hell, poof, are going away.

Dan Beecher As a metaphor, it makes a lot of sense to say what Jesus has done or what God is doing is now sort of getting rid of the concept of Death and of Hades and of whatever. You can let go of those ideas. Let's just throw them into the infernerator and- Inferner.

Dan McClellan Yeet them into the sun.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because this is not something that's going to happen anymore. People are not going to die anymore. We don't need a location to store, to house the dead because they've all been given up to be judged and then they have elsewhere to be. And so even if you do want to understand them as being personified in some sense, I think the notion that the personified Death is going in a lake of fire for eternity, I don't know anybody who's going to get their jollies off of that. And if you are, you're messed up.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And then also just the concept of death. If the idea here is the concept of death as we understand it, I guess we've already established that in this case it's not death as we understand it, it is death as a place.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher I'm wrapping my head around it. I'm working on it. So we're not talking about death as in the end of human life or the end of life, we're talking about death as the place that a spirit would go after they die?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and that's Hades.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because when you look at ancient mythology, death is not this abstract thing. Death is actually journeying to the underworld. So it is a place.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And we tend to think of it in slightly more scientific kind of biological terms. But anciently, there were a lot more things that were oriented along a source path goal kind of metaphor or an inside outside or a directional metaphor. Like the concept of truth. We talk about truth as a thing. You have the truth, you can find the truth, you hide the truth.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You can give it in parts, in halves, in wholes. Truth is a thing.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan In the Bible, and particularly in the New Testament, but also to some degree in the Hebrew Bible, truth is a path. You walk in truth, you depart from the truth, you return to the truth.

Dan Beecher Huh.

Dan McClellan And so you've got to think about truth more as a path that is representative of behavior. And so similarly, you've got to think about death not as a change of condition, but a change of location. And so that's why death is represented as a location here. And I wanted to read from my favorite commentary on the Book of Revelation is from the Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries series, and Koester is the author, K-O-E-S-T-E-R, of the Revelation volume that was published in 2014. And let me just find where it talks about this. "The final judgment ends the work of Death and Hades. They are sometimes pictured as places that can be locked or opened with a key, as we saw in Revelation 1:18, and they are also depicted as sinister beings that hold people captive, as we saw in Revelation 6:8. Before the judgment, they 'give up their dead,' which means they have no absolute right over people. They do God's bidding by relinquishing those they hold." Then God deals with them as he dealt with the beast, false prophet, and Satan by throwing them into the lake of fire. The end of death is the counterpart to resurrection. As God brings the dead to life, he also terminates death's power to hold anyone captive. In the new Jerusalem, death has no place. So even here, the focus is not on, "Let's torment this guy forever." The focus is on the influence is over, the presence is over- Yeah ... the role of that thing is over. Judgment ends with the opponents of God in the lake of fire, which is also called the second death. Revelation refrains from using terms like physical death and spiritual death, and assumes that both death and resurrection affect the whole person. Ordinary death affects both the righteous and the wicked, whereas the second death afflicts only those condemned by God.

Dan Beecher Okay. There you go.

Dan McClellan Conversely, those allied with evil may now elude condemnation, but their future is the second death in the lake of fire, along with Satan, the beast, the false prophet, Death, and Hades. John's visions disclose the divergent outcomes of relationships with God and God's adversaries. And then he goes on to talk about how some people argue that Revelation depicts condemnation as annihilation rather than ongoing suffering. But one can imagine a political system and death coming to an end, but it is hard to see how they could suffer torment.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher That is- Most- That is-- It's, yeah, it's a very odd thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, I think the problem is we want this to be a rich, unified tapestry.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan That this all fits together, and that it all makes sense, as if it is some vision of things that are going to take place in the future, when really it's just a jumbled-up collection of apocalyptic imagery.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I don't think the author is like, "Oh, wait a minute, I got to change that to make it consistent because I did the thing over here. Now it all flows together."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think the author was like, "Ha ha, and then this. Ha ha, and then this." Because the idea is just- Yeah.

Dan Beecher John the Revelator has a very sort of beatnik sensibility. It's almost a gonzo journalism, what's-his-name thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You know who I'm talking about.

Dan McClellan Anyway.

Dan Beecher Yeah, he flows. He doesn't go back and revise.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher He's not heavy into editing. He's just a whatever's coming out is coming out sort of dude.

Dan McClellan Which I think makes it a problem when we have people today, in our modern world, who try to create this unifying framework that gives everything a place and everything fits together, as with gotquestions.org and everybody else who wants Revelation. Every time there's a car accident, somebody's like, "Ah, this is the beast from Revelation."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And somebody was like the trains that were derailing- Oh, yeah ... a bit ago, they were like, "Ah, this is the serpent with the tail like a scorpion from this part of Revelation." Because they think this is actually some kind of prophecy about things that are going to happen in the future. It's really just scary story time.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Like when you look- And taking it literally, very much to my mind, misses the point. If you try to take it as these are literal things that I'm predicting are literally going to happen, and look the way I'm describing them, you miss everything that he's trying to say in it. Now, I- Yeah ... I think a lot of what he's trying to say is nut balls, myself. I think he might- Yeah ... I think he might've been a little bit goofy. But if you want to understand it, if you want to understand what he was trying to say, taking it literally is not going to get you anywhere near it. It's very clearly metaphor. The guy can't even decide whether two things are a place or people.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That to me is plenty to just say, "Let's look at this as a metaphor. Let's chill out a little bit with the literal."

Dan McClellan And I think the reason there are so many people who are just allergic to recognizing that fact is because they want to try to make the text as useful and meaningful as possible to them.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And right now, there's an awful lot of utility in mapping whatever's in the text onto current events- Sure ... so that we can pretend we have some kind of insight into what's coming next, and that is horrifically dangerous when on a geopolitical level, we have bad actors who are trying to represent genocide as something not only that is prophesied to happen in the future, but that is something they should be excited about.