As a kid, I kept my mouth shut when this line (“descended into hell”) was sung in church. How could that be right? How could Jesus be handed over to Satan’s minions after all that Pilate’s soldiers had done to him? I struggled to understand the entire concept of hell: how could a God who is said to be a loving father allow any of his children to be thrown into the fire? Is he not the God who called this very act “something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind,” (Jeremiah 7:31). And if Jesus said, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43), to a man who was crucified with him, how can Jesus have descended into hell?

Did we misunderstand hell?

To make one thing clear from the outset: there is no place in the bible where Satan gets to torture souls. We should not impose the imagination of medieval Christendom or modern horror movies on the faith of apostles. The words “descended into hell” were not always in the Apostles’ Creed. We know that because we have an early commentary on the creed, when it was still passed on orally to baptism candidates. Around the year 308 CE, Rufinus wrote this about the text used in Aquileia:

18. It should be known that the clause, “he descended into hell,” is not added in the Creed of the Roman Church, neither is it in that of the Oriental Churches. It seems to be implied, however, when it is said that he was buried.

In this last statement, Rufinus echoes Acts 2:31, where Peter proclaims – citing a Psalm – that Jesus’s soul was “not abandoned in hell (literally: hades), nor did his flesh see decay.” In other words: hell in this context simply meant ‘death:’ as the body was laid in the grave, the soul descended into hell. For Peter and Rufinus, the one implies the other, at least for normal human beings. But what does that make hell?

The problem for us today is that translators have used the word “hell” for two different words in the New Testament: the Greek Hades and the Hebrew Gehenna. The conflation of the two has led to the construction of Hell as we imagine it. But Gehenna refers to a place in Jerusalem where child molesters would be punished while Hades is a state of mind. And Jesus descended into both.

Hades

Hades is not a physical place, but the state of the soul after death. In Hebrew it was called Sheol and the souls in Sheol were in a state of timeless unconsciousness. Just as the body is said to rest in the earth, the ‘soul,’ so visibly missing from the dead body, was said to rest in Hades. This explained reports that people had sensed or seen their deceased for some time after their death, things that today we would explain psychologically. For the Greeks, once in Hades, the souls had to pay the ferryman and pass the river Styx, and then rest in the fields of Asphodel. Only poets could make them responsive again. Homer’s hero Odysseus made them talk in return for the blood of a sheep that he sacrificed there.
Today we are learning to distinguish between the moment of death of the body, pronounced when the heart has stopped beating, and the end of consciousness which now has been proven to be some moments or even minutes after the death of the body. In other words, we are dealing with a typical mode of speech in antiquity, where the same thing would be said twice, but in different terms, in order to stress its finality: Jesus was dead: not just his body but also his consciousness.
This is not unimportant, as some people in Antiquity liked to believe that special ‘souls’ go a different path. The souls of great philosophers and emperors were believed to be so much akin to the divine intellect, that they would go up to the gods, shining from heaven like a star. Some Hollywood films would like us to believe that this happens to all of us. But for Jesus there was no special treatment, no valhalla, nirwana or heaven. His death was a most shameful death. He became ‘obedient to death, even to death on the cross’ (Phil 2:8). His body was in the grave and his soul ‘in Hades’ with the ordinary people and the criminals, with all those who had died before him and who had never heard of him. This is the primary meaning in the New Testament. Some, however, trusting God that whatever salvation had been offered to them through Jesus, came to believe that Jesus had descended into Hades, as once Odysseus had with the blood of a sheep, to communicate the message of salvation, and show them a way to defeat death (an idea supported by I Peter 3:18-20). He has gone there to conquer death, open the gates of Hades, and lead God’s children out. In the end, the Book of Revelation says, Hades will be burnt down (20:14).

Gehenna

Gehenna, the valley of Hinnom, was a waste dump under the walls of Jerusalem in the days of the prophet Jeremiah. The crawling vermin were kept at bay with fire. Under influence of Phoenician culture, infants were burnt as a sacrifice to the gods, in the threat of an invasion by the Babylonian empire. Some believed they would be saved because of the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. But what is the temple if the priests and the rich oppress the poor? They had made their house of God ‘a den of robbers.’ Jeremiah raised his voice and urged them to repent. “There will be hell if you don’t,” he could have said, when he painted a picture of what the Babylonians would do to them, leaving their carcasses to rot and burn in Gehenna.
Jesus uses the same picture. Hell is for those who molest God’s children physically, emotionally and spiritually. And just like Jeremiah he protested the corruption of the leading class: “You have made this house a den of robbers,” (Mark 11:17). Can you feel the anger of Jeremiah and Jesus when you read their fiery indignation? Jesus foresaw a clash between the Roman Empire and the Jerusalem Temple, ending with slaughter and destruction. You cannot sacrifice your sons and daughters to avert it. Yet, that is exactly what the Sanhedrin thought they could do with Jesus when too many people started to follow him (John 11:47-53):

Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.
“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”
Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one.
So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

So when a son of Israel was sacrificed on Golgotha to appease Roman power, his body buried in a stone quarry below the walls of Jerusalem, the disciples had to expect the worst. All they could hope for was that Jesus’s other instinct would prove to be correct as well: that the Lord would lead his children out before the end.
But hell was coming for Jerusalem.

*      *

From the fourth century BCE, Greek poets and philosophers came up with a geography of Hades and added judges who would assign the souls of the good to the eternal bliss of the Elysian Fields, or the wicked to the punishments in a deep and fiery pit called Tartarus, where also the disobedient gods of old, the Titans were held prisoner. The grey and misty fields of Asphodel became a sort of purgatory for those neither wicked nor good. This was the dominant culture in which the apostles lived, so they used its concepts and metaphors. In the Second Letter of Peter, the Letter of Jude and the book of Revelation we read that the disobedient spirits or angels, Satan and ‘the beast’ were thrown into a bottomless pit, an act referred to as ‘being Tartarussed’ in 2 Peter 2:4. Jesus uses this imagery in the parable of the poor leper Lazarus and the merciless rich man, whose roles are reversed in Hades (Luke 16:19-31). The rich man is tortured in flames, while Lazarus lying at the table with Abraham. Early Christianity had to combine the general ‘knowledge’ of its surrounding culture that included tartarus and hades with the specifics of Christian salvation. They wrote fictional ‘apocalypses’ in which the geography of hell was used to expose various sins outside and inside the church. In the Renaissance, Dante wrote his famous Divina Commedia, describing ‘Inferno,’ ‘Purgatory,’ and ‘Paradise’ with a mixture of Classical and Christian elements. Also, in this work, the element of metaphor is not lost: the circles of hell and the stages of purgatory are classified along the various sins, like envy, greed and pride. It was not written as a guide for the dead, but as an allegory for the living. You have to see sin for what it really is in order to be purged of its psychological power over you and enter paradise. Purgatory is basically the battlefield of the soul where we see the struggle between divine and perverted love, and all kinds of temptations and ambitions. 

Suggestions for dialogue

A moderator can explain the dialogue steps and invite people to contribute:

• Check in with yourself. Share with each other how you are in this moment. Then take a moment again to seek stillness, humility and openness. 
• First round: Share something from the text or image(s) that stood out to you and that you would like to explore with the group, briefly indicating the thoughts and feelings that it evoked within you. Listen to the others do the same: what resonates with you? Responses in this round should be limited to questions for clarification.
• Second round: Name one or two things that resonated with you from the things that others just shared. 
• Third round: Having heard the group, the moderator names the main topics for exploration. The moderator may also propose a common thread that emerged in several topics. The exploration normally starts with asking the person(s) who brought up the topic to expand on it.
• Leave room for silence and contemplation. 
• Check out by sharing what you take home from this dialogue.

These suggestions are an adaptation of the Estuary protocol. Look for more at https://www.estuaryhub.com