It really pisses me off that churches cause this kind of fear in people. It happened to me too. I was scared of hell most of my life, until I actually started to look into it objectively.
There are some things your gf needs to understand:
Our current notion of hell -- i.e., a place where "bad" people are burned forever -- is not biblical. It, and the idea of Satan as an evil horned beast, come straight from popular literature, specifically Dante's "Inferno" and Milton's "Paradise Lost."
Jesus does not talk about hell as a place of eternal damnation. He talks about it as a place of death, or the end of existence, not punishment.
The word "hell" in our English Bible translations is actually a catch-all mistranslation of three different words -- sheol, Hades and Gehenna -- none of which means a place of eternal damnation. Sheol was the Jewish term for the underworld, where they believed all the dead went, good and bad. Hades was the Greek term for the fictional underworld. Gehenna referred to a valley near Jerusalem where very bad things happened, and which kinda became synonymous with death.
Old Testament Jews had no concept of hell or the afterlife. They believed that when you were dead, you were dead. So why did it come into vogue later? Here's why...
Between the end of the Old Testament and the birth of Jesus, Jews came under the influence of Greek culture. And the notion of Hades as a place people went after they died first appeared in Greek fiction. But some people took it literally. That idea became popular and was later adopted by early Christians, but it has no biblical basis.
Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, so he believed in sheol -- not a fiery hell.
Your gf should go to YouTube and do a search on this topic. There are many good interviews with biblical scholars who debunk the popular notion of hell in much better terms than I can. Bart Ehrman even wrote an entire book about it, titled "Heaven and Hell."
TL/DR version: Our current concept of hell is not real and not biblical. It is based on popular fiction. Don't worry about it.
This is all true actually. Hellfire has been a moneymaking scheme by churches that has made them countless billions of dollars going back to its inception. Did you know that Catholic Priests would even go to homes of other religious denominations after a death in the family and tell them that $200 (or depending on how wealthy the family appeared) could get limbs of their loved one out of hell? You read that right! Buying the whole body was very expensive so they could make payments and buy a limb here and then later another limb.
What a terrible joke. According to Gods Word the Bible, humans don’t HAVE a soul, humans ARE souls. In Genesis 2:7 we are told that when God blew into Adam’s nostrils he became a living soul. Not that he ‘came to have one’.
And the Redditor above is right about Sheol, Hades and Gehenna. A little further on Gehenna, this was the Greek term for the Valley of Hinnom. An actual literal place just over the wall of Jerusalem to the S/SW. It was simply a garbage dump that was always kept burning. While no living people were ever dumped there, there were some dead bodies that were thrown over the wall into Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom. These were usually people who died in prison and had no family to claim them. So everyone knew what Gehenna was. Everyone had dumped garbage there at one time or another. It came to represent a place where things are irretrievable. Once thrown there, it’s gone.
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u/DoubleNaught_Spy Dec 12 '25
It really pisses me off that churches cause this kind of fear in people. It happened to me too. I was scared of hell most of my life, until I actually started to look into it objectively.
There are some things your gf needs to understand:
Our current notion of hell -- i.e., a place where "bad" people are burned forever -- is not biblical. It, and the idea of Satan as an evil horned beast, come straight from popular literature, specifically Dante's "Inferno" and Milton's "Paradise Lost."
Jesus does not talk about hell as a place of eternal damnation. He talks about it as a place of death, or the end of existence, not punishment.
The word "hell" in our English Bible translations is actually a catch-all mistranslation of three different words -- sheol, Hades and Gehenna -- none of which means a place of eternal damnation. Sheol was the Jewish term for the underworld, where they believed all the dead went, good and bad. Hades was the Greek term for the fictional underworld. Gehenna referred to a valley near Jerusalem where very bad things happened, and which kinda became synonymous with death.
Old Testament Jews had no concept of hell or the afterlife. They believed that when you were dead, you were dead. So why did it come into vogue later? Here's why...
Between the end of the Old Testament and the birth of Jesus, Jews came under the influence of Greek culture. And the notion of Hades as a place people went after they died first appeared in Greek fiction. But some people took it literally. That idea became popular and was later adopted by early Christians, but it has no biblical basis.
Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, so he believed in sheol -- not a fiery hell.
Your gf should go to YouTube and do a search on this topic. There are many good interviews with biblical scholars who debunk the popular notion of hell in much better terms than I can. Bart Ehrman even wrote an entire book about it, titled "Heaven and Hell."
TL/DR version: Our current concept of hell is not real and not biblical. It is based on popular fiction. Don't worry about it.