History of Hell in Islam

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History of Hell in Islam
OP - June 11, 2015, 06:42 PM

I want to compose just a brief overview of the evolution of the idea of Hell from Judaism to Christianity to Islam.

This is what I've written so far. Please give me any thoughts/comments/corrections (Bear in mind I do want to keep it brief.)

****************************************************************************

Early Judaism had no concept of Hell. The concept of an afterlife was introduced by later rabbinical writers during the Hellenic period when they were influenced by neighbouring Hellenistic religions. However the Old Testament itself only speaks of Sheol which meant grave and had a neutral connotation.

It is not until Christianity that a doctrine of Hell as a place of eternal suffering begins to develop. The words translated as Hell in the New Testament are; Gehenna, Hades & Tartarus.

The word Gehenna is the Greek version of the Hebrew word GeHinnom - where the Qur'anic word Jahannam comes from. GeHennom literally means the valley of Hennom and it was a valley outside the walls of Jerusalem which had been used by pagans for child sacrifice. It was later deemed unholy and used to burn the rubbish from the city. The bodies of criminals and animal carcasses were also thrown there. Continual fires were necessary to keep down the stench and putrefaction. The audience at the time of the New Testament would have immediately understood the metaphorical reference in the Gospel of Matthew (23:33) when Jesus criticises the Jewish scribes and Pharisees saying: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of GeHinnom?" (Matthew 23:33)

The Greek word Hades was used in the New Testament to mean simply "the place of the dead" or "grave" and it is used in reference to both the righteous and the wicked, since both wind up there eventually.

Tartarus occurs only once in the New Testament where it is a place of incarceration of the fallen angels. It mentions nothing about human souls being sent there in the afterlife.

These are the words translated as Hell in the New Testament. However later Christian writers embellished the concept as a place of eternal suffering and torment, describing it in ever more gruesome detail.

At the time Muhammad was growing up this very graphic and literal view of Hell would have been the current view.
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Reply #1 - June 11, 2015, 08:18 PM

Have you read Pagels on Satan?

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #2 - June 11, 2015, 08:29 PM

No. Could you tell me more, please?
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Reply #3 - June 11, 2015, 08:29 PM

And do you think the above is OK?
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Reply #4 - June 11, 2015, 08:49 PM

Good start! Some additions though:

1. The original word for the hell in Hebrew is Sheol. Like Hades in the Odyssey, it is a place of gloomy almost non-existence that both the righteous and the sinners go to after their deaths. It could be reasonably inferred from the documents themselves that the writers viewed Sheol as nothing but a metaphor for death, and this view was the view of many Jews at the time of Jesus. The Torah and the Writings (ketuvim) offer the believer no incentive of the afterlife, but instead promise the believer only blessings in this life for following God's laws. Only in of the later prophets (nevi'im) and the apocryphal writings in Greek (especially Maccabbees) do we start to see the idea that YHVH (adonai=God) will bless the believer with some kind of eternal life after death. At the time of Jesus, the position of the Sadduccees (a now defunct branch of Judaism which rejected the oral Torah(talmud) and instead relied soley on the 5 books of the Pentateuch) was that there is no afterlife, and in Matthew 22:23-34 the Saduccees actually argue with Jesus on this point.

2. The original theology of the NT on hell, expressed most completely in the book of Revelations, is that it is a place of terrible suffering and destruction and torment but not eternal punishment. All mentions of hell by Jesus in the Gospels and revelations indicate that the unbelievers will be burned to destruction there, but they will be destroyed and their torments will not last forever.

3. The idea of hell as eternal only developed slowly in the first Christian centuries, as the church suffered helplessly under the persecution of the pagan Romans. Unable to stop their persecution and forbidden by their creed from taking up arms to defend themselves, Christian church fathers like Tertulian turned their powerless rage to spite in the form of elaborate fantasies of hell that supposedly awaited their pagan oppressors. The fantasies served to keep the faithful in line and console their powerless anger, as well as encouraging spectacles of martyrdom by pitiful fanatics who believed that their oppressors would 'get it back good' in the afterlife. After the rise of Imperial Christianity the church found hell a very convenient way to keep the faithful in line and terrorize heretics and pagans. It proved such an enticing idea that imperial Zoroastrianism in Persia picked the idea up and copied many of its tropes. The persecution-era fantasies of the early Church Fathers, people being forced to drink boiling water, having their skins ripped off and put back on again, having their eyes put out and put back in, found their way both into the Quran and into Sassanid era Zoroastrian texts.

4. The idea that heaven and hell await the believer and the unbeliever, respectively, immediately following death, are platonic and gnostic ideas that owe their origin to Greek philosophy's penetration of Islam and Christianity during the middle ages. The Quran, the Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the book of Revelations (I don't know enough about talmudic post-2nd temple Judaism to speak to it but I imagine it's also the case for the Talmud )are all in agreement that the afterlife awaits the believer and the unbeliever in physical, not spiritual form only after the day of judgment and the resurrection. Paul in particular is very adamant that we will only experience the afterlife after the resurrection of the physical body of the believer and unbeliever, an idea that apparently earned him quite a ribbing from the Greek philosophers of Athens if Acts is to be trusted. The first Christians and paleo-Muslims would find the modern idea of dying and awaking immediately in heaven or hell to be both strange and heretical.

إطلب العلم ولو في الصين

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Reply #5 - June 11, 2015, 08:54 PM

It's kind of ludicrous how so many modern Christians and Muslims build their whole lives out of the fear of Hell, but in point of fact their ideas about it differ markedly from the original ideas of hell and are much more influenced by popular culture than the traditions and theologies of the religions involved.

إطلب العلم ولو في الصين

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Reply #6 - June 11, 2015, 08:55 PM

Thanks countjulian - that is very helpful. I will make some changes. Though I want to keep it very brief as it will form only part of a general Khutbah on Hell that I'm hoping to give tomorrow.
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Reply #7 - June 11, 2015, 08:59 PM

Ya no problem. I have researched this a lot, the idea of hell is so easy to trace and so patently self-serving for the religious traditions that promote it that I cannot believe anyone takes it seriously. When I was a Catholic my solution was literally to never think about it under any circumstances.

إطلب العلم ولو في الصين

Es sitzt keine Krone so fest und so hoch,
Der mutige Springer erreicht sie doch.

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Reply #8 - June 11, 2015, 09:01 PM

The above is all accurate. However, in the book of Revelation, a "Lake of Fire" is mentioned in which everyone who's name is not written in the book of life will be thrown. While Revelation is highly symbolic and this cannot with any certainty be referring to a literal hell, it was written in the late 1st century and probably right around when the medieval concept of hell was beginning to form.

Here is the apocalypse of Peter. Notice the graphic images it has of hell. It was probably written in the 2nd century and this is the first time a clear picture was emerging of unbelievers being tortured forever.

http://earlychristianwritings.com/text/apocalypsepeter-mrjames.html

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Reply #9 - June 11, 2015, 09:10 PM

As we get into the 3rd and 4th centuries we get these lovely contributions:

Cyprian of Carthage

An ever-burning Gehenna and the punishment of being devoured by living flames will consume the condemned; nor will there be any way in which the tormented can ever have respite or be at an end. Souls along with their bodies will be preserved for suffering in unlimited agonies. . . . The grief at punishment will then be without the fruit of repentance; weeping will be useless, and prayer ineffectual. Too late will they believe in eternal punishment, who would not believe in eternal life (To Demetrian 24 [A.D. 252]).

Cyril of Jerusalem

We shall be raised therefore, all with our bodies eternal, but not all with bodies alike; For if a man is righteous, he will receive a heavenly body, that he may be able worthily to hold converse with angels; but if a man is a sinner, he shall receive an eternal body, fitted to endure the penalties of sins, that he may burn eternally in fire, nor ever be consumed. And righteously will God assign this portion to either company; for we do nothing without the body. We blaspheme with the mouth, and with the mouth we pray. With the body we commit fornication, and with the body we keep chastity. With the hand we rob, and by the hand we bestow alms; and the rest in like manner. Since then the body has been our minister in all things, it shall also share with us in the future the fruits of the past (Catechetical Lectures 18:19 [A.D. 350]).

Compare these to the later Quranic descriptions.

Source: http://www.staycatholic.com/ecf_hell.htm

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Reply #10 - June 11, 2015, 09:11 PM

Love the website JustPerusing. That apocalypse is a really excellent example of hell in its more or early modern form. How can modern people believe such rubbish?

إطلب العلم ولو في الصين

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Reply #11 - June 11, 2015, 09:18 PM

It's to be expected from a species a few genes away from being chimpanzees. Our pre-frontal cortexes are too small and our adrenal glands too large.

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Reply #12 - June 11, 2015, 09:22 PM

Quote from: countjulian on June 11, 2015, 08:49 PM
It proved such an enticing idea that imperial Zoroastrianism in Persia picked the idea up and copied many of its tropes. The persecution-era fantasies of the early Church Fathers, people being forced to drink boiling water, having their skins ripped off and put back on again, having their eyes put out and put back in, found their way both into the Quran and into Sassanid era Zoroastrian texts.

CJ, have you read the book of Arada Viraf? It's much like the Apocolypse of Peter except for the Zoroastrian religion.

http://www.avesta.org/mp/viraf.html

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Reply #13 - June 11, 2015, 09:23 PM

Quote from: moi on June 11, 2015, 08:18 PM
Have you read Pagels on Satan?

Good god, I remember reading this for an essay back in 1996. Fascinating stuff, though my memory of it isn't much more detailed than that.

Hassan - this is the book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Origin-Satan-Christians-Demonized/dp/0679731180

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Reply #14 - June 11, 2015, 09:24 PM

Quote from: justperusing on June 11, 2015, 09:22 PM
CJ, have you read the book of Arada Viraf? It's much like the Apocolypse of Peter except for the Zoroastrian religion.

http://www.avesta.org/mp/viraf.html

I was actually thinking of it and your post on it when I wrote that

إطلب العلم ولو في الصين

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Reply #15 - June 11, 2015, 09:26 PM

countjulian - I have re-drafted what I wrote, shamelessly taking bits of your post above - I hope you don't mind. Could you have a look and see if it's OK?

But bear in mind I cannot make it longer than this - as I have other stuff to say - and the Khutbas on the farm are generally short and sweet lol

*************************************************************************

Early Judaism had no concept of Hell. The concept of an afterlife was introduced by later rabbinical writers during the Hellenic period from neighbouring Hellenistic religions. However the Old Testament itself only speaks of Sheol which meant grave and had a neutral connotation - a gloomy place of almost non-existence that everyone goes to - good or bad. It seems likely that it was simply a metaphor for death.

It is not until Christianity that a doctrine of Hell as a place of punishment and torment begins to develop. The words translated as Hell in the New Testament are Gehenna, Hades and Tartarus.

The word Gehenna is the Greek version of the Hebrew word GeHinnom - where the Qur'anic word Jahannam comes from. GeHennom literally means the valley of Hennom and it was a valley outside the walls of Jerusalem which had been used by pagans for child sacrifice. It was later deemed unholy and used to burn the rubbish from the city. The bodies of criminals and animal carcasses were also thrown there. Continual fires were necessary to keep down the stench and putrefaction. The audience at the time of the New Testament would have immediately understood the metaphorical reference in the Gospel of Matthew (23:33) when Jesus criticises the Jewish scribes and Pharisees saying: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of GeHinnom?" (Matthew 23:33)

The Greek word Hades was used in the New Testament to mean simply "the place of the dead" or "grave" and it is used in reference to both the righteous and the wicked, since both wind up there eventually.

Tartarus occurs only once in the New Testament where it is a place of incarceration of the fallen angels. It mentions nothing about human souls being sent there in the afterlife.

t is clear from some passages that Hell was not originally regarded as eternal. All mentions of hell by Jesus in the Gospels and in the Book of Revelations indicate that the unbelievers will be burned and destroyed and so their torments will not last forever.

The idea of hell as eternal developed later as Christians were persecuted by the pagan Romans. Feeling powerless the Christian church fathers turned to elaborate fantasies of hell that supposedly awaited their pagan oppressors. The fantasies served to console the faithful as well as encouraging martyrdom. Then later when Christianity finally became the state religion of Rome the church found hell a very convenient way to keep the faithful in line and terrorise heretics and pagans. The myth of Hell was now graphically detailed with unbelievers being forced to drink boiling water, having their skins ripped off and put back on again, have their eyes put out and put back in.

At the time Muhammad was growing up this very graphic and literal view of Hell was the current view.
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Reply #16 - June 11, 2015, 09:28 PM

Quote from: justperusing on June 11, 2015, 09:10 PM
As we get into the 3rd and 4th centuries we get these lovely contributions:

Cyprian of Carthage

An ever-burning Gehenna and the punishment of being devoured by living flames will consume the condemned; nor will there be any way in which the tormented can ever have respite or be at an end. Souls along with their bodies will be preserved for suffering in unlimited agonies. . . . The grief at punishment will then be without the fruit of repentance; weeping will be useless, and prayer ineffectual. Too late will they believe in eternal punishment, who would not believe in eternal life (To Demetrian 24 [A.D. 252]).

Cyril of Jerusalem

We shall be raised therefore, all with our bodies eternal, but not all with bodies alike; For if a man is righteous, he will receive a heavenly body, that he may be able worthily to hold converse with angels; but if a man is a sinner, he shall receive an eternal body, fitted to endure the penalties of sins, that he may burn eternally in fire, nor ever be consumed. And righteously will God assign this portion to either company; for we do nothing without the body. We blaspheme with the mouth, and with the mouth we pray. With the body we commit fornication, and with the body we keep chastity. With the hand we rob, and by the hand we bestow alms; and the rest in like manner. Since then the body has been our minister in all things, it shall also share with us in the future the fruits of the past (Catechetical Lectures 18:19 [A.D. 350]).

Compare these to the later Quranic descriptions.

Source: http://www.staycatholic.com/ecf_hell.htm

Wonderful - I will use some of these quotes too - if you don't mind
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Reply #17 - June 11, 2015, 09:29 PM

Great And feel free, not like I am making any money off of it lol.

إطلب العلم ولو في الصين

Es sitzt keine Krone so fest und so hoch,
Der mutige Springer erreicht sie doch.

I don't give a fuck about your war, or your President.
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Reply #18 - June 11, 2015, 09:32 PM

One thing, I actually am not sure where Rabbinci Judaism got the idea of an afterlife from. Hellenistic philosophy/religion is definitely a candidate, but so is Zoroastrianism, as well as the then-hundreds-year-old Rabbinic tradition stretching back to the foundation of the 2nd temple after the end of the Babylonian exile. Isaiah certainly has echos of eternal life in it, though modern scholarship holds it to be a book of more than one author. Same with the book of Daniel, whose authorship is even more complex. If someone else could chip in on that one, I would be grateful to know.

إطلب العلم ولو في الصين

Es sitzt keine Krone so fest und so hoch,
Der mutige Springer erreicht sie doch.

I don't give a fuck about your war, or your President.
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Reply #19 - June 11, 2015, 09:32 PM

Thanks CJ - I now added a little of justperusings quotes:

*************************************************************************

Early Judaism had no concept of Hell. The concept of an afterlife was introduced by later rabbinical writers during the Hellenic period from neighbouring Hellenistic religions. However the Old Testament itself only speaks of Sheol which meant grave and had a neutral connotation - a gloomy place of almost non-existence that everyone goes to - good or bad. It seems likely that it was simply a metaphor for death.

It is not until Christianity that a doctrine of Hell as a place of punishment and torment begins to develop. The words translated as Hell in the New Testament are Gehenna, Hades and Tartarus.

The word Gehenna is the Greek version of the Hebrew word GeHinnom - where the Qur'anic word Jahannam comes from. GeHennom literally means the valley of Hennom and it was a valley outside the walls of Jerusalem which had been used by pagans for child sacrifice. It was later deemed unholy and used to burn the rubbish from the city. The bodies of criminals and animal carcasses were also thrown there. Continual fires were necessary to keep down the stench and putrefaction. The audience at the time of the New Testament would have immediately understood the metaphorical reference in the Gospel of Matthew (23:33) when Jesus criticises the Jewish scribes and Pharisees saying: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of GeHinnom?" (Matthew 23:33)

The Greek word Hades was used in the New Testament to mean simply "the place of the dead" or "grave" and it is used in reference to both the righteous and the wicked, since both wind up there eventually.

Tartarus occurs only once in the New Testament where it is a place of incarceration of the fallen angels. It mentions nothing about human souls being sent there in the afterlife.

t is clear from some passages that Hell was not originally regarded as eternal. All mentions of hell by Jesus in the Gospels and in the Book of Revelations indicate that the unbelievers will be burned and destroyed and so their torments will not last forever.

The idea of hell as eternal developed later as Christians were persecuted by the pagan Romans. Feeling powerless the Christian church fathers turned to elaborate fantasies of hell that supposedly awaited their pagan oppressors. The fantasies served to console the faithful as well as encouraging martyrdom. Then later when Christianity finally became the state religion of Rome the church found hell a very convenient way to keep the faithful in line and terrorise heretics and pagans. The myth of Hell was now graphically detailed with unbelievers being forced to drink boiling water, having their skins ripped off and put back on again, have their eyes put out and put back in.

For example Cyprian of Carthage says Hell is:

An ever-burning Gehenna and the punishment of being devoured by living flames will consume the condemned; nor will there be any way in which the tormented can ever have respite or be at an end. Souls along with their bodies will be preserved for suffering in unlimited agonies. . . . [A.D. 252]).

And Cyril of Jerusalem said

if a man is a sinner, he shall receive an eternal body, fitted to endure the penalties of sins, that he may burn eternally in fire, nor ever be consumed...[A.D. 350]).

At the time Muhammad was growing up this very graphic and literal view of Hell was the current view.
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Reply #20 - June 11, 2015, 09:38 PM

Use all you need Hassan. From your mouth it will reach far more people that need to hear it

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Reply #21 - June 11, 2015, 09:39 PM

Quote
Q: Contrary to what people may assume, Satan is barely a presence in the Old Testament. What is he like?

A: There about five Old Testament stories in which Satan is kind of an incidental character. In the Book of Zechariah, he's the devil's advocate, so to speak, for the Lord. In Book of Numbers, he's not even a person. He's an angel.

The Jewish view is that Satan is always under the command of the Lord. Satan is one of his servants, one of his army.

Q: So the Satan of the Old Testament is basically a lackey, a kind of minion?

A: He is. In the book of Job, he can't do anything that the Lord doesn't authorize. He says, 'Let me do this thing,' and the Lord has to say, 'I'll give you this much permission. You can go this far.' He can't go any further.

Satan is not a rival to God at all. He's a servant.

Q: Did the early Jews ever view Satan as evil?

A: The only place I could find that is when Jewish groups split. It's only when God's people are divided that you get an angel who turns against the Lord.

It's a way of defining your enemy as the enemy within. Members of one sect see all the Jews who don't join the sect as the sons of darkness: We are the sons of light and other Jews are the sons of darkness.

Q: The New Testament offers much more visceral descriptions of Satan and demons. What changes?

A: If you look at the Gospel of Mark, it's full of demons. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is God incarnate and Satan incarnate is the son of darkness.

And Satan, of course, is in the Book of Revelation.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2014/0613/The-Origin-of-Satan-author-Elaine-Pagels-discusses-the-religious-figure-s-modern-conception

Compare Bede

Quote
Another of the king's chief men, approving of his wise words and exhortations, added thereafter:"The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed."

http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/bede/hist049.htm

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Reply #22 - June 11, 2015, 09:46 PM

I think a lot of this stuff is a result of something BoneyM sang about.

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #23 - June 11, 2015, 10:00 PM

This is an interesting topic. I'd been reading about this very thing recently because I was struck by how much more concrete the descriptions of the torments of hell are in the Koran* compared to the bible. But on the other hand had noticed that the popular christian cultural idea of hell was also very similar to the Koran's view (even if a lot of christians don't take it literally these days).

As mentioned by others above some of this can be explained by the existence of post-bible christian texts like the Apocalypses of St Paul and St Peter which have truly graphic descriptions of hell and specific torments. I was reading somewhere that these texts did not make the 'final cut' of the bible but nonetheless remained a very popular literary form among the Syriac christians among others in the early centuries CE. I suppose it isn't difficult to imagine that these ideas found their way into the Koran from these or similar sources.

*I still haven't got over the bit about "and when their skins are burned away we shall make them other skins so that they may truly feel the scourge". That one stayed with me!
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Reply #24 - June 11, 2015, 10:04 PM

Hellporn?

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #25 - June 11, 2015, 10:13 PM

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do with this, Hassan.
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Reply #26 - June 11, 2015, 10:34 PM

Quote from: Hassan on June 11, 2015, 09:32 PM
Thanks CJ - I now added a little of justperusings quotes:

*************************************************************************

The Greek word Hades was used in the New Testament to mean simply "the place of the dead" or "grave" and it is used in reference to both the righteous and the wicked, since both wind up there eventually.

One more thing. The use of 'Hades' as analogous to Sheol in Hebrew is pre-Christian. I was particularly thinking of its use in the Odyssey of Homer. In the NT it is used to designate the place where bad people go after they die, for instance it is the word used in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man for where the rich man goes.

إطلب العلم ولو في الصين

Es sitzt keine Krone so fest und so hoch,
Der mutige Springer erreicht sie doch.

I don't give a fuck about your war, or your President.
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Reply #27 - June 11, 2015, 10:45 PM

Quote from: happymurtad on June 11, 2015, 10:13 PM
I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do with this, Hassan.

I've jotted down a few ideas now - and will try to put it into a cohesive Khutbah tomorrow - going to bed now - but will post the Khutbah once I've delivered it.

Hope everyone doesn't walk out in disgust at my blasphemy lol
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Reply #28 - June 12, 2015, 12:13 AM

^
If you really want to go the 'whole hog' re: the blasphemy walk out, you could mention the very notion of such a place is truly despicable and an insult to any 'most mercyful' creator. The concept of Heaven and Hell is the ultimate 'carrot and stick' and a mockery to the intellect of any person remotely able to think for themselves. Such notions of Hell have clearly been taken advantage of by rulers throughout the ages, Catholic church etc.

Ok slightly off topic and only reiterating what's been said a 1000 times before on this forum but none the less an important point which regularly repeated can only be a good thing. Well alright then, perhaps break them in with the history part first and pending how that goes doyen you could hit then with something more subtle (maybe use Hell as a metaphor) but along these lines the next time.
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History of Hell in Islam
Reply #29 - June 12, 2015, 12:31 AM

Quote from: Doubting Tomas on June 12, 2015, 12:13 AM
^
..........Such notions of Hell have clearly been taken advantage of by rulers throughout the ages, Catholic church etc......well

well one cab blame catholic church for Christian hell.. which appears to have moved in to Arabic language and to Quran.... But hell is an age old thing even before the birth of Muhammad, Christ and Moses..

World Scripture....HEAVEN AND HELL

Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything
I renounced my faith to become a kafir,
the beloved betrayed me and turned in to a Muslim
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