Who needs hell ...

Be careful what you pray for !  I pray for illumination for myself and us all.  So in that spirit I posted below on hell as we'd had two Breathe readings on it and I was keen to explore what Jesus and His first century audience would have meant and understood by hell, i.e. from their end of the telescope.  Especially in the light of our understanding that they understood Ge-Hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom, Gehenna to be the city dump.  It was easy for me from that assumption to explore that regardless of the ultimate dread possibility of reprobation, of eternal damnation, hell is what we get for not living Kingdom lives now; that we may be better motivated to repent of pursuing our desires, not just from fear of ultimate damnation but also by realising that our lives and the lives of those we are complicit with in our desires can be redeemed now.


All very well and good !  But it turns out that apparently the earliest reference to Gehenna as Jerusalem's garbage dump, the first recorded reference to fires in the Valley of Hinnom comes from a commentary on Psalm 27 by Rabbi David Kimhi, dating from around 1200 AD.  And this has been known by scholars for nearly 200 years ...

So for me to read that in to Jesus saying is going too far and for that I apologise.

However : ) perhaps the point can still be made that the non-biblical Jewish understanding of hell that Jesus was using can be compared with the hell of life without Him now as well as after life.

Martin