Where does the Teaching About Hell Come from?

The idea that the souls of men and women are cast into hell to spend eternity tormented for the evil that they did in this life is a notion borrowed from the Greeks initially, was taken up by Jewish rabbis of the inter-testimental period (the 400 years between the Old and New Testaments), and began to gain a foothold in the church in the 4^th and 5^th centuries of the church age.

Many of the church fathers were philosophers and teachers in schools of higher learning before their conversion to Christ and some continued to teach the worldview of the Hellenistic Greeks afterward. However, it wasn’t until the beginning of the 5^th century that Latin replaced Greek as the language of the church. A proliferation of Latin manuscripts of the New Testament was compiled by St Jerome and that effort produced the Latin Vulgate. It became the Bible of the church for the next thousand years. In both the Vulgate and in St Augustine, the doctrine of hell found champions.

That was problematic for the doctrine of Universal Reconciliation because of the predisposition toward eternal torment of the translators. This is when the idea of eternity began to take hold because of the mistranslation of the Greek aion (age or ages) as “forever”, “eternal”, and “everlasting”. See The Mishandling of the Ages and Everlasting vs Age-Lasting on this site.

For 1,500 years the prolific hell-myth developed a growing stronghold on the minds and hearts of church members and leaders alike perpetuated by mistranslations, the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, the works of Dante’ and Milton, and the preaching of the likes of Jonathan Edwards. Please see the chapter, May We Steal Your Hell, in my free webbook, Undressing Orthodoxy: Stripping Church Doctrine of the Garb of Philosophy.

Why is eternal torment not mentioned in the earliest creeds and statements of faith of the church?