Hell?

Contrary to popular religious teaching Jesus NEVER - not one time - EVER spoke about "hell". That is a fact! The word was not even invented until 725 AD. He spoke very clearly and specifically about Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom, a very real place just outside of the city walls of Jerusalem with a dreaded history where the Jews once sacrificed their children and had them burned alive.

Both Jeremiah and Isaiah referred to this place in their prophecies about the fate of the inhabitants of Jerusalem during the destruction of the city in 586 BC when the Babylonians laid waste to Jerusalem and threw hundreds of thousands of dead Jews into that cursed valley where they were burned up and consumed. Jesus was warning the Jewish leaders of the same fate which was going to come upon them within one generation if they did not repent and receive Him as their Messiah.

This is, in fact, exactly what happened in 70 AD, as chronicled by Josephus in his work, "The Jewish Wars" when the Roman general Titus laid siege to the city of Jerusalem and massacred almost the entire population and threw the dead bodies of the Jews into that very same valley of Gehenna where they were consumed by fire and eaten by worms.

"Hell" is NOT some future mythological place of eternal torment for people who don't accept Jesus. That is a man-made religious myth used to control and manipulate the masses ever since the Dark Ages of Roman Catholicism and has been carried over into Evangelical tradition. It should have been renounced and cast out of the belief system of the church along with the worship of the saints, the infallacy of the papacy, the selling of indulgences and many other pagan practices rejected during the Reformation.

Unfortunately Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et. al, did not go far enough in the 16th century. It is time to finish the work started during the Reformation and purge the Church of the pagan false belief in a place of eternal punishment called "hell".

Lee O'Hare