Trooper Mick, on 03 April 2013 - 10:59 PM, said:
I also got level 6. I've heard that there is no mention of hell in the bible. Can someone like Mr Flibble verify that?
The word "hell" is an English word. You get references to Gehenna in the NT (Jesus talks about it a bit in Matthew). Gehenna was a fire dump outside of the walls of Jerusalem.
The concept of a punitive afterlife is Greco-Roman but even then, it is mythological (Tartarus). A punitive afterlife seems to be something Jesus or at the very least the Jesus followers (Matthew's community)...created isn't the right word, but they talk about it. I think I can safely say that they at least bring it into the European mind as something. I'm not sure off the top of my head if any of the Mishnah or other rabbinical sayings talk about a punitive afterlife.
In most ancient Mediterranean cultures, the afterlife was just a bleak existence. In the Aeneid, Achilles tells Aeneas that he would rather be the slave of the poorest man on earth than a king of Hades. The Psalms talk about how no one praises God in Sheol because the dead don't praise anyone. This is probably why the Sadducees didn't believe in a resurrection or afterlife - any reference to it in the OT is rather bleak or non-descript.
The Indian people seem to have a punitive afterlife by name (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka).
It seems that when the Bible made its way into Latin, it got mixed into Hell (fire pit)
http://en.wikipedia....ll#Christianity
Now I'm mildly interested in this and if I hadn't just decided to stop studying NT for a PhD (and stop at an MA for now) I would take time to study it. Right now, however, I have to figure out how to pay rent and eat food and not move back to my parents' basement.