Was just looking up different things today and came across this website I personally thought it was interesting that the Pope would say something like this. Cool little website....

Who invented Hell?

Helluva a hot topic, Jon! So good that U.S. News & World Report featured a cover story about Hell in its January 31, 2000, issue. And in the summer of 1999, both the Pope and the Jesuit magazine, La Civilta Cattolica, were talking about it. They said Hell is not a place, but a state of being in which you suffer from being away from God. To describe such a condition, the Pope said the Bible uses symbolic language. However, some non-Catholic Christians still believe Hell is a physical place where your soul burns in the lake of fire for eternity

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...-invented-hell

I'm sure a woman is to blame.

You could say Adam invented hell.

According to the Bible, the hell that the unredeemed end up in is the grave, plain and simple, and it was Adam who brought death into the world.

I'm pretty sure it was a Christian.

Actually, it was a "pagan" concept that became incorporated into Christian thinking with the advent of Constantinian rule.

It was the Romans who had the lowest level of afterlife, not the Christians or Jews. It was called "Tartarus." Also the name of the God who ruled there.

But Hades, the general name for "underworld" which is how pagans conceived the afterlife, became conflated in the non-pagan mind with the lowest level, because Christians and Jews placed heaven in the sky. Or above it, actually.

So, hell was always a pagan concept, not a Christian one.

What was referred to in the OP, the suffering by being far from God, is the more ancient, and most constant, Christian way of thinking.

Any evidence, or is that just your bigotry talking?

Fail. However as a side note please stop grouping all religions except yours as "Pagan."

The Israelites adopted the idea of a "good place" for the good and "bad place" for the bad from the same place everyone else did--Zoroastrianism. Zoroaster the Prophet (ca. 628-551 B.C.E) started this in the Persian empire and the idea later spread into many other religious beliefs. This is not absolute fact but much like all other things regarding history, this is by far the best answer given the available evidence.

edit: and of course the Christians took this from the Jews (who were earlier Israelites iirc on my terminology) who most likely got it strait from Zoroastrianism.

You should read up, the evidence that the Israelites adopted things from Zoroastrianism is fairly thin and not held on by many any longer. There is strong evidence that many customs and theology was pre Persian rule. This is one of the most thin answers given the available evidence.

Christians get their non-Biblical ideas of "hell" from several sources, including Classical paganism.

Hell has gotten quite the makeover recently it seems. If it is true that the burning pit of hell with eternal torment cannot be justified as a legitimate interpretation, who should answer for the massive con the church and countless preachers have put over millions upon millions of people, scaring them into being good Christians? Who among you could take comfort in seeing how widespread Christianity is knowing that the growth was based on a massive lie by a Church who clearly invented an unjustified interpretation in order to manipulate the masses?

Not really. The grave is the same dull place it's always been.

Whoever knowingly perpetrated the fraud, of course.

Judging by the "testimonials" on various atheist propaganda sites, the non-Biblical "eternal barbecue" version of hell has had the opposite effect, i.e. one of moving people away from Christianity, which of course is why atheist activists are such ardent defenders of that misinterpretation.

Isn't that quite a large majority of the church for the past millenia and a half? Isn't it still going on across Christendom?

Well, that may be true for many in more recent times. However, you would agree that the church has abused the concept of the fiery hell to manipulate believers, am I right?

Actually, I'm wrong and I apologize. It most definitely could not have been a Christian. So it most probably was someone involved with authoring the bible. Is that better?

I wouldn't know how to determine who in Christendom is or was knowingly perpetuating the "eternal barbecue" error. Probably a very small minority while most people uncritically go along with what they've been taught, as is the case in pretty much all areas of society.

Maybe to some extent, since there are opportunists in any group. However, I ascribe the "eternal barbecue" misinterpretation of scripture mostly to the medievalism that also gave us dragons and sea monsters, rather than to cynical manipulation.

No wait! I was right the first time! Didn't the concept of hell originate in the NT?

Like most religious beliefs, it's the result of syncretism that took place over hundreds of years.

No, the Egyptians had a concept of hell over a thousand years previous.

It really depends on what you mean by "hell". The idea that some people go to a "bad" place? If that is what you are referring to than most definitely not. The concept of a "bad" place in christian theology is probably more what you are referring to. You can see that there are some of the early christian writers believed in some sort of torture. But one could argue that much of that was reactionary as they themselves were being tortured.

Most of what is commonly see as how hell is depicted arose from the middle ages. That was a pretty dark time.

I have argued many times in the past though that "hell" as commonly known today was a creation post NT and not ever meant that way by the original authors.

Just a question.
If the church accepts that hell is not a literal place why then do they not take the effort to correct people on a mass scale. I.e if a company makes products that then become toxic there is usually a mass recall. I mean the church basically sells two things Heaven and Hell. Those are the two options oh and I guess purgatory.

It'd seem that the church almost accepts that the idea of 'hell' is beneficial to their religion. Some one pointed out that hell was the reason a lot of people become atheist or turn away from the church, but im sure that if these numbers were somehow qauntifiable that the amount of people 'forced' or made to believe in christianity out of the fear of hell, would be somewhere in the region of 100,000-1 or even more (Complete guess)

Well, that's because by and large, there isn't a "The Church" making the decisions, at least in protestant Christianity. Protestants feel no need to listen to the Pope or any other Catholic doctrine, and going into any protestant church, you're going to run into many unique beliefs that vary from denomination to denomination, and even church to church within denomination.

That said, many denominations and churches do take hell to be a literal place, or, even when a pastor preaches on hell and tries to "take the edge off" by pointing out there might not be one or it might not be all fire and pitchforks, it doesn't do much. The idea of hell is simply ingrained in people's thoughts, and it would take a truly massive push to change that thinking. Given that Christians who believe hell doesn't really exist are already in the minority, there's just not enough force behind the idea to make it widely accepted.

Finally, the subject is very much up for debate even among very well educated Biblical scholars. On topics where no one can really speak with certainty, it's hard to pull everyone over to one particular side.

However, upon researching, the basic Catholic stance (since you seemed to be looking for a type of universal response) is that hell does exist, and it is eternal.

I looked for references to hell in the Bible and was able to find more than one reference to hell being torment-filled and eternal (Isaiah 66, Mark 9, Revelation 14 and 20), and most of those include references specifically to smoke and fire. I found none that would seem to imply the soul disappearing after death.

So, I personally would classify people trying to say hell doesn't exist as an attempt to ignore parts of The Bible in an attempt to make it more palpable for unbelievers.

It's fact checking time!

This is not so, according to (most notably) Isaiah, Mark, and Revelation. Death is one punishment for/consequence of sin, but it is not the only one.

Sheol, the Jewish concept of afterlife, predates the Romans significantly. You're correct in that the concept became associated with Christianity when the New Testament was translated into Greek, as the word Hades was used rather than Sheol, and has more torment-type connotations. However, Sheol is definitely a bleak place, where both the righteous and wicked went, with little or no recollection of their former lives, wandering an incorporeal.

I have taken quite a few history classes in the last year at uni and this is the standard doctrine as far as I know and have heard. But about the "customs and theology was pre Persian rule" part, we are talking here about specifically "heaven" and "hell", or "good place for good people" and "bad place for bad people" ? Want to make sure were on the same page.

As far as thin i guess this may be?? ... I am interested of course. Do you have any links or references?

God obv

Depends what you mean by hell of course.

If you intend a generic concept of some place bad people go to get punished after they die, then it probably predates the species. H. heidelbergensis is believed to bury their dead, and likely had some concept of an afterlife. Maybe H. erectus, maybe even outside the primates. It does not have to be species wide, just one small group of individuals who have developed the concept.

If you mean a concept of hell as incorporated into a specific religion, then it presumably was developed at the same time as that religion. So that would put the Christian hell at around two thousand years, but I guess its been modified since?

this is so awesome. (think about it)