this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Being raised in a Christian household, this was one of the things that I first picked up on as a kid, and the adults did not like my line of questioning about it. In my teens, I learned that hell isn't even a concept in any Jewish or "Christian" scriptures... it's purely a holdover from Hellenist Rome perpetuated by Ur-Catholic Roman cults monopolizing and institutionalizing the religion. You can imagine how pointing these things out went over in a religious household and circles.
Something pinged at the back of my mind and wondered before what is so bad with eating the apple of knowledge. Everyone loves to have knowledge, right? The fall of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden also sounds so strikingly similar from the story of Prometheus, who gave fire to humans to help themselves, but he was punished.
Now as an adult, the stories just tell people to stop thinking for themselves and surrender their agency to a higher authority and be unquestionably obedient.
Children are natural philosophers. It's because they have fresh eyes and untrained with the world that they see things that adults were taught to not see or ignore.
I didn't save it and I wish I had. Someone did find a novel in Aramaic that mentions an idea of hell not far from the Christian idea. So to be pedantic it is found in Jewish writings but only once. It's possible it got picked up or it is possible that it was just coincidence and got imported from Greek thought, like most of the NT concepts. Also worth mentioning that most Jews at the time didn't believe in an afterlife and the ones that did had a very vague idea of it. This is why Paul seems to think that Jesus is the first person who has an actual afterlife.
Spot on. In Jewish thought (including Paul’s writings) there are three “heavens”. First, the sky. Second, the cosmos. Third, the dwelling place of YHWH. None of those are meant to be the a destination for any kind of human afterlife.
-Hipster Jesus