A Brief History of Hell

It's my birthday today. So I wrote about hell. That's all you really need to know about me.

Today is my birthday! So I wrote about hell.

The evangelical church I grew up in held onto a belief that most Christians—even most evangelicals—would have considered extreme.

But for me, it was normal. Terrifying, but normal.

They taught that salvation had to be renewed every Sunday by taking communion. Miss church, skip the eucharist, and if Jesus came back or you died that week?

Straight to hell.

I remember one family vacation when we missed Sunday service. We got stuck in traffic on our way to Myrtle Beach. My dad—panicked—pulled into a gas station, bought a pack of saltines and a bottle of grape soda, and gathered us around the cheap motel bed like it was an altar. We took communion before midnight. Because if we didn’t?

We were damned.

I spent the rest of the week worried that grape soda might not count as grape juice. That God might not honor our motel sacraments. That missing a single Sunday could mean burning forever.

And for the record—I was a kid. Just trying to go to the beach.

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Where Did the Concept of Hell Even Come From?

Let’s take a breath. This one’s heavy.

If you’re anything like me, you were handed a version of Christianity where hell was central. Not just in the background—but right up front. It wasn’t “God loves you,” it was “God loves you... but if you don’t do XYZ, you'll burn forever.”

So… where did this come from?

What do the scriptures actually say?
And how did “eternal conscious torment” become the dominant image of hell in modern Christianity?

Let’s rewind.

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The Hebrew Scriptures (OT) Don’t Teach Hell

Let’s start with what the Hebrew Scriptures actually say about the afterlife.

Spoiler: It’s not much.

Some in ancient Israel believed in Sheol—a shadowy, silent place where all the dead go. Not a torture chamber. Just… the grave. Everyone went there: good, bad, rich, poor. No fire. No demons. No judgment.

It wasn’t until later Jewish writings—closer to the time of Jesus—that some new ideas started bubbling up. Influenced by surrounding cultures, certain Jewish sects began speculating about judgment, reward, and punishment after death. But it still wasn’t clear or universal.

So if the Hebrew Scriptures don’t give us hell as we know it... what do the Jesus accounts say?

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Jesus Talked About “Gehenna”

When Jesus talked about hell, he used the word Gehenna—a real place outside Jerusalem. Historically, it had been a site of child sacrifice. By Jesus’ time, it was basically the city dump: a nasty, burning pit of garbage.

So when Jesus says things like “better to lose your eye than your whole body be thrown into Gehenna,” he’s making a pointed, cultural metaphor. It’s about destruction. Waste. Consequences. Not about eternal torture.

Also: Jesus was a Jewish rabbi speaking to Jews. His references made sense in that world. Most scholars agree that Jesus wasn’t laying out a systematic theology of the afterlife—he was calling people to repentance and warning them about the very real consequences of their choices in this life.

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Early Christian Apocalyptic Literature

(Yes, We’re Talking About Revelation)

Before we move on, we’ve got to make a stop in a weird, wild, and widely misunderstood Book of Revelation.

Apocalyptic writing was a well-known literary genre in the ancient world. It wasn’t meant to be read like a newspaper or theology textbook. It was symbolic, metaphorical, and—most significantly—political.

Think of it as a kind of fantastical secret code that people oppressed by empire could use to communicate with one another. Bold ideas disguised as bizarre images. Dangerous hope wrapped in metaphor.

And it was always meant to communicate something urgent and specific to its first readers—not to us, thousands of years later, trying to decode it like a fortune teller's crystal ball.

And Revelation? It’s full of beasts, dragons, digestible scrolls, flying eagles, rivers of blood, and—yes—a lake of fire.

This is the passage that often gets quoted to support the idea of hell as a literal place of eternal torment:

“And anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”
(Revelation 20:15)

Sounds terrifying. And it was meant to be—but not in the way modern readers often think.

The “lake of fire” is part of a vision, not a GPS coordinate. Revelation uses deeply Jewish symbolic language to talk about divine justice. The lake isn’t about individual souls going to hell forever—it’s a metaphor for the final destruction of evil, empire, and injustice.

And in context, the lake of fire was no more literal than the dragons, beasts, or seven-headed monsters that appear earlier in the vision.

It's apocalyptic poetry. Not postmortem cartography.

The earliest Christians didn’t read Revelation as a guide to the afterlife. They saw it as a coded hope letter written to persecuted believers under Roman rule. It’s about Rome falling, not people roasting.

But somewhere along the line, Christians started reading Revelation through a modern, Western lens—forgetting it was a symbolic genre—and turned metaphor into map.

Oh, and for what it’s worth. Revelation barely made it into the canon of the New Testament. It was highly contested for centuries—both in the East and the West—and was one of the last books officially accepted into the Christian Bible.

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Enter the Greeks: The Soul Becomes Immortal

Here’s where things shift.

Early Christians began wrestling with their faith in a Greco-Roman world, where Plato’s concept of the immortal soul was already in the air. Plato believed that the soul lives on forever—and that its fate depends on how it lived in the body.

Combine that with Roman ideas of justice as punishment, and you start to get a different tone. The best we can tell, the very earliest Christians didn’t believe in going to heaven or hell as separate realms after death. Their hope was in a future bodily resurrection and the renewal of all things—a “new heaven and new earth,” right here, not somewhere else. And they seemed to truly expect it to happen in their own generation through a visible return of Jesus Christ to earth.

But he didn’t come back, so…

Christianity begins absorbing cultural assumptions. Suddenly, it’s not just about resurrection and restoration—it’s about eternal reward or eternal punishment.

By the time we get to Augustine (354–430 CE), hell is no longer just a metaphor or consequence—it’s a literal, eternal destination for the wicked. Augustine’s theology becomes deeply influential in shaping Western Christian thought, embedding the idea of unending torment as orthodoxy.

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Fear Finds Its Roots

After Augustine, the idea of hell continued to evolve—not through scripture, but through culture, clergy, and control.

Throughout the Middle Ages, hell became a vivid and terrifying feature of church life. Preachers described it in detail. Artists depicted it. And stories of saints’ visions of hell circulated widely.

By the 12th and 13th centuries, fear of the afterlife wasn’t just emotional—it was transactional.

The Church began offering indulgences—promises to reduce time in purgatory—in exchange for prayers, pilgrimages, or increasingly, money. This system would eventually be abused so thoroughly it helped launch the Protestant Reformation. But even before that, it helped solidify hell as an economic tool, not just a theological one.

So when Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) wrote The Inferno, he wasn’t inventing hell. He was giving it structure. Shape. Story.

He took centuries of imagination and fear and turned it into a masterpiece of punishment and poetry.

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Dante Lit the Match

If you grew up picturing hell as a fiery underworld with layers, punishments, and demons poking people with pitchforks, thank a poet—not a prophet.

Dante’s Inferno painted hell in exquisite detail. Each sin had its own ironic punishment. It was brilliant literature. Fantastic storytelling. Terrible theology.

And it stuck. Good stories always stick.

Dante gave the church images. Pictures. Emotions. And the church—especially in the Middle Ages—used them. Hell became a tool for fear-based obedience, especially when tied to confession, indulgences, and allegiance to church authority.

The imagery became more powerful than the original text.

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Evangelicals Took the Baton and Ran With It

The Reformers—like Luther and Calvin—rejected the Church’s use of hell as a fear-based fundraising tool, but the fire never fully went out, and by the 1800s, American revivalists were stoking it hotter than ever. Hellfire preaching became the norm. Tent revivals, altar calls, and emotional conversions were often built around one core message:

Avoid hell. Choose Jesus.

The “turn or burn” era was born. Sunday School visuals. Chick Tracts. Left Behind movies. Rapture scares. All built around a fear of hell. Not love. Not transformation. Just fire insurance.

And it worked.

People “got saved” in droves. But many of us now—years later—are asking:

Saved from what, exactly?

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Oh, About the Rapture...

Just a quick note.

The version of the Rapture that many of us were taught—the one with believers vanishing, planes crashing, and unbelievers left behind for seven years of chaos?

Yeah… that’s a very modern invention.

The concept of a pre-tribulation rapture wasn’t taught by the early church. Or the medieval church. Or even most reformers. It really took hold in the 1800s, popularized by a British preacher named John Nelson Darby, and later mass-marketed to America through the Scofield Reference Bible and eventually, Left Behind books and movies.

For the last 40–50 years, it’s been huge in parts of American evangelicalism—especially among dispensationalist and fundamentalist groups.

But globally? And historically?

Almost no Christians believed it.

So if you grew up being taught it as solid fact—with charts and graphs to prove it—and if any of that still hangs out in your mind as scary… just remember: it was invented nearly 1,800 years after Jesus.

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Alternate Views Have Always Existed

Not all Christians believed in eternal conscious torment.

In fact, throughout church history, many have held very different views:

• Conditional Immortality: The soul isn’t inherently immortal. The saved live on. The wicked… simply cease to exist.

• Universal Reconciliation: All people will ultimately be restored to God—maybe through purification, but not punishment.

• Purgatorial Theories: Some version of post-death refinement or correction—not eternal torture.

• Hopeful Agnosticism: We don’t really know. And maybe that’s okay.

None of these views are new. They just weren’t the loudest.

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Why It Still Matters

So why am I writing this?

Because it’s my birthday and this is fun for me?

Yes.

But also because also because hell still lives in our nervous systems.
In our nightmares.
In our shame.

It’s not just about theology—it’s about trauma.

We were told that God is love… but also, that this God would burn us alive forever if we got it wrong. Oh, and also that he would eternally punish people in other parts of the world if we didn’t get the message to them before they died. No pressure.

That contradiction lives deep in the bones.

So we end up afraid of asking questions. Afraid of doubt.

Afraid of vacation traffic and grape soda communion.

And it breaks my heart.

Because the story of hell didn’t begin with you.

But it did take up space inside you.

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Final Thought

I don’t know exactly what happens when we die.

I have hopes. I have instincts. I don’t believe in hell anymore.
But I’m not here to convince you to believe what I believe.

Because wherever you end up—whether it’s a different kind of faith, a different kind of Christianity, or no faith at all—you might still find that voice in your head.

The one that whispers: What if you’re wrong? What if there’s a hell?

It can show up out of nowhere. In the middle of the night. In traffic. On vacation.

And if it does, I just want you to know this:
That idea didn’t fall out of the sky.
You didn’t invent it.
Neither did Jesus.

You inherited it—just like I did.
From poets, preachers, empires, artists, and institutions.
It evolved over centuries, and it worked its way into the air we breathed before we even knew we were breathing.

I’m not here to tell you what to believe about hell.

I just want you to know where it came from—long before you or I got here.

If nothing else, it’s one hell of a story. 🙂

The Far Side

** I can’t really do this, but neither could the popes. It is my birthday today, though. Just saying.