What happens after you die

What this group of questions is

Almost everything an English speaker pictures when they hear the word “hell” arrived from somewhere other than the Bible. The horned figure on a throne, the pitchfork, the office, the underworld with its own management — that is Dante, Milton, seven centuries of painting and about eighty years of cartoons. It is not a conspiracy and nobody hid anything. An image simply became more available than the text it decorated.

That makes this group of questions unusual. In most of the arguments about Christianity the disagreement is about whether the text is true. Here, a great deal of the disagreement is about what the text says at all, and that part can be checked by anyone in an afternoon.

The vocabulary problem, first, because it is real

English Bibles have used the single word “hell” for at least four different underlying words, and the differences are not decorative.

Sheol is Hebrew, and it is where everybody goes. The righteous go there. Jacob expects to go there. It is the grave, or the realm of the dead, and it is not a place of punishment.

Hades is Greek, and the Septuagint uses it to translate Sheol, so it inherits most of that meaning while dragging some Greek mythology along behind it.

Gehenna is not a concept at all. It is a place name — the Valley of Hinnom, a real ravine on the southern edge of Jerusalem with a specific and terrible history — and it is the word Jesus actually uses in the Gospels almost every time an English translation prints “hell”.

Tartarus appears once, in 2 Peter 2:4, borrowed straight out of Greek myth, and it is used of angels rather than of people.

And then the lake of fire in Revelation is a further image again, into which, in Revelation 20:14, Hades itself is thrown — which by itself rules out reading the two as synonyms.

Anyone who tells you these are four names for one place is going beyond the evidence. So is anyone who tells you the distinctions dissolve the subject. They do not. They just mean that a conversation about hell which does not say which word it is discussing is not yet a conversation.

What the pages in this group actually establish

They are narrow on purpose, and each is narrow in a different direction.

On the devil: wherever the text puts him near the fire, he is the object of the sentence and never the subject. Seized, bound, cast, shut, sealed, thrown, tormented. There is no passage in which he administers, presides over or owns a place of punishment. That is a claim about syntax, it is checkable, and it settles less than it sounds like it does — it says nothing about how long anything lasts.

On angels: people do not become them. The two categories are consistently distinct, and in the one place the New Testament describes what the dead are like, the comparison is like the angels, in a single specified respect, and the passage is about marriage.

On heaven: the cloud and the harp are not in it. What the text describes at the end of Revelation is a city, and it is coming down.

On the criminal beside Jesus: he is promised paradise with hours to live and nothing to offer, and every system anyone has ever built for who gets in has to survive that sentence.

Where this group stops

The largest live question in Christian theology about the afterlife is not addressed by any of these pages, and it is the one most people actually want answered: how long it lasts, and what it is.

There are three positions with long pedigrees. Most Christians through most of history have held eternal conscious torment. A minority tradition, well attested from the early centuries onward and with a good deal of contemporary support, holds annihilation — that the second death is a death. A third position, held by some in the Eastern tradition and by others besides, hopes for final restoration. Each has texts it leans on and texts it has to work at. Each has been held by people who read the languages.

This site does not treat that dispute as settled, and it does not treat it as unimportant. It is named on every page where it becomes relevant, both positions are given the same space, and no page here depends on which one is right.

If you came looking for a verdict on that, you will not find one, and any site that gives you one quickly is telling you more about itself than about the text.