Recently I posted a scan of Matthew 16:18 from the Pshitta, the standard Aramaic version of the New Testament.
I circled the word kepha the two times it appeared, so that folks could see with the own eyes (even if you don’t read the script) that in this version Jesus does say "You are kepha and on this kepha I will build my Church."
Fine and dandy.
But afterwards I was looking at the verse and translating mentally and I noticed something else that was interesting.
Y’know how in the latter part of the verse in traditional English translations Jesus says "I will build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it." Well, in Greek what he says is "the gates of hades" will not prevail against it, which some modern translations have also picked up on.
The distinction is significant because in contemporary English the word "hell" means one thing: the place of the damned. That’s not the case in older dialects of English (e.g., the one in use when the Douay-Rheims and King James versions were translated). In that day, "hell" could mean the same things as "hades," which in Greek simply refers to the place of the dead, not specifically the place of the damned. ("Netherworld" might be a good English translation since that doesn’t indicate specifically where the damned go.)
The Hebrew equivalent of hades is sh’ol, which also just refers to the place of the dead.
(You may have seen this word spelled sheol, but this is bad because it leads English-speakers to want to pronounce it /SHEEE-ol/, which is wrong. The /e/ is only a half-vowel. The spelling sh’ol gives you a much better sense of the correct pronunciation, /sh-OL/. Same deal with Pshitta being spelled Peshitta. Makes English speakers want to say /PESH-it-ta/ when it’s really /p-SHEET-ta/.)
So what caught my eye was this: In the Pshitta, Jesus says the gates "of sh’ol" will not prevail against it. Here’s the text again with this word circled as well (the one on the third line):
The character that is on the front of this word (this script is read right-to-left, remember) is a prepositional prefix that means "of" (as in "of sh’ol"), but I’ve circled the word for sh’ol itself (which is here spelled sh-y-o-l in Aramaic).
Cool, huh?
In the Scriptures, we are often told that the ways of sin lead to “death”, and that to follow Christ leads us to “life”. Our spiritual death takes us to Hell, just as our spiritual life is our life with Christ, so I see no problem with the current understanding being hell.
Jimmy,
dealing with this article and with the precedent called “What if we found a new letter of Paul”, It is assumed by many scholars that Matthiew has an original in aramaic or Hebrew….
What if we find the original gospel of Matthiew? Would this be the same reasonning as for Paul’s letters?
The problem lies in that people that Sh-ol does not mean damned but simply in the Grave of Ground – it could be that those in Sh-ol were still in the Bossom of Abraham.
Grave ‘or’ ground – typo
OK, maybe I shouldn’t type late at night. Anyways what I meant to say was that Sh’ol, as far as I remember, is not necessarily the place of the damned but simply the place of those who had died.
The writers of the Bible tended to use Gehenna to signify a burning place where the dead go… but this is a metaphor because “Gehenna” is actually the valley of Ge Hinnom. Ge Hinnom is a valley in Israel where trash was constantly burned and often times the bodies of criminals were often thrown. Other peganistic rituals also took place in this valley but I will leave that up to someone else to explain if they wish.
This is great. I’m being doing some translations from English to Spanish and Bibles in Spanish (ie Latinoamericana) have the word “dead” instead of “hell”. I got concern trying to find a translation that “sound” similar to English. Now I know this is better.