The final reference to Jesus using the word Gehenna in the Gospels is to be found in Luke 12:5 – ‘But I will warn you whom to fear: fear the one who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell [Gehenna]; yes I tell you, fear him’. From the context there is little doubt that Jesus is referring here to what could happen to us after death. There is no need to fear those who can kill us, he says, for there is no more that they can do. Rather, fear the one – presumably God – who has the ability to do more to us after our death.

But is the use of Gehenna here a reference to a place of eternal conscious punishment? Since Jesus does not say so explicitly we can only come to this conclusion in one of two ways: first that this is the theological understanding we bring with us to the text and that we then read into the verse. Or second that this is how Jesus used the word in his own time. From the text itself all we can say is that God has an ability to cast someone into Gehenna. There is nothing here explaining where Gehenna is, what happens there, or how long anyone stays there.

So we must turn to what we believe Jesus’s understanding of the word Gehenna is to understand this verse (presuming, that is, that none of my readers think it a good idea to read our own theological preferences into the text). This, however, isn’t as easy as it sounds. Scholars offer differing opinions as to how the word was used in the period. But in my reflection upon the subject over the past few weeks (and I came to it genuinely wanting to know how Jesus used the word) the view that I find most persuasive is the one that sees Jesus using Gehenna in the way it was used by the prophet Jeremiah when he was prophesying judgement upon Israel at the hands of the Babylonians. (I touched upon this view in this previous post.) Gehenna, therefore, becomes a place of judgement in the here and now; an awful judgement where the recipient is rejected by God. However, this was not an eternal rejection and there was in time an opportunity to repent and return.

But what of Luke 12:5 and the reference to being cast into Gehenna after death? Is there not something more happening here? And of course there is – there is the awful situation of being rejected by God, just as Israel was after Jeremiah’s prophecy. To speculate what happens next, however, would be to … well, speculate. It could be that the rejection leads to an everlasting death (annihilationism), or a second chance post-mortem, or an everlasting punishment. This verse itself or its context is silent on the issue. 

This concludes my study of how Jesus used the word ‘Gehenna’ (though there is one further example of it being used in the New Testament that I shall deal with next time). As someone who has always held to the view that hell as a place of eternal punishment does exist I find it hard not to read this meaning into the word and yet in the preceding posts on Jesus’s use of it, it is difficult to accept that this is the correct interpretation. This does not mean that Jesus rejected hell as a place of eternal punishment or that the unrepentant would end up being there, but I cannot accept that this is what he meant when using the word ‘Gehenna’.
 
The previous post on hell can be found here.
 

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