7 DARK Facts That Make the Church's Hell IMPOSSIBLE — And the Bible Proves It | Spinoza

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]The hell you were taught to fear isn't in the Bible. Not the Hebrew one. 39 books, the entire scripture Jesus himself read, and not a single verse describes conscious eternal torment. Not one.

[00:00:14]That picture you've carried since you were a kid, it was built out of seven layers, none of them Revelation. The doctrine that ran your childhood, the doctrine that made you afraid to fall asleep at 8 years old, the doctrine that pulled tides out of your grandmother's pocket for 50 years, that doctrine was built somewhere else, by somebody else, after the book closed. You might not remember the first time you heard about it. Most people don't. The image was just always there. Flames, screaming, [music] a basement under the floor of the world, demons with names and faces.

[00:00:49]Maybe you remember the night you couldn't sleep over it. The age when somebody read you Revelation slow, like they were making sure you understood.

[00:00:56][music] You were six. You were nine. You were a kid being told that one wrong move in your tiny, still figuring out shoelaces life would land you in fire that never stopped. And you carried that. You carried it into every prayer, into every confession, into the long stretches at 3:00 in the morning where your stomach turned because what if you forgot to repent of something you didn't even know was a sin?

[00:01:22]I want to walk you through seven facts about where that picture actually came from. Each one has a date. Each one has a name. Each one is something seminaries quietly teach and pulpits will never mention. The bishop who locked eternal hell into Western Christianity, the theologian whose name you've heard a hundred times, didn't actually know Greek. That's coming. But the foundation collapses long before we reach him. It collapses on the very first word of your Old Testament that was translated to mean something it never meant. [music] The word is Sheol. It appears in the Hebrew Bible 65 times. 65. Every prophet uses it. Every psalmist uses it.

[00:02:03]>> [music] >> Job uses it. David uses it. It's the word the Hebrew scriptures used to talk about what happens to a person when they die.

[00:02:11]>> [music] >> And in the King James Bible, the translation that shaped the English-speaking Christian world for 400 years, that word was translated as hell 31 times. But here's what you weren't told. The exact same Hebrew word was translated as the grave another 31 times. Same word. Same 65 appearances.

[00:02:33]Half the time hell, half the time [music] grave. Why? Because the translators made a choice. When a righteous person was going to Sheol, a David, an Abraham, a prophet, they translated it grave. When a wicked person was going to Sheol, they translated it hell. Same destination.

[00:02:51]Same Hebrew letters on the page.

[00:02:53]They just split the word into two English words based on who they wanted to send where. This isn't translation.

[00:03:00]This is theology pretending to be translation.

[00:03:05]Look at what the text actually says about Sheol.

[00:03:08]Not what someone preached to you, the verses themselves. Psalm 6:5.

[00:03:13]David is the one speaking. In death, there is no remembrance of you.

[00:03:18]In Sheol, who will give you praise?

[00:03:21]That's a question expecting the answer, no one.

[00:03:24]Nobody praises God in Sheol. Why?

[00:03:27]Because consciousness ends when the body stops. Ecclesiastes chapter 9:10.

[00:03:32]>> [music] >> There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol to which you are going. [music] Verse 5 of the same chapter. The dead know nothing. Isaiah 38:18.

[00:03:44]Sheol cannot thank you. Death cannot praise you. Psalm 115:17.

[00:03:51]The dead do not praise the Lord, nor any who go down into silence. Silence, not screaming.

[00:03:58]Silence. The Hebrew picture of death is darkness, dust, sleep, forgetfulness.

[00:04:05]Both good people and bad people go there.

[00:04:08]There's no division. There's no torture wing.

[00:04:11]There's no devil with a tally sheet. The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, the academic reference, not some atheist pamphlet, states it plainly.

[00:04:22]Nowhere in the Old Testament is the abode of the dead regarded as a place of punishment or torment. The concept of an infernal hell developed in Israel only during the Hellenistic period.

[00:04:33]Hellenistic, that means after the Hebrews started rubbing up against the Greek-speaking world.

[00:04:39]After Alexander.

[00:04:41]After Plato's ideas started seeping in.

[00:04:43]>> [music] >> The Old Testament knows nothing about hell as the church teaches it.

[00:04:48]It knows about a grave, a pit, a hush, and that single word, Sheol, translated as hell by people who were choosing what they wanted you to picture.

[00:04:58]That's the first crack. Because if the Hebrew word never meant what they told you it meant, then everything built on top of it has to be re-examined, including the next word, the Greek one.

[00:05:10]The one Jesus is supposed to have said.

[00:05:12]You've been told that Jesus talked about hell more than anyone else in the Bible.

[00:05:17]That he warned about it constantly. That the gentle teacher of love and mercy was actually obsessed with eternal fire, and you've just been reading the soft parts.

[00:05:28]>> [music] >> The verses they point to, Mark 9, Matthew 5, Matthew 23, Jesus does use a word that gets translated as hell in your English Bible.

[00:05:40]But the word isn't a theological term.

[00:05:43]It isn't describing some spirit world under the ground. It's the name of a place, an actual physical place you could walk to. The word is Gehenna.

[00:05:54]Gehenna is the Greek way of spelling Ge Hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom. You can stand in it right now.

[00:06:00]>> [music] >> It's still there. It's just outside the walls of the old city of Jerusalem on the southwest side, below the Temple Mount. When Jesus said that word to his audience, his audience didn't picture a flaming dimension under the earth. They pictured a specific stretch of land that they could walk to in 20 minutes. They knew which trees grew there.

[00:06:20]>> [music] >> They knew where the road in started, and they knew its history. That's what mattered. Centuries before Jesus, the Valley of Hinnom had been the site of something genuinely horrifying. It was where Israelites, who had abandoned the worship of Yahweh, sacrificed children to the Canaanite god Moloch. The text of 2 Kings chapter 23 describes it in detail. There was a place inside the valley called Topheth, where this happened.

[00:06:48]Jeremiah 32 names it. The prophets condemned the practice constantly. And then King Josiah, around 622 BC, deliberately desecrated the valley, tore down the shrines, made the entire valley ritually unclean, so that no Israelite could ever offer there again. After that, for centuries, the valley sat as cursed ground just outside the city.

[00:07:14]Some sources record it being used to burn refuse and the bodies of executed criminals. Whether that detail is literally accurate or something later Jewish writers added is debated. What isn't debated is that Gehenna, in the first century, was shorthand for a real, a cursed, defiled place, the worst spot anyone in Jerusalem could think of.

[00:07:37][music] When Jesus says, Mark 9:48, that Gehenna is the place where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. He's not inventing a new doctrine. He's quoting. [music] The exact phrase appears in Isaiah 66:24, the last verse of the entire book of Isaiah, where the prophet is describing the corpses of those who rebelled against God lying outside Jerusalem after the city's destruction. Corpses, not conscious souls being tortured.

[00:08:09]Bodies being eaten by maggots and burned outside the gates. Think about what Jesus was actually doing. He was speaking to first-century Jews. He used a name they knew, pointing to a valley they could walk to, quoting a prophet they had memorized about a scene of national judgment they'd been taught to dread. He was being concrete. He was being [music] specific. Honestly, he was just being a Jewish rabbi using Jewish imagery.

[00:08:39]And somewhere between the 1st century and the 4th century, the church took his metaphor of a defiled valley outside one city in one country and turned it into an eternal underground torture facility for every non-Christian who has ever lived.

[00:08:57]>> [sighs] >> Same word, two completely different [music] things. The hell Jesus mentioned was a piece of real estate with a zip code. The hell you were taught to fear is something else entirely. Something built on top of his words by people who lived hundreds of years after him in a language he never spoke in a culture he never visited, which brings us to the language they were working in. Because that's where the third crack opens.

[00:09:25]And it's the biggest one. You've been told that Matthew 25:46 [music] settles the debate, that Jesus himself, in his own words, said the wicked would go away into eternal punishment and the righteous into eternal life. End of argument. The Greek word right there in the text, eternal, eternal, forever, forever. Except the Greek word right there in the text doesn't mean eternal.

[00:09:53]The word is aionios. It's an adjective.

[00:09:57]It's noun form is aion, which is where we get the English word eon or age. Aion means an age, a period of time, a stretch with a beginning and an end. Aionios is the adjectival form, age-long or pertaining to an age. I know how that sounds. The whole tradition has translated this word as eternal for so long, it feels like correcting it must be some special pleading move by people who don't want hell to exist. So, look at where else the word appears.

[00:10:31]And watch what happens if you actually translate it consistently. Romans 16:25 talks about the mystery kept secret for aionios times, meaning kept secret for ages past. Are those eternal times that already ended?

[00:10:50]That doesn't make sense. They were a long stretch of past time. That's [music] all. Hebrews 1:2, the writer says God created the aionas through his son.

[00:11:01]Aionas, plural of aion. He made the ages. He made the eons, not the eternities. You can't have multiple eternities.

[00:11:12]Eternity by definition can't be plural.

[00:11:15]Luke 20:34, Jesus himself says, "The sons of this aion marry and are given in marriage."

[00:11:22]The sons of this age. He's talking about this lifetime, this era, this stretch of human history. So, when Matthew 25:46 says aionios kolasin, What's actually being said? Age-long discipline.

[00:11:37]Age-long correction.

[00:11:39]Punishment fitting an era. Young's literal translation, one of the most respected word-for-word translations in English, translates it as age-during.

[00:11:49]Charles Ellicott, the 19th-century Anglican bishop and biblical scholar, wrote in his commentary on Matthew 25:46, and I'm quoting directly, "It must be admitted that the Greek word which is translated eternal does not in itself involve endlessness, but rather duration, whether through an age or succession of ages." This is in the official commentary that sat on Anglican clergy shelves for over a century, by the way.

[00:12:17]They knew.

[00:12:18]They've always known. So, how did age-long become eternal in the English Bible you were handed as a kid? It happened in Latin. Specifically, in Jerome's Latin Vulgate translation, finished around the year 405. Jerome, who himself struggled with the choice, translated aionios using the Latin aeternus, which sounds a lot closer to forever, [music] no end. And once the Western Church was reading the New Testament in Latin instead of Greek, the original full meaning of aionios got buried. Eternal punishment became the doctrine. The original idea, discipline lasting a defined age, quietly disappeared from Western Christianity. Eastern Christianity, which kept reading in Greek, never lost it. The Greek-speaking church fathers, and there were many of them, openly, in major teaching centers, believed punishment after death was finite. They had no Latin filter telling them otherwise. Three words now. Sheol [music] never meant hell. Gehenna, a real-world place. Aionios, an age, not forever.

[00:13:30]Three mistranslations stacked on top of each other, [music] and under all three of them, there's a deeper problem.

[00:13:36]Because the Hebrew Bible, the 39 books the church called the foundation of everything, doesn't just lack the word for hell, it doesn't describe the idea of hell at all. You were taught the Old Testament builds the case for hell, that from Genesis through Malachi, the threat of eternal punishment is the moral undercurrent of the whole story, that every prophet warning Israel of judgment was warning them about the same fiery underworld your Sunday school teacher described. It isn't there. Read the Old Testament looking for it.

[00:14:10]Don't trust me.

[00:14:11]Don't trust your seminary. Go look.

[00:14:14]Read the prophets. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the 12 minor prophets.

[00:14:20]Looking specifically for descriptions of conscious eternal torment after death.

[00:14:25]They warn about destruction.

[00:14:27]They warn about exile. The threats are concrete and earthly. The sword, famine, plague, bones rotting in a foreign country, being cut off from the land of the living. They never warned about a place where the wicked are tortured forever while the righteous look on. It is not in the text. Read the wisdom literature.

[00:14:48]>> [music] >> Job suffers more than any man in scripture. He demands an explanation. He argues with God for 42 chapters, and his theory of death, chapter 14, verse 21, is that when a man's sons rise to honor, he doesn't know it. When they are brought low, he doesn't see it. Nothing reaches him in the place he's gone.

[00:15:10]There is no torment for him to feel, and no glory for him to enjoy. He's just gone. Read the Psalms, the most quoted, most prayed, most memorized book in the entire Old Testament. Psalm 6:5, "In death, there is no remembrance of you.

[00:15:28]In Sheol, who will give you praise?"

[00:15:30]>> [music] >> Psalm 88, the most despairing Psalm in the entire collection, verses 10 through 12, "Do you work wonders for the dead?

[00:15:40]Do the departed rise up to praise you?

[00:15:42]Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon?

[00:15:47]Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?" Six rhetorical questions in three verses, every one of them with an implied answer of no. Psalm 115:17, "The dead do not praise the Lord, nor any who go down into silence." Psalm 146:4, "His breath departs, he returns to the earth.

[00:16:13]On that very day, his plans perish."

[00:16:15]Read Ecclesiastes chapter 9:5, "The dead know nothing and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten." Verse 10, "There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol to which you are going." These aren't isolated lines pulled out of context.

[00:16:36]>> [music] >> This is the consistent unified picture of death in the Hebrew Bible. The dead don't know, the dead don't feel, the dead don't suffer, and the dead don't celebrate. They're asleep, they're in the dust, they're gone. There is one verse, exactly one, in the entire Old Testament that even gestures towards something more.

[00:16:58]Daniel 12:2, "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt."

[00:17:09]>> [music] >> That's the one. That's the verse the tradition has to lean on. And Daniel is the latest book in the Old Testament, [music] written in the 100s BC, during a Jewish war against Greek rulers, when Greek ideas were already heavily shaping the end times writing of the period, Daniel isn't the foundation.

[00:17:27]Daniel is the leak.

[00:17:30]Daniel is the first place foreign ideas about postmortem judgment start seeping in. Outside of that one verse, silence.

[00:17:39]Total silence. 39 books, thousands of pages, generation after generation of prophets and poets and priests.

[00:17:49]And the central doctrine [music] that the church told you was the most important fact in the universe, the eternal destination of every human soul, never gets described once. Not by Moses, not by Abraham, not by David, by no prophet at all, anywhere in the canon. That's not an oversight. If hell were real, if hell were the absolute center of moral reality, God could not have failed to mention it to the people he allegedly chose to be his witnesses to the world. He would not have left them generation after generation with a doctrine of death as silent dust. He would have told them. He would have made it explicit. Genesis would have opened with it.

[00:18:35]Moses would have hammered it. The prophets would have lived for it.

[00:18:40]He didn't. They didn't. Because nobody had the idea yet. Stop with me for a second. Look at where we are. Three mistranslated words. Sheol, not hell.

[00:18:52]Gehenna, a literal valley. Aionios, an age, not forever. And underneath all three, the entire Old Testament, the book Jesus himself called scripture, silent on the doctrine that would later define Western Christianity for 1,500 years. If you grew up in a tradition that hammered hell from the pulpit, take a breath here. You don't have to do anything with this yet. Just sit with what's already on the table. Because the next thing I'm going to show you isn't a mistranslation.

[00:19:25]It isn't a missing verse. It's an entire imported philosophy coming from outside Judaism, outside Christianity, outside the Bible that was wedged into Christian doctrine before anyone realized what was happening. You've been taught that you have an immortal soul. Not as a question, not as a theory, as fact. It's built into the architecture of how you imagine yourself. There's a body, and there's a soul. And when the body dies, the soul goes somewhere, either up or down. That's the picture. It isn't in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew word that gets translated soul in English is nefesh. It appears more than 750 times in the Old Testament.

[00:20:10]>> [music] >> And it doesn't mean what you think it means. Nefesh means a living being, a breathing creature. Genesis chapter 2 verse 7, when God breathes into the dust and makes Adam, the text says Adam became a living nefesh. It doesn't say he received a soul. It says he became one. The entire person, body and breath together, is the nefesh.

[00:20:36]And here's the part that breaks the whole picture. The same word, nefesh, is used dozens of times for animals, cattle, birds, fish, sea creatures. Every breathing thing in Genesis chapter 1 is a nefesh.

[00:20:53]Reptiles are nefeshim. The Hebrew Bible does not divide creatures into things with souls and things without. It calls all living beings souls, which is, you know, a completely different thing from what you were taught. The word doesn't mean some little ghost thing inside you that can leave the body. It just means the fact of being alive. When that nephesh stops, when the breath leaves, >> [music] >> the person doesn't continue somewhere else. They go to the grave. The body returns to dust. Ecclesiastes 12:7, "The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it." Not the soul flies off to heaven, the breath, the animating force, >> [music] >> returns. The person, as a continuing conscious entity, gone.

[00:21:46]So, where did the idea of an immortal soul come from if not the Hebrew Bible?

[00:21:51]It came from Plato. Plato, the 4th century BC Greek philosopher, taught that the soul was an unkillable, invisible thing temporarily stuck inside a mortal body.

[00:22:02]Death was the soul's release.

[00:22:04]The body was a prison.

[00:22:06]The soul existed before the body and would continue after it. This is the entire framework of his book Phaedo, written 350 years before Jesus was born.

[00:22:16]And it became the dominant way of thinking about the soul in the Greek-speaking world. Educated Jews who lived in Greek cities, Alexandria especially, absorbed [music] it. The 1st century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria taught it openly, fusing Plato with the Torah. The New Bible Dictionary states it plainly, and I'm quoting, "The Greeks thought of the body as a hindrance to true life, and they looked for the time when the soul would be free from its shackles.

[00:22:43]They conceived of life after death in terms of the immortality of the soul."

[00:22:47]The Jewish Encyclopedia, the standard reference work on Jewish thought, is even more direct.

[00:22:53]>> [music] >> The belief in the immortality of the soul came to the Jews from contact with Greek thought, and chiefly through the philosophy of Plato. That's the sentence. That's it. [music] The immortal soul, the whole thing that makes hell even possible to imagine, wasn't revealed to Israel by God. It was absorbed by Greek-speaking Jews from a pagan philosopher >> [music] >> who would have been horrified to find his ideas being used to justify a Christian afterlife of fire. Without the immortal soul, hell can't work. If the dead are just dust, if the breath returns to God and the person is gone, there's nobody conscious to suffer forever. The whole thing falls apart.

[00:23:35]You can't have endless punishment without an endless somebody to receive it. And the Hebrew Bible doesn't give you one. So, the question becomes, who took this borrowed Greek idea? And who used it to lock the doctrine of eternal hell into the Western Church?

[00:23:51]>> [music] >> Because someone did, and the names are on the document. His name is Augustine, Augustine of Hippo, born in 354 in what's now Algeria, died in 430. If you've ever been to a Catholic university or a Protestant seminary, [music] you've seen buildings named after him.

[00:24:11]He's basically the most important theologian in the history of Western Christianity by a mile. He shaped doctrines [music] that still run churches today. He's also the man who locked the doctrine of eternal conscious torment into Western dogma. And he [music] did it from inside a Latin translation he couldn't check against the Greek. This is documented. Augustine himself admits it. In his Confessions, Book 1, he tells you that as a student he tried to learn Greek and hated it. He gave up. By his own statement, he never got fluent in the original language of the New Testament.

[00:24:48]When he sat down to read scripture, he was reading the Latin Vulgate, the translation by Jerome we already talked about, >> [music] >> in which aionios had become aeternus, eternal, without end. And this matters because of what was happening around him. Before Augustine, the early church was not unified on the doctrine of hell. Of the six big teaching centers running between the years 100 and 400 after Jesus in places like Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, Edessa, Carthage, and Rome, four of them taught something very different. They taught that after a period of correction, every soul, every single one, would eventually be brought back to God. No exceptions. No eternal flames. The Greek word for it was the bringing back of all things. It was mainstream Christian belief for centuries. Some of the most influential early theologians taught it openly.

[00:25:47]Clement of Alexandria, Origen, probably the most prolific Christian writer of the first three centuries, Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great early bishops who was eventually canonized as a saint by the same church that later condemned the same teaching. Look, [music] these weren't fringe figures. These were mainstream Greek-speaking Christians working in the language Jesus and Paul actually used. And they all believed that age-long meant exactly that.

[00:26:17]A defined period, then restoration.

[00:26:21]Augustine, reading in Latin with no access to the original Greek, looked at aeternum and concluded the punishment was endless. In his huge work, The City of God, books 20 and 21, he built the first big case from scratch for eternal conscious torment [music] in Western Christianity. He lined up proof texts.

[00:26:43]He answered objections. He insisted that the fire was literal, that the bodies of the damned would be remade so they could burn forever without ever being consumed and that this had been the unanimous teaching of the church from the beginning. It hadn't been. It was him and then the institution closed the door behind him.

[00:27:03]In the year 553 at the second Council of Constantinople, 300 years after Origen had already died, the church formally cursed the idea of universal restoration as heresy. Origen, who had been one of the most respected Christian thinkers of his era, was condemned by name three centuries after his death for teachings he could no longer defend. Gregory of Nyssa, who had taught essentially the same thing, somehow escaped the condemnation and kept his sainthood. The decision was final.

[00:27:36]The teaching that every soul would eventually be brought back to God was now heresy. The Greek-speaking churches that had taught it for centuries were forced underground. So the whole structure, the immortal soul borrowed from Plato, the three mistranslated words, the Old Testament silence quietly ignored, was now locked in place by a Latin-reading bishop who couldn't check his sources and by a council that condemned the dissenters two and three centuries after their deaths. That's the doctrine.

[00:28:08]That's where it comes from.

[00:28:10]Not from Sinai, not from Galilee.

[00:28:13]From a North African seminary in a language Jesus never spoke, defended by a man who admitted he never learned the original. This is the doctrine your grandmother tithed to be saved from and honestly, we're not even at the worst part yet.

[00:28:29]Stay with me here. Because what comes next is the part that explains the picture itself.

[00:28:35]The chains, the pits, the demons with horns, the whole architecture of layered suffering matched to specific [music] sins. None of that is in the Bible, Old Testament or New. None of it is in Augustine. None of it is in the church fathers. [music] The doctrine of eternal punishment that comes from Augustine is bare, disembodied.

[00:28:58]It doesn't describe the place. It just insists that the place exists. The image in your head, the one that made you stop sleeping at 8 years old, came from somewhere else entirely.

[00:29:10]And once you know where, the whole nightmare loses its grip.

[00:29:16]His name was Dante Alighieri. He was a Florentine poet born in 1265, exiled from his own city for political reasons, and he spent the last 20 years of his life writing a single long poem in three parts. The first part, the part everyone knows, >> [music] >> is called the Inferno. He finished the whole work, the Commedia, in 1320.

[00:29:40]He died the next year. He never thought he was writing doctrine.

[00:29:45]He was writing a poem, but he changed everything. Read the Inferno, or don't.

[00:29:51]You already know what's in it. Hell is built like nine rings, one inside the other, going down.

[00:29:58]Each ring matched to a specific category of sin. The lustful are blown around by an endless storm.

[00:30:06]The gluttonous lie in cold sludge under a freezing rain.

[00:30:10]The wrathful tear at each other in a black swamp. The heretics sealed in burning tombs. The violent boiling in a river of blood. The flatterers, and I mean this literally, waiting in actual excrement. And the traitors frozen up to their necks in ice [music] at the very bottom of the world, with Satan himself locked in the center, frozen from the waist down, chewing the three worst traitors in human history in his three mouths forever.

[00:30:41]You've seen the woodcuts.

[00:30:43]You've seen the Gustave Doré illustrations. You've seen the paintings.

[00:30:48]You've sat in cathedrals and looked up at vaulted ceilings showing scenes that came straight out of Dante.

[00:30:54]You've absorbed his architecture without ever opening his book.

[00:30:58]>> [music] >> The image in your head is his image. And here's what you may not realize.

[00:31:04]The Catholic Church's actual doctrine, the official doctrine, the one in the catechism, does not describe any of this. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, section 1035, gives the official definition of hell.

[00:31:19]Hell's principal punishment consists of eternal separation from God. That's it.

[00:31:24]There are no circles.

[00:31:26]There are no rivers of blood.

[00:31:28]There are no demons with assigned tortures.

[00:31:31]There is no hierarchy of sins matched to specific physical sufferings.

[00:31:38]The Church teaches that hell is the absence of God.

[00:31:41]Period. Everything else, every concrete, vivid, terrifying detail you carry, Dante invented or borrowed. And here's where it gets even weirder.

[00:31:53]The figures Dante drew from were not Christian. They were Greek and Roman.

[00:31:59]The judge of hell in the Inferno is Minos from Greek mythology, the king who became a judge of the underworld in the works of Homer and Virgil. The guide who leads Dante through hell isn't an apostle.

[00:32:11]It isn't a saint. It's Virgil, the Roman poet, a pagan who died 19 years before Jesus was born. Dante picked a pagan Roman poet to be his tour guide through the Christian underworld, because the underworld he was describing was structurally Roman. The Inferno is a Roman myth of Hades with Christian sins penciled in over the original pagan punishments.

[00:32:36]And it became, for the next 700 years the picture every Christian in the Western world carried in their head when they heard the word hell. The sermons that scared you. The horror illustrations in children's Bibles.

[00:32:53]The descriptions you got from the pulpit on judgement day. The pictures on holy cards. The fear that woke you up at 3:00 in the morning.

[00:33:02]All of it came downstream from an Italian poet writing a literary masterpiece in the early 1300s. A man who never claimed his map of hell was anything other than poetry. A man who used pagan myths as his [music] blueprint. I want you to sit with this for a moment because the cost of it is enormous. Somewhere out there is the 8-year-old you were or the 12-year-old or the 16-year-old lying awake afraid you'd forgotten to repent of something.

[00:33:35]Afraid you'd be the one in the burning tomb. Afraid the demon was watching to see if you slipped up.

[00:33:42]Afraid that the suffering was going to be physical and personal and forever. That fear was real. It cost you nights.

[00:33:51]It cost you years. It might still cost you even now.

[00:33:56]It came from Dante.

[00:33:59]It did not come from God. The image that hurt you came from a poem. A magnificent poem.

[00:34:06]A poem so brilliantly written that the Italian language itself was reshaped around it. But still, a poem. Not a revelation.

[00:34:16]>> [music] >> Not a vision.

[00:34:18]Not a description from anyone who claimed to have seen it. A piece of literature written by an exile in the 1300s using pagan stories as his blueprint.

[00:34:28]>> [music] >> And the church let you believe.

[00:34:31]Let your parents believe.

[00:34:33]Let their parents believe, 10 generations deep, that the artwork was the underworld.

[00:34:40]That's seven.

[00:34:42]>> [music] >> Look back at what just happened.

[00:34:45]Seven layers.

[00:34:47]Not one of them revelation. Every single one has a name, a date, a language, a translator, a council, an author. Every layer is human work. Every layer can be inspected. Every layer is somewhere outside the actual book the church told you was the source. There is a way of reading scripture that a philosopher named Baruch Spinoza built into a method almost 400 years ago. You look at the text the way you'd look at any other ancient document. You ask when it was written, by whom, in what language, with what edits, and you follow the evidence honestly wherever it leads. When he did that to Moses, what he found was that Moses didn't write the Torah. He didn't get to do it to the doctrine of [music] hell. That wasn't his fight. But the method works on hell the exact same way it worked on Moses. You ask when.

[00:35:43]You ask by whom. You ask in what language. You ask whether the book the church kept pointing to actually describes the thing being preached on top of it. And the thing being preached collapses into its sources. Plato, a North African bishop with bad Greek. A poet from Florence using Roman mythology. A council in 553 closing the door behind everyone who'd already noticed. The whole structure has a paper trail. The fear that ran your childhood was built on a stack of human productions. You don't owe a stack of human productions your sleep. The child you were, the one lying awake at 8 or 11 or 15, scared because the pastor had been graphic that Sunday. Scared because the children's Bible had pictures.

[00:36:33]Scared because the demon had a face.

[00:36:36]That child was afraid of Dante. They were afraid of a piece of Italian literature.

[00:36:42]The terror was real. The thing being feared was not what they were told it was.

[00:36:48]>> [music] >> You don't have to defend a 14th century poem as if it's divine reality. You don't have to perform certainty about a doctrine that took 500 years and a Greek translation error to construct.

[00:37:00]>> [music] >> You don't have to keep arguing with your aunt at Thanksgiving about whether you're going to that valley outside Jerusalem when you die. It can just be a poem now. That's the whole thing. Tell me in the comments which of these seven cracks hit you the hardest. Was it Sheol? The word the translator split in half to send people where they wanted them? Was it Augustine? The man whose bad Greek shaped a thousand years of Western fear? Or was it Dante? And the moment you realized the picture in your head wasn't from God, it was from an Italian poet. Whichever one cracked it open for you, >> [music] >> that's the one you needed. And if this gave you even a moment of breath, send it to the person you grew up with who still carries it.

[00:37:44]>> [music] >> Send it to the friend whose mother used hell to keep them in line. Who never quite escaped the shape of that fear.

[00:37:51]That's how this reaches them directly.

[00:37:55]The hell you were taught to fear isn't in the Bible. It's in a poem. It's in a translation. It's in a council. It's in the architecture of a system that needed you afraid in order to need it back.

[00:38:09][music] You are allowed to walk out of that valley the way Jesus did. 20 minutes south of the city every time he wanted to go home.