Candida Moss,
here for the Jesuits, thinks that the biblical hell begins as a relatively late product of Greek influence from the time of Alexander the Great, and that in keeping with later Catholic reflection is a temporary place of punishment and purgation, not of eternal damnation.
Evidently Hitler does go to heaven, but he will be the very last one out of hell, on that you may rely.
Her essay does a better job of explaining how the later Catholic idea of purgatory reflects the actual awful material conditions of Roman penal and slave experience in late antiquity than it does of explaining the gospels' language. In the end the pope's hope that hell one day will be empty is "surely right", according to Moss.
In the middle of those Greek and Roman historical bookends, however, lies the New Testament language about hell. And it is just weird how Moss is so perfunctorily dismissive of that language. She hardly treats of it at all. For her it is simply "obscure" because it is usually parabolic or "evasively symbolic", a point of view which is oddly reminiscent of long-standing Protestant dismissiveness of "the hard sayings of Jesus". The Protestants find the hard sayings problematic in the main because they contradict the universal gospel to the Gentiles. In this case, a Catholic finds them problematic because they contradict the universalism implied by purgatory. For neither could it be possible that those sayings reflect an actual historical message, being so stern and radical as to be unthinkable. They must be an anomaly: "eschatology straight up, without the diluting effects of divine mercy and forgiveness."
Just so.
Candida Moss stumbles over the Albert Schweitzer hard truth. The ameliorating of the hard sayings was the anomaly. The hard sayings did not arise from Lake Placid. Lectio difficilior potior, interpretatio item.
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
-- Matthew 7:14
For Moss the gospels are contradictory and run "hot and cold" on hell. The gospels give us only a "faint sense" of hell at best. After all there was a time when hell was not in the Bible, before the Greeks, and it shouldn't surprise us that the parables of Jesus really don't describe any "actual eternal punishment" dontcha know. It's a foreign idea, whose time came and went.
Oh dear.
And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter
into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire
that never shall be quenched:
Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter
halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire
that never shall be quenched:
Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to
enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be
cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
-- Mark 9:43ff.
Moss would like us to think, simply ignoring this passage, not only that there is no eternal fire according to Jesus, but that all such worm talk actually came from a later period, from the horrible fact of the parasites in human shit found everywhere and on everything in ancient prison cells, the literal analogues of an imaginary storied hell as in Dante, rather than from the actual message of Jesus about the eternal decay of death in the grave. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, they do a dance upon your snout. This is . . . completely unconvincing.
That last point needs to be emphasized. The eternal decay of death in the grave flies in the face of Jesus' supposed belief in and preaching of resurrection of the body. The eternal grave which confronts us here is an offense to that.
But there it is. Eternal fire. Eternal worm. Straight up.
