This is legit why people started to believe in Hell- to think there is some kind of justice in the world even if there doesn’t seem to be any. Before the late BCs, most people in the Mediterranean didn’t believe in Hell, at least as a place of eternal torment for the wicked. They believed in an afterlife that was pretty bleak, but everyone went there. The ancient Greeks and certain Jewish sects began to imagine separate portions of the shared afterlife for particularly evil of righteous people to be punished or rewarded in after death. For the Greeks, these were Tartarus and Elysium, and for the Jewish sects these were Gehenna and Paradise. These concepts arose, particularly within Judaism, as a way to answer the question “why do good things happen to bad people, and why do bad things happen to good people?” And the answer was that the good would be rewarded and the evil tormented in the end, even if things look bad in this life. These ideas were floating around in the time and place Christianity arose, and became incorporated into it.
Does Zoroastrianism not figure into this somewhere?
It’s generally considered an influence on Judaism that is older than Judaism & ancient Greek tradition.
They also have an idea of divine justice in the afterlife with concepts roughly corresponding to heaven, purgatory, hell.
Neither Zoroastrianism nor Judaism consider “hell” a place of eternal torment, more a place where spirits confront their actions to cleanse & purify themselves before reuniting with the divine.
This is legit why people started to believe in Hell
This, and monotheism. You can’t have an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity if there’s observable evil in the world unless “it’s all part of God’s plan,” and/or “people reap what they sow”
This is legit why people started to believe in Hell- to think there is some kind of justice in the world even if there doesn’t seem to be any. Before the late BCs, most people in the Mediterranean didn’t believe in Hell, at least as a place of eternal torment for the wicked. They believed in an afterlife that was pretty bleak, but everyone went there. The ancient Greeks and certain Jewish sects began to imagine separate portions of the shared afterlife for particularly evil of righteous people to be punished or rewarded in after death. For the Greeks, these were Tartarus and Elysium, and for the Jewish sects these were Gehenna and Paradise. These concepts arose, particularly within Judaism, as a way to answer the question “why do good things happen to bad people, and why do bad things happen to good people?” And the answer was that the good would be rewarded and the evil tormented in the end, even if things look bad in this life. These ideas were floating around in the time and place Christianity arose, and became incorporated into it.
Does Zoroastrianism not figure into this somewhere? It’s generally considered an influence on Judaism that is older than Judaism & ancient Greek tradition. They also have an idea of divine justice in the afterlife with concepts roughly corresponding to heaven, purgatory, hell.
Neither Zoroastrianism nor Judaism consider “hell” a place of eternal torment, more a place where spirits confront their actions to cleanse & purify themselves before reuniting with the divine.
This, and monotheism. You can’t have an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity if there’s observable evil in the world unless “it’s all part of God’s plan,” and/or “people reap what they sow”
Well, one can, it just wasn’t a good fit for the Abrahamic set.