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Article: The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds.
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- May 5, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Evil and divine retribution are uncomfortable topics for modern Christians. We prefer to see the former as a product of bureaucratic banality or improper socialization and the latter has been all but abandoned as a subject of sermons by even the wildest TV preachers. How is it, then, that such unpleasant themes as hell and the devil have played such a big part in the historical development of Christianity?
Alan Bernstein argues that the Christian Hell was shaped by views about death, the afterlife, and justice held by a variety of Mediterranean societies, with Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity exercising the greatest and most immediate influences. Approaches to death ...