When I started the examination of Matthew that has occurred over the last few weeks, I was hoping that what I would find was that there was a clear parallel between the use of the word fire in Matthew and the sense in which it was used in Zechariah, as a fire that purifies the ore placed within it.  Having now completed this review, it is clearly the case that Matthew is often using the word quite differently. 

It is probably obvious by this point, but one of my focuses here is critically examining the concept of hell as well as the Scriptural support (or lack thereof) for it. At this point, it is clear to me that modern conceptions of hell aren’t very well supported by Scripture, for a couple key reasons.  One of those reasons is that the word translated as ‘hell’ literally refers to a valley near Jerusalem.  This is a point that I have raised several times before, but I think one key aspect of this is the expectation that punishment and salvation are both happening on earth, rather than in some ethereal realm.  The other thing that is quite clear in the parts of the New Testament that we have examined so far is the expectation that punishment in Gehenna will be part of the culmination of one age and start of another.  The overarching sense in Matthew is that the age of worldly empires will end and the age of the Kingdom of Heaven will begin, wherein the righteous will live under the rule of God/the Son of Man/Jesus, and the unrighteous will be cast in the Gehenna.  

It is also the case that the nature of the punishment they will receive is unclear.  Gehenna is consistently described as fiery, and the fire itself is described as unquenched or aeonian.  We have talked many times about the ambiguity of the word aeonian, and depending on how you choose to interpret that word, Gehenna’s fire is possibly just the cleansing fire that helps to culminate the age, or possibly it is an eternal fire.  But although the fire might be interpreted as eternal, it is less obvious that punishment in Gehenna entails eternal suffering.  As we have just seen, Mark cites Isaiah 66:24, where it is only corpses who are subjected to this fire. To the extent that divine punishment here is eternal, then, possibly the difference is simply between death and eternal life, rather than eternal life and eternal suffering. 

It is also worth noting that there are disagreements between the Gospel writers, and that Matthew occasionally has differences that heighten the sense of punishment when compared to other Gospels or otherwise modifies the sense of passages. What these differences show is that even for the authors of the New Testament, there was not perfect agreement. As this blog continues, we should expect to see more such disagreements, and probably at some point I will mount a more structured effort to examine unique passages to see if we can more clearly get a sense for the individual preoccupations of the Gospel writers.  

Finally, I found this basic approach of reviewing Hebrew Scripture and then examining how it is used in the New Testament to be quite fruitful.  In particular, it is obviously the case that New Testament authors relied heavily on the works of the prophets to frame their understanding of Jesus, and my understanding of the prophets is fairly weak.  My next project is going to be a review of Isaiah and its citations.  This will be a much more substantial project because Isaiah is both quite long and also cited much more frequently by New Testament authors.