It’s interesting that hell as a concept seems to be one of those post-Jesus Christian ideas that formed more from traditions of organized religion than from Biblical teachings.
Until roughly around Jesus’s own lifetime, Judaism didn’t even include the idea of an afterlife as we would recognize it today. Most Mediterranean cultures didn’t.
Greeks and Romans had the concepts of shades and lemurs respectively, but these were not eternal souls that incorporated the identity of a human being, like in the Christian reckoning today. They were more like echoes of a former existence that could be experienced by living people.
Pre-rabbinical Judaism was almost completely silent on ideas about an afterlife. Many people today are astonished by this, but it simply was not part of the religion.
Understanding that sheds different kinds of light on passages in which Jesus seems to be talking about an afterlife based on our modern ideas about it.
The thing is, you can’t reproduce those modern ideas from anything Jesus said, or from other New Testament texts for that matter. They are subject to all sorts of interpretations, because they aren’t specific.
That lack of specificity is critically important given the knowledge that people of that time did not understand the afterlife like we do. The concept of heaven and hell, eternal reward and damnation, etc, would have been so radical to people, that clear teachings would have been necessary if that’s what was actually meant.
“In my father’s house are many mansions" and similar fairly vague statements don’t qualify as that kind of clear teaching.
An interesting experiment might be to try to reproduce modern Christian thought by examining New Testament texts only in the light of the cultural knowledge people had at the time those texts were written.
I think it’s pretty clear that the concepts of heaven and hell, which took Christian thinkers hundreds of years to develop after Jesus died, would not pop out of that kind of experiment. It would be interesting to see what would pop out.
