The road, they say, has many turns, and I have many meetings over the next few days, as we are still looking for a new Director here. In addition to that, I have a meeting with an editor this afternoon over a project that's been in the works for a long while, and I just started reading We Meant Well: How I helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren, a book that describes a slice of Hell in freakish detail. I'll post a review of that as soon as I finish it, probably early next week.
But since Hell is one of those ideas that extends to much of humanity I figured I'd post a link to and an excerpt of an excellent review of Alice K. Turner's The History of Hell, by Slacktivist Fred Clark:
Turner introduces us to many of the more obscure sources that have shaped our idea of Hell — including ancient Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman myths, once-popular pseudoscriptures like the Gospel of Nicodemas, and once immensely popular tales like the vision story of Tundal and his cow.
They may be obscure, now all-but forgotten, but their effect and influence lingers on, shaping what we hear in and what we mean by that word “Hell.” The influence of these sources is intriguing, particularly when contrasted with the paucity of actual biblical material supporting what we say we “know” about Hell. The Old Testament does not appear in Turner’s history. Nor, for the same reason, do the New Testament writings of the Apostle Paul — at least not the biblical Paul who, like the Hebrew scriptures, never mentions Hell at all.
The much later so-called Gospel of Paul — like the so-called “Gospels” of Peter and Nicodemas — is obsessed with Hell, weaving a pseudo-Christian underworld out of Greek and Roman stories, dirty jokes and scatological humor. All of these pseudo-Gospels of Hell were, in their day, very popular. They were never seriously considered for inclusion in the Christian canon, yet most Christians had read them, or heard them, and the portrait of Hell they created has endured long after the books themselves were forgotten. That portrait today remains, in a sense, canonical for many believers who seem certain that it’s actually somehow biblical.
The whole post is here. Enjoy!
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