Although the true doctrine concerning the state of the dead was, as has been shown, revealed in the Old Testament, it was more or less perverted in the minds of the people. The prevalent idea was that all souls after death descended into Sheol, and there remained in expectation of the coming of the Messiah. When He came it was expected that the Jews, or at least, the faithful, would be raised from the dead, and made partakers of all the glories and blessedness of the Messiah’s reign. The views presented in the writings of the Rabbins of the condition of the souls in Sheol are not only diverse but inconsistent. The common representation was that Sheol itself was a gloomy, subterraneous abode, whose inhabitants were shades, weak and powerless, existing in a dreamy state; the best of them not in a state of suffering, and yet with no other enjoyment than the anticipation of deliverance when the Messiah should come. At other times, however, more life was attributed to the souls of the departed; and Sheol was represented as divided into two departments, Paradise and Gehenna. In the former were, according to some, all Jews, according to others only those who had faithfully observed the law; and in the other, the Gentiles. The common opinion was that all the Jews would be raised from the dead, when the Messiah came, and all the Gentiles left forever in the abode of darkness. Paradise, according to this view, was a place of positive enjoyment, and Gehenna a place of positive suffering. It is evident that there is no great difference between this Jewish doctrine in its essential features, and the true doctrine as presented by our Lord in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Both are represented as going into Sheol or Hades. The one was comforted, the other tormented. There was an inseparable barrier between the two. So far both doctrines agree. When the Rabbi Jochanan was dying, he said, “Two paths open before me, the one leading to bliss, the other to torments; and I know not which of them will be my doom.”1 “Paradise is separated from hell by a distance no greater than the width of a thread.”2
According to many modern interpreters the New Testament writers adopted this Jewish doctrine not only in substance but in its details. (1.) They are represented as teaching that all the people of God who died before the advent of Christ, were confined in Sheol, or the under-world. Sheol or Hades, as stated above, is constantly spoken of “as the gloomy realm of shades, wherein are gathered and detained the souls of all the dead generations.” The soul at death is said to be dismissed “naked into the silent, dark, and dreary region of the under-world.” (2.) That when Christ died upon the cross, He descended “ad inferos,” into Hades, or Hell, for the purpose of delivering the pious dead from their prison; and that they were the redeemed captives of whom the Apostle speaks in Ephesians iv. 8-l0, as led by Christ into heaven. (3.) That those who die in the Lord since his advent, instead of being admitted into heaven, pass into the same place and the same state into which the patriarch passed at death before his coming. (4.) And as the Old Testament saints remained in Sheol until the first coming of the Messiah, so those who die under the New Testament, are to remain in Hades, until his second coming. Then they are not only to be delivered from Sheol, but their bodies are to be raised from the dead, and soul and body, reunited and glorified, are to be admitted into heaven.
Such is the scheme of doctrine said to be taught in the New Testament. Our Lord is regarded as giving it his sanction in the parable concerning Lazarus. Paul is made to teach it when he speaks of Christ as descending to “the lower parts of the earth,” which is said to mean “the parts lower than the earth,” that is, the under-world. His object in thus descending was, according to the theory, to deliver the souls confined in the gloomy prison of Sheol. Christ’s triumph over principalities and powers is referred to the same event, his descent into Hades. Mr. Alger, representing a large class of writers, says that according to Paul’s doctrine, “Christ was the first person clothed with humanity and experiencing death, admitted into heaven. Of all the hosts who had lived and died, every one had gone down into the dusky under-world. They were all held in durance waiting for the Great Deliverer.”3 The fate of those who die since the advent is no better, for they, as Paul is made to teach, are “all to remain in the under-world” until the second coming of Christ, “when they and the transformed living shall ascend together with the Lord.”4