I don't usually like engaging with videos on subjects that demand careful attention; I'd rather work from text, which can be quoted and analyzed more easily. But I've been watching the work of a popular YouTube guy, a biblical scholar named Dan McClellan who's also active on TikTok. I first encountered him in the Twitter feed of Candida Moss, whose book The Myth of Persecution (Harper, 2013) I liked a lot. I found him offputting then, and still do, but he knows his stuff and is good on matters of fact. But matters of fact about the Bible tend to bleed into questions of doctrine, as in this short video.
McClellan isn't as different as he might be from the Christian TikTokers he takes on. As you can see in this case, he draws in traffic with a catchy line, "There is no biblical concept of hell." At least he doesn't begin by gushing "This video will BLOW YOUR MIND!" He quickly explains that there are several biblical concepts of post-mortem punishment, and I can go along with his account of the development of ideas about the afterlife in Judaism and Christianity. I believe I've seen another video where he goes into differing terms such as "Hades" and "Gehenna," which some English translation render as "Hell."
So that much is good. I don't think the translation of specific words is that important: if you're being burned by the fire that is not quenched, gnawed by the worm that is not sated, it's not going to matter whether you're in Hell or Hades or Gehenna. As McClellan says, the New Testament has several conceptions of post-mortem punishment, as it has several conceptions of what you must to do be saved, and what is required of you after you've been saved. If you take such things seriously, that can't be reassuring. It's why so many Christians are anxious and unsure that they won't be condemned after all. Quibbles about terminology are like fussing about whether Jesus' name was really or some variant of Yehoshua: do the purists on that issue, who generally don't know any more Aramaic and don't fixate on the Aramaic forms of other Biblical names, think that the Savior won't hear their prayers if they don't address him by the exact correct name, or pray in flawless Aramaic or koine Greek? Maybe he won't, I don't know.
I think it's more important that Jesus in the gospels is consistently punitive, though of course he forgives sins when he's in the mood. God isn't consistent either, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy (Exodus 33:19, quoted in Romans 9:15). As McClellan points out, Paul doesn't talk about post-mortem torture - that's Jesus' shtick. But the default setting of the New Testament is that you are in danger of God's wrath, and you can only escape it through Christ. As I've argued before, this is a widespread human assumption, older than Christianity and found beyond the borders of Christendom. As with any belief about the afterlife, there's no evidence for it, but it's what many people take for granted anyway. It isn't something that wicked priests invented to control the masses; the masses believe it on their own, and may even have invented it.
Many Christians and what you might call Christian-adjacent types don't like the idea that a loving god would condemn them or people they like to eternal torture, though they're willing to throw Truly Bad People under the bus. Maybe they're right, but they have to work hard to forget that Jesus didn't see it their way. The time, for some reason, was very short, and the gospel must be proclaimed far and wide, but he came to save a few; most would not find the way to safety. The promise of salvation depends on, and is meaningless without, the threat of punishment. Whether you'd end up in Hades or Hell is, it seems to me, a distraction from the main message of danger and safety.
Of course many of his fans react as if McClellan had come up with this information on his own, the way people react to Bart Ehrman or Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky. That goes with the territory. When I read the comments under his videos I often wonder how many of them really understand what he's telling them. Many of the reactions are of the typical Internet line that he DESTROYED the Bible Thumpers. SCHOOLED them. And so on. It doesn't matter whether they understand, as long as they're on the Right Side.
As someone who's read a lot of biblical scholarship over the past forty-five years, I don't see it that way. McClellan likes to invoke "the data" and intone that the scholarly consensus "absolutely" disproves the apologists' claims, and in many cases he's right; but scholars aren't always as unanimous as he implies, and the scholarly consensus has changed in the time I've been following the field. I agree with much of what McClellan says, but I'm wary of being too absolute about it. The data about Jesus are too sparse, vague, and contradictory to say much with certainty about him. Many different reconstructions have been constructed from the data, and despite archaeology and some manuscript finds, very little new data have been found in the past century. Compare William Shakespeare, who lived much more recently than Jesus, in a period and place that is much better documented. But we know surprisingly little about him, almost new documents have turned up in the past century, and his biographers use speculation, often very free, to fill in the yawning gaps. (See David Ellis, The Truth About William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction and Modern Biographies, Edinburgh 2013.) The great English scholar and churchman Dennis Nineham quoted his teacher R. H. Lightfoot "lamenting that New Testament scholars 'are "so hot for certainties"; if only they would sometimes say, 'we simply do no know'". But scholarship abhors a vacuum, as do believers and unbelievers.
I suspect McClellan wanted to convey that no one knows what Jesus taught about the afterlife, to forestall any claims about it, and I think some of his fans decided that they could fill in the gap with their own wishful thinking. It's possible that the clashing concepts in the gospels go back to Jesus himself. When the time is short and the gospel must be proclaimed with the help of the Holy Spirit, consistency is not a priority. Jesus was not a systematic theologian but a back-country revivalist, exorcist, and end-times preacher, not a serious scholar of Torah. If he had teachers or other influences, we don't know who they were; scholars can only infer them. As McClellan indicates, the gospels show the influence of religious speculation and writing of Jesus' time and place; he may not have bothered to think hard about them when the Spirit drove him into the wilderness (Mark 1:12) after his baptism. Or he might have. It's fun to speculate, and I do it myself, but speculation isn't evidence, let alone certainty.
