For context, I am not Christian. This post is mostly just for the sake of curiousity.
When did the concept of Hell in Christianity become a thing? Where did it come from?
I have heard some say it was a ruse by the church to maintain power over people through fear. I have heard others say the concept is much older.
Anybody know anything?
Well, there are many opinions about Hell, especially in Christianity. In Christianity, the concept of Hell came from a mix of ancient Hebrew ideas (Sheol, Gehenna,) Greek concepts (Hades, Tartarus) surrounding cultural mythologies and later medieval literature.
In the earliest Hebrew Scriptures the afterlife was described in Sheol as a shadowy, silent under-realm where all dead people went to regardless of moral character. It was a place of silence for the dead, not of active torture. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, translators used Hades instead of Sheol (reasonable since the Greek term for those who died and went to the underworld is Hades).
Gehenna or Valley of Hinnom was a term that Jesus used frequently in his teachings and it relates to the realm that was a literal trash dump where fires burned continuously. This further inspired it to be used as a metaphor for waste, destruction and what is defined as Sin in Christian literature. It is important to note that this place as well is not to be interpreted as one of eternal torture.
Finally, Tartarus, found only once in the New Testament in 2 Peter 2:4, we can see that Tartarus was brought from Greek mythology as a deep abyss reserved for punishing fallen angels (like Lucifer and the third of the fallen angels as well as the Grigori (The Fallen Watchers)).
