“It was your mother’s responsibility to teach you modesty. … If any of your body parts were uncovered, there’s a very special form of hell that is reserved for both you and your mother. In this hell, your mother would dip your clothes in acid, put them on your body, and so throughout the day your body would decompose from the acid. And then the next morning it would start all over again, for thousands of years, or however many years hell lasts. When you learn this as a child, and everyone around you believes it, you believe it.”
Haart grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community she describes as “fundamentalist,” though critics have questioned how the show portrays it. In both Christianity and Judaism, views on the afterlife are diverse – and most Jews in the U.S. today put less emphasis on what happens after death than what happens now.
As a scholar of early Christianity whose work focuses on depictions of hell, I see this education as rooted in two millennia of ideas about gender, bodies, sin and punishment that influence our society today – particularly for women.
Some ancient Jewish and Christian depictions of the afterlife provide graphic depictions of sinners and their punishments. Many of these punishments are seen as “fitting” for the sin committed: They follow the ancient legal standard of “measure for measure” punishment, known as lex talionis.
Punishments for women, like the one that Haart describes, follow the norms of the ancient and medieval cultures that first created them, including drastically different expectations for men and women. In these texts, the “immoral” clothes that brought women to hell become the instruments of their own torment – threatening images used to keep them in their place.
‘Fitting’ the crime
Clothing is only the beginning. Women in hell hang by their breasts in several medieval Jewish texts known as the Isaiah fragments because they uncovered their hair, tore their veil or nursed their children in the marketplace “in order to attract the gaze of men.” In the Gedulat Moshe, a Jewish text written sometime around the 13th century that describes Moses visiting hell, he sees women who uncovered themselves hanged by their breasts and their hair.
These frightening visions were drawn from attitudes toward real women and were used to control them, as well. In a third-century rabbinic legal text, the Mishnah Sotah, a woman who has committed adultery is sentenced to have her breasts and hair uncovered. The public humiliation is considered “fitting,” because her body led to her sin.
But this idea of justice or retribution did not originate with the rabbis and is certainly not exclusive to Judaism. The punishments in these Jewish texts closely mirror the second-century Apocalypse of Peter, a Christian text that describes women hanging by their hair and neck because their intricate hairstyles seduced married men.
It is difficult to say whether it was Jews or Christians who first brought these gendered ideas about the body into their images of hell. But the earlier Christian visions of hell certainly elaborate on them more than medieval Jewish ones do. For example, only young women were punished for being unchaste in early Christian depictions of hell – even those like the Apocalypse of Paul, in which male and female sinners were punished equally for other sins.
In the earliest Christian descriptions of hell, women and men were both held accountable for parenting-related sins, such as abortion or abandoning an infant. After a few centuries, however, women alone were held responsible for having children and nurturing them. In one medieval account of hell, the Latin Vision of Ezra, women were not only responsible for parenting their own children but punished for failing to nurse orphaned infants. Their punishment? Hanging in fire while serpents suck their breasts.
These sins and punishments reflect several different but interwoven ancient ideas about the body: that women’s hair was a sexual organ, that female grooming is tied to adultery, that women’s main role is child rearing and that their bodies should not be seen in public.
Double standards today
Although these ideas were not included in the Jewish or Christian Bible, societies often used them to define religious crimes and control their bodies.
It is easy to look at these ancient hellscapes and dismiss them as long-ago. But ideas about women’s bodies being problematic and in need of control persist, with or without religion. And in “My Unorthodox Life,” Haart invites the audience to look at gender double standards in the fashion world up close.
Haart, who has left her Orthodox community, calls herself “very proud to be a Jew” and determined “to show people that there are all sorts of Jews.” Now CEO of Elite World Group, the parent company of a major modeling agency, she draws viewers’ attention to the industry’s sexual abuse, unequal standards for men and women, and its tendency to cater to male desire. She describes her mission as “cleaning up” modeling and “rooting out” its sexual abuse – a vow a former supermodel has recently called on her to uphold.
Though “My Unorthodox Life” has been mocked for its soap opera style, I believe it carries a serious message: Ideas about objectifying and controlling women’s bodies shape our society more than we’d like to admit – with or without religion.
How threats of hellfire helped keep ‘immodest’ women in their place – from the ancient world to ‘My Unorthodox Life’. By Meghan Henning. The Conversation, September 8, 2021.
There are, additionally, legal observers concerned about the unusual manner in which abortion will be targeted. Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, has set up a “whistleblower” website where people can submit tips about those they believe have violated the legislation. A spokesperson for Texas Right to life told NPR that “These lawsuits are not against the women…[they]would be against the individuals making money off of the abortion, the abortion industry itself.” While many would contest whether or not the legislation is about women, it is striking that accountability is being assigned to third parties: doctors, nurses, volunteers, and even Uber drivers.
This is not the first time in history that culpability for abortion has shifted. Around the turn of the Common Era the Roman Emperor Augustus introduced moral legislation designed, among other things, to encourage marriage and childbearing among Roman elites. The legislation required citizens to marry and prohibited cross-class marriage. The descendants of senators were prohibited from marrying freedwomen (formerly enslaved women), dancers, actors, gladiators or sex workers. Those who were married were provided with incentives to procreate (exemptions from certain arduous duties) and adultery now became a public crime punishable by exile and fines. While none of this legislation targeted abortion or infant exposure, it created a context in which what we might call household or familial crimes could be legislated by the state. Moreover, these laws disproportionately affected women. An elite woman who had sex with anyone other than her husband could be punished for adultery.
An elite man was only guilty of adultery if he had sex with an elite woman to whom he wasn’t married; sex workers, enslaved and formerly enslaved people did not leave them open to this charge. Abortion was something of a non-issue. It only became problematic, medical historian Rebecca Flemming has written, when a woman used it “to obstruct a man’s acquisition of legitimate heirs.” In the same way, responsibility for procreation was women’s work. The first divorce, Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes, was performed on the grounds of infertility. If a couple could not get pregnant it was assumed to be the woman’s fault. When the Roman writer Juvenal speaks of “foul pools” where women went to acquire exposed babies to pass off as their husbands’, he may be offering us a glimpse of the desperate situation that faced women who could not get pregnant. In the first two centuries of the Common Era, Christianity followed suit. The earliest statements about abortion appear in the second century in a suite of texts about ethics and Christian lifestyle.
The Epistle of Barnabas 19.5 prohibits its audience from procuring an abortion or destroying a child after its birth (through infanticide or, potentially, infant exposure) but the addressees of the statement are everyone. Another second century text, the Didache, includes abortion in a genderless list similar to the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not commit sodomy; thou shalt not commit fornication; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not use magic; thou shalt not use love potions; thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” Once again, the list does not specify any one person as responsible for these sins. In her just published book Hell Hath No Fury (full disclosure, I endorsed this book), Dr. Meghan Henning charts the ways that culpability for sins shifted and changed course in the first millennium. The earliest descriptions of Christians being punished for household crimes, Henning shows, depicts both parents being punished for infant exposure. In the Apocalypse of Paul, she told me, both men and women are punished for procuring abortions. In the late second-century Apocalypse of Peter, however, only women are condemned for seeking terminations. The women whose children had been aborted are described as seated in a place of excrement and filth where a lake of putrid matter had filled and covered them up to their necks. Here, Henning says, we see the beginning of the gendering of household crimes as female. The distinction stuck. Over the next few centuries, the notion that women were exclusively responsible for adultery and abortion was further cemented in a variety of ancient sin catalogues and apocalypses. Henning told me that women’s responsibilities were even expanded such that they could be responsible for broader “childrearing” crimes.
Then medieval Latin Vision of Ezra not only condemns those who killed their children but also those who “did not give their breasts to orphans.” This radically reshapes the moral obligations of women to include caring for parentless children. Given that most ancient wet nurses were enslaved this text adds a layer of religious violence to the injustice already inflicted upon them those who had been trafficked. Now the exploitation and violation of women’s bodies was refashioned as a kind of moral duty. All women were obligated to allow their bodies to be used in this way, regardless of their lack of choice, autonomy, or health. The recent legislation in Texas aims to target abortion providers. It thus expands culpability for abortion to include medical doctors and anyone else involved in providing terminations. In religious contexts this has happened before. In 2009 a Brazilian doctor was excommunicated for performing an abortion on a 9-year-old rape victim who was pregnant with twins. The girl’s mother and the medical team were also excommunicated. It is worth noting that the child herself was not. Given the religious and legal history governing the family, we might wonder why fathers are no longer a part of the religious or legal conversation. One imagines that a biological father might be liable to prosecution if he drove his partner to an abortion clinic but, otherwise, they are in the clear. Henning told me that our culture “continues to place the lion’s share of responsibility for procreation and parenthood on women.” This is one of the few places in society that men are invisible. “Ironically,” said Henning “the ancient Christian documents that hold everyone responsible for abortion also held the whole Christian community responsible for all imaginable for sin.” The biggest targets are the wealthy, who face damnation if they don’t share their resources.
A return to Christian morality, said Henning, implicates everyone: “Selectively reanimating ancient teachings about abortion in order to condemn women, is not a return to authentic Christian ethics, it is a misrepresentation of ancient teachings about collective responsibility and the common good.”
**This was first published in the Daily Beast on September 6th.
This is not the first time in history that culpability for abortion has shifted. By Candida Moss, University of Birmingham, September 2021.
Why are we obsessed with the reimagining of hell? And what influences our notions of the landscapes, geography, and bodies within the fiery inferno? A new book takes readers to the origins of hell and back.
Professor Meghan Henning has found her niche studying stories about the one place no one wants
Across
the pop culture landscape, eternal perdition is having a moment. Hadestown
raked in eight Tony Awards including best musical, and The Good Place is NBC’s
highest-rated comedy series. Meanwhile, over on Netflix, Lucifer is solving
crime while running a nightclub in Los Angeles that looks pretty spectacular,
if salacious opulence is your thing. Hell is hot right now.
The elements of Homer’s telling — the descent, the encounters with wellknown characters, the suffering — were familiar structures for early Christians, according to Henning.
“The myth of the descent into Hades was popular and widely referenced,” she said. “When an ancient person would hear someone say, ‘You know, I went on this journey to the underworld,’ or ‘I went on a trip to Hades,’ the idea of such a thing would be familiar enough that, instead of asking ‘Really? Is that a real place?’ or ‘What was there?’ the person would ask instead, ‘Well, who did you see?’”
One reason for the saturation of these stories in the culture of antiquity is that they were widely used to help teach morality. What one saw and who one met in an underworld had “an ethical orientation, aimed at providing instructions for how people ought to conduct themselves in their mortal lives,” Henning writes in her book.
Afterlife stories about punishment, in particular, were commonly used to teach students about the rhetorical concept of ekphrasis, or the use of visual imagery conveyed with words to move an audience, so students throughout antiquity were familiar with the form. In Plato’s Republic, the visual descriptions of suffering underscore the importance of living a life of moderation. Roman satirist Lucian flips social hierarchy in his underworld, with kings and governors “either selling salt fish on account of their neediness or teaching the alphabet, and getting abused and hit over the head by all comers,” Henning notes in a footnote.
That highly visual language — “selling salt fish,” “getting abused and hit over the head” — creates vivid descriptions with a moral purpose: to warn to the rich and powerful about how they ought to be living their lives. Plutarch, in another of Henning’s examples, details the colors of the wounds of those suffering in the afterlife and attributes them to particular sins. “Drab brown … comes of meanness and greed,” for example, “while if spite and envy are present, they give out this livid green.”
Homer. Plato. Lucian. Plutarch. These storytellers have a sort of “All Along the Watchtower” effect going on. The original version of the song comes from Bob Dylan, but then Jimi Hendrix took it and made it his own. Decades later, U2 gave it a shot on their album Rattle and Hum, and plenty more have continued reworking it. Likewise, when the early Christians write about hell, they’re riffing on something already out there, not coming up with something completely new.
These examples from Homer and the rest offer a sense of the rhetorical practices in which early Christians are participating when they write their gospels, epistles and other texts. Homer is Dylan, Plato is Hendrix and, as the New Testament writers dip their reeds in ink, they are U2’s lead singer Bono clearing his throat. They’ve got a structure for how to think about the afterlife and what awaits the damned. Now’s their turn to rock the hell story in a way that explains how they believe Jesus has called them to live.
Though Henning offers examples from throughout the New Testament of how they do this, she devotes an entire chapter of her book to Matthew’s Gospel. It is rife with imagery of punishments — eternal fire, weeping and gnashing of teeth, outer darkness and more — that illustrate what awaits those who do not follow the path to righteousness laid out by Jesus.
“In Matthew, the vivid depictions of ‘hell’ functioned in much the same way that it did for the Greek readers of The Odyssey, as a tool for broad ethical and cultural education,” Henning writes.
On the flip side, the virtues on which Matthew focuses prove to be exceptionally influential on early Christians, particularly his account of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, which begins “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” commands love of one’s enemy, warns against piety and wealth-seeking, and gives us the “Do unto others” golden rule.
As more early Christians wrote new texts, including the epistles of the New Testament and works such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Latin Vision of Ezra, they picked up on and elaborated Matthew’s themes. They used the “tried and true [hell] rhetoric of empire” to present “their own distinctive values,” Henning writes, often describing “the punishment of those who do not care for ‘the other’” and using new hell stories to “[draw] upon the Sermon of the Mount as an ethical core that could bring cohesion to early Christian communities.” This theme emerged at a critical time for early Christians, when they were still in the early stages of identity formation and deciding which texts and messages would be their exemplars.
Two thousand or so years later, we’re still talking about hell. But Henning will tell you we’re creating hell stories not only in different ways today, but for different reasons.
“Unfortunately, what I think has happened is that we’ve picked up on the rhetoric — which is really kind of a trick from the Greco-Roman world — and we have not brought with it any of the ethical content,” she said. “The real focus of hell in the New Testament and early Christian texts is really on care for the other and love of the neighbor. But when we depict hell in modern media, we’ve actually pivoted away from that and have focused more on the rhetoric itself and the violent imagery.’’
This turn away from using hell depictions to focus an audience on virtues is not just secular. Henning cites the example of so-called “hell houses,” a phenomenon of evangelical Christianity in America whose purpose is straight out of Jonathan Edward’s 1741 sermon to encourage religious conversion. These houses feature depictions of gruesome punishments linked to sins that “usu- ally include abortion, homosexuality, consumption of alcohol and recreational drugs, suicide, pre-marital sex, and other sins that are of primary concern to evangelical Christians.” In this catalog of transgressions, “the early Christian emphasis on the virtues presented in the Sermon on the Mount is all but lost.”
Although Henning’s study of hell is driven by academic curiosity rather than the religious concerns of a theologian, she laments the loss of what she calls the “pedagogical savvy” of the early Christians as they created vivid hells in service of a broader message of concern with the marginalized in our world.
Henning works to reclaim their teachings in The Road to Hell, a course she and communication professor Joseph Valenzano III designed and teach together.
Henning said that when they start teaching hell, their students “want to quickly go to the entertainment value,” she said. This impulse reflects their experience with depictions of hell in popular culture, including ultra-violent ones such as the Saw horror movie franchise, which, she said, “uses the same kind of measure-for-measure punishment stuff that early Christian depictions of hell do, but intensifies it. … It’s even grosser than you could imagine.”
When Henning assigns her students to analyze modern depictions of hell, they typically will train their critical lenses on comparatively less disturbing depictions of the afterlife, such as in Stranger Things or American Horror Story — even Harry Potter.
“The
image when Harry dies for a short period of time and he’s in this void —
students actually compare that to different ancient depictions of a kind of
neutral afterlife, like Greek and Roman depictions of Hades that don’t have
punishment or Hebrew Bible notions of Sheol,” she said.
Henning really likes NBC’s The Good Place, which she describes as an especially nuanced exception to the violence that pervades contemporary hell depictions. In it, Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell) believes she is in heaven by mistake. But — spoiler alert — her crippling doubts are a form of psychological torture being inflicted on her in a ver- sion of hell constructed by a demon architect (played by Ted Danson) who is trying to freshen up the whole agony paradigm. The show creates a world in which these and other characters are forced to reflect on what is just, what is unjust and how justice should be restored. Somewhere, sometime soon, if it isn’t already happening, a graduate student ought to be typing up a dissertation on The Good Place as an embodiment of 21st-century American anxiety about unearned privilege.
We don’t need to rely on hell stories for communicating about what it means to live virtuously, Henning points out.
“I think that we have a lot more rhetorical tools at our disposal than ancient Chris Christians did,” she said. “I think the question is, ‘What are the best rhetorical tools in our world, and how can we maximally use them to do that good work in the world?’”
Social media, for all its faults, offers a good example. Henning — who also has a strong interest in disability studies, which she attributes to seeing her grandmother cope with the loss of her leg after her car accident — has watched as disability activists use social media campaigns to create new ethical boundaries for how media companies serve customers who need, for example, closed captioning services. Activists no longer require hellinspired storytelling to get the public to pay attention or change its ways.
Early Christians might easily recognize the rhetorical point we’re making in one specific way we talk about hell today. Type a Google search for recent news that includes the word “hell,” and you’ll turn up the usual stories about airline “travel hell” or “the neighbor from hell.” But sprinkled among the usual suspects will be stories that describe one circumstance or another as “hell on Earth.” It might be the fate of a community victimized by war, the last days of an abused child, a pocket of indescribably deep poverty in a distant country or nearby place, or some other dire, desperate situation.
No matter the lamentable particulars, one shared element defines these stories as hellscapes: the undeserved torment of blameless innocents. Here, the usual hell story is turned inside-out. These are not hells where the wicked are being punished. These are hells that confront us with the moral urgency of caring for the most marginalized and vulnerable who suffer among us today. In these stories at least, hell still calls us to follow the early Christians’ message about how we ought to live.
The Lesson from Hell. By Matthew Dewald. University of Dayton Magazine, Autumn 2019.
Although many of us now associate hell with Christianity, the idea of an afterlife existed much earlier. Greeks and Romans, for example, used the concept of Hades, an underworld where the dead lived, both as a way of understanding death and as a moral tool.
However, in the present times, the use of this rhetoric has radically changed.
Rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome
The earliest Greek and Roman depictions of Hades in the epics did not focus on punishment, but described a dark shadowy place of dead people.
In Book 11 of the Greek epic the “Odyssey,” Odysseus travels to the realm of the dead, encountering countless familiar faces, including his own mother.
Near the end of Odysseus’ tour, he encounters a few souls being punished for their misdeeds, including Tantalus, who was sentenced eternally to have food and drink just out of reach. It is this punishment from which the word “tantalize” originated.
Hundreds of years later, the Roman poet Virgil, in his epic poem “Aeneid,” describes a similar journey of a Trojan, Aeneas, to an underworld, where many individuals receive rewards and punishments.
This ancient curriculum was used for teaching everything from politics to economics to virtue, to students across the Roman empire, for hundreds of years.
In later literature, these early traditions around punishment persuaded readers to behave ethically in life so that they could avoid punishment after death. For example, Plato describes the journey of a man named Er, who watches as souls ascend to a place of reward, and descend to a place of punishment. Lucian, an ancient second century A.D. satirist takes this one step further in depicting Hades as a place where the rich turned into donkeys and had to bear the burdens of the poor on their backs for 250 years.
For Lucian this comedic depiction of the rich in hell was a way to critique excess and economic inequality in his own world.
Early Christians
By the time the New Testament gospels were written in the first century A.D., Jews and early Christians were moving away from the idea that all of the dead go to the same place.
In the Gospel of Matthew, the story of Jesus is told with frequent mentions of “the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.” As I describe in my book, many of the images of judgment and punishment that Matthew uses represent the early development of a Christian notion of hell.
The Gospel of Luke does not discuss final judgment as frequently, but it does contain a memorable representation of hell. The Gospel describes Lazarus, a poor man who had lived his life hungry and covered with sores, at the gate of a rich man, who disregards his pleas. After death, however, the poor man is taken to heaven. Meanwhile, it is the turn of the rich man to be in agony as he suffers in the flames of hell and cries out for Lazarus to give him some water.
For the marginalized other
Matthew and Luke are not simply offering audiences a fright fest. Like Plato and later Lucian, these New Testament authors recognized that images of damnation would capture the attention of their audience and persuade them to behave according to the ethical norms of each gospel.
Later Christian reflections on hell picked up and expanded this emphasis. Examples can be seen in the later apocalypses of Peter and Paul – stories that use strange imagery to depict future times and otherworldly spaces. These apocalypses included punishments for those who did not prepare meals for others, care for the poor or care for the widows in their midst.
Although these stories about hell were not ultimately included in the Bible, they were extremely popular in the ancient church, and were used regularly in worship.
A major idea in Matthew was that love for one’s neighbor was central to following Jesus. Later depictions of hell built upon this emphasis, inspiring people to care for the “least of these” in their community.
Damnation then and now
In the contemporary world, the notion of hell is used to scare people into becoming Christians, with an emphasis on personal sins rather than a failure to care for the poor or hungry.
In the United States, as religion scholar Katherine Gin Lum has argued, the threat of hell was a powerful tool in the age of nation-building. In the early Republic, as she explains, “fear of the sovereign could be replaced by fear of God.”
As the ideology of republicanism developed, with its emphasis on individual rights and political choice, the way that the rhetoric of hell worked also shifted. Instead of motivating people to choose behaviors that promoted social cohesion, hell was used by evangelical preachers to get individuals to repent for their sins.
Even though people still read Matthew and Luke, it is this individualistic emphasis, I argue, that continues to inform our modern understanding of hell. It is evident in the hell-themed Halloween attractions with their focus on gore and personal shortcomings.
These depictions are unlikely to portray the consequences for people who have neglected to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, cloth the naked, care for the sick or visit those in prison.
The fears around hell, in the current times, play only on the ancient rhetoric of eternal punishment.
Why the Christian idea of hell no longer persuades people to care for the poor. By Meghan Henning. The Conversation, October 23, 2018.
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