It is not too much to say that if these three sets of passages were removed from the Bible nobody would think of believing in everlasting torment. Now let me make the assertion straight out—There is no word in the original language of the Bible that at all justifies the use of either of these words in the meaning that we have attached to it—and therefore the Revised Version of the Bible has practically swept them all away.
§ 1
Take first the words Damn, Damnation which convey to us the idea of doom to a Hell of never-ending torment and never-ending sin. The original word conveyed no such idea to our Lord or the Apostles. It conveyed no such idea to the translators of the Authorized Version. When they translated it Damn and Damnation they did not at all mean what we now mean.
There are two Greek words, krinô which means simply to judge, and kata-krinô which means to judge adversely, to condemn, and it is sometimes the first and sometimes the second of these words which is translated "Damn." Why is it so translated? Surely the translators did not think so evil of God as to believe that He could never judge a man without condemning him and that He could never condemn him except to everlasting torment. Not at all. They had no thought of this. The English word "damn" at that time had no such awful meaning as has grown into it in our day through the wide-spread influence of the theory which I am criticizing. It simply meant what the Greek word meant. I find an interesting illustration of this in the Wycliffe Bible in the passage about the woman taken in adultery. Jesus saith, "Woman, hath no man damned thee?" "No man, Lord." "Neither do I damn thee." That is to say the English word Damn at that time only meant "condemn." But words are dangerous things if not carefully watched, owing to their tendency to change their meaning as a language grows. A new, darker meaning has grown on to the English word since. Once an innocent word, it has now become dangerous and misleading. Therefore, the Revisers have swept it away, and the words damn and damnation have now vanished entirely and for ever out of the pages of the English Bible. Unfortunately the public do not read the Revised Version.
With this explanation I ask the reader to turn back to his Bible. In our sense of the word did our Lord say, "He that believeth not shall be damned"? Most certainly not. He said that he should be condemned for wilfully disbelieving, but He did not say to what he should be condemned, nor for how long. I should condemn you for doing a selfish act, but that would hardly mean sending you to endless torment. Did He say that those who had done evil should rise to the resurrection of damnation? (1 John v. 29). No. He said, "to the resurrection of judgment." (See R. V.) Did St. Paul say, "He that doubteth (about eating certain meats) is damned if he eat"? (Rom. xiv. 23). Did he say that a church widow should have damnation for marrying again? (1 Tim. v. 12). Of course not; the word only means judgment or condemnation. There is no thought at all in it of this endless Hell as the Revised Version has plainly shown. So we see that at any rate all these texts about "damnation" can no longer be used in proof of everlasting torment and everlasting sin.
§ 2
Something similar is true about the texts whose chief word is "Hell." The word "hell" occurs eighteen times in the Authorized Version. Once it is a translation of a Greek word Tartarus (2 Peter ii. 4) cast down to Hell to be reserved "unto the Day of Judgment." That certainly was not everlasting. Five times it is a translation of the word Hades whose meaning we already know, and which certainly did not mean everlasting. The other twelve times it is a translation of the word Gehenna used by our Lord, and no scholar with the least regard for his reputation would dream of stating that our Lord certainly meant it to convey the idea of endlessness. It was the name of a horrible valley outside Jerusalem where things were cast out to be burnt, to keep the city pure. The Jewish prophets took the word as a metaphor to express the fate of wicked men. From it they drew their images used by our Lord of "the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched" (Mark x. 46). To be in danger of Gehenna was to be in danger of a hereafter doom suggested by this dread place.
Our Lord simply took up the vague Jewish word and did not define it. What exactly had He in His mind when He used this word? This is a question of terrible importance. He certainly meant something very stern and awful. He seems to indicate also something final and irrevocable. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that He meant to convey the idea in our minds of a vast prison, in which the souls of the lost are pierced through with agony for ever and ever. You ask, How can I know what He meant? How could I know what Shakespeare meant by a certain word? I should read up all the books and letters of Shakespeare's times in which the word occurs, and whatever it commonly meant to the people of Shakespeare's time I should accept as being what Shakespeare meant. That looks sensible, does it not? Well, a very interesting investigation has been made by various scholars. They have examined all the existing Jewish writings where the word Gehenna was used from 300 B. C. to 300 A. D. Then they have examined the Jewish Talmuds which run on to the fourth and fifth century. A modern English scholar, Dr. Dewes, says (Plea for a New Translation, p. 23): "Every passage has been carefully examined which is quoted in the works of Lightfoot, Schoetgen, Buxtorf, Castell, Schindler, Glass, Bartoloccius, Ugalino and Nork, and the result of the whole examination is this: there are only two passages which even a superficial reader could consider to be corroborative of the assertion that the Jews understood Gehenna to be a place of everlasting torment."
I give a few specimens from the Talmuds. "Gehenna is ordained of old because of sins." "The ungodly will be judged in Gehenna against the day of judgment." "The ungodly shall be judged in Gehenna until the righteous shall say of them, We have seen enough." "The judgment of the ungodly is for twelve months." "Gehenna is nothing but a day in which the impious will be burned." "The sinners … shall descend into Gehenna; at the end of twelve months the body shall be consumed and the soul burned up and the wind shall scatter it under the feet of the just."
The reader sees, of course, that the vague Jewish opinions have no authority for us except to help us to get at the meaning of our Lord when speaking to Jews about Gehenna. We may assume that He used their familiar word in the sense in which they would naturally understand it. They certainly would understand Him to proclaim some terrible doom, probably also an irrevocable doom. But can any one affirm that they must have understood Him to mean endless torment, in the face of this evidence—and its powerful confirmation by the greatest of all modern Jewish students of the Talmud, Emanuel Deutsch. "There is no everlasting damnation in the Talmud" (Remains, p. 53), and again, "There is not a word in the Talmud which supports the damnable dogma of endless torment" (Conversation with Mr. Cox, Salvator Mundi, p. 72).