Catholic Envy/Gehenna

Jerome writing the Vulgate

I've always had a little bit of Catholic envy. They have the coolest music, the coolest ceremonial clothes, and the best artists. But my Catholic envy reached an all-time high when I started reading the Vulgate. Before I knew any actual Latin, the language always had a certain mysticism to it. This made me (you guessed it) envious. Now that I can actually read Latin with something like efficiency, it may have lost some of its mysticism, but for me it's acquired a beauty and a precision. 

Protestants et al often give the Roman Catholics a hard time. We frequently accuse them of keeping the Bible out of the hands of the common people by only having it in Latin. Such an esoteric language, right? But during the Dark Ages, Latin had not yet become an obscure Roman artifact like so many amphitheaters. Latin was the common tongue across Europe. No one spoke it natively, but it was used as the lingua franca, and if you were educated at all, you knew some Latin. Hence the name Vulgate, which means "common." It was written expressly for the common people. And let me say, after having just fought my way through translating the first book Caesar's Gallic Wars, the Vulgate is EASY Latin. The first book I read was first John, and it was cake.

Now, it is true that the Catholic church murdered a fair share of people for trying to translate the Bible into their own language, but we can't pin that on Jerome.

So yesterday I was reading Matthew 5 in the Vulgate, and after the Beatitudes, I came across the section where Jesus "upgrades" the old law. In the KJV it reads:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:

But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

Now, that's lovely. I've read it for many years in this translation and thought it was magnificent every time. But the words for "hell fire" in the Vulgate are quite different: gehennae ignis. Literally, "the fire of Gehenna." I was puzzled by that word, Gehenna. It didn't sound like any Latin word I could think of for hell or punishment. I looked in my handy-dandy Cassell's Latin Dictionary, but it wasn't listed there. So, naturally I turned to the internet. Turns out, Gehenna is where cultists would sacrifice their own children, by fire, to their gods.

Now, I love the use of "Gehenna" as a metaphorical name for hell. Sometimes, I feel like people think that God has created hell to punish people, or that it's Satan's torture palace. But by referring to it as "Gehenna," the responsibility of its creation lies with people. Just as the City of Enoch was founded by humans and will eventually become the New Jerusalem of Revelation, so hell is an essentially human invention. I don't think God had anything to do with it—that's kind of the point. Hell, in it's eternal, immutable state is for the very few who want to separate themselves from anything godly. Heaven, on the other hand, (in its various degrees) is for those who have embraced those qualities which are best in themselves and others. There's something very human about all eternal destinations.