The New Testament: A Translation

by David Bentley Hart

Mark 9:45–48, where he describes the valley in terms of the description in Isaiah 66:24 of human corpses being consumed by inexterminable worms and inextinguishable fires (neither of which, incidentally, is described as either otherworldly or eternal in nature). Then again, these same images also fit well with Jeremiah’s vision of the Ge-Hinnom gorged with corpses—the “valley of slaughter”—as a result of God’s historical punishment of Jerusalem and of those Israelites who had worshipped false gods and sacrificed their babies, using the king of Babylon as the instrument of his wrath; and, indeed, some very formidable New Testament scholars over the years, noting the seemingly more than incidental echoes of Jeremiah in the teachings of Jesus, have concluded that the language of the gehenna in the synoptic Gospels really referred to the historical “wrath” and “judgment” that many could see descending on Israel in Jesus’s own time (culminating in the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in AD 70),