To the Spirits in Prison: When Jesus Descended into Hell

The Apostles Creed is the oldest statement of Catholic belief and apostolic witness. Its Fifth Article, what happened to Jesus between the Cross and the Resurrection, is a mystery to be unveiled.

“This is the night when Christ broke the prison bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.”

— The Easter Vigil Exultet

April 13, 2022 by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

This is my 13th Holy Week post from prison. In each of them, I have tried to move away from my usual format, which is sort of a prison journal, to make our Holy Week post a more serious theological endeavor. That has been a challenge where I live because my resources for research are few. Despite that obstacle, we have over these years presented a series of posts about the events of Holy Week that have become popular with readers.

Some of these posts stand out more than others. They tend to follow the Way of the Cross so we have selected seven (besides this one) that could become daily readings for a personal Holy Week retreat. We have now gathered them in one place “Our Holy Week Retreat for Beyond These Stone Walls” .

A few weeks ago in my post, “The Annunciation and the Consecration of Russia and Ukraine,” I wrote of my path of reversion to Catholic faith at age 16 in 1969. At a time when most of my peers were drifting away from faith in protests of one sort or another, I was drifting toward it. It was 1969, after all, and it was the age of protest and dissent. It was a strange time to commence taking Catholic faith seriously. It was the year after Pope Paul VI published “Humanae Vitae,” a year in which much of the world resisted authority and fidelity. It was a year of exodus for many priests and religious, a year in which secular and Catholic Culture began a misguided quest for relevance in a fracturing world.

It was also the year that I first paused while reciting the Apostles’ Creed to ponder its Fifth Article, a perplexing statement that Jesus, upon His death on the Cross, descended into hell. The Apostles’ Creed is a summary statement of the core beliefs of our faith’s first witnesses about the person and mission of Jesus. Did they really believe that upon His death He went to hell? For a 16-year-old struggling with faith, it was a startling question.

The answer to it has been a long and winding road into the meaning of the Cross, death, covenant, hell, and Heaven, the most fundamental questions for people of any faith. I have written a post that perhaps should precede this one for those who want a serious inquiry into the meaning of life and death in Sacred Scripture: “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead.”

There are two creeds — summaries of belief — that have a special place in the life of the Church. The Apostles’ Creed identifies with the centrality of the Church of Rome and the See of Peter from Apostolic times to the present. It is the Church’s core statement of belief. The second, the Nicene Creed used in the Mass, is formulated from the first two Councils in the life of the Church, the Councils of Nicea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD).

The Nicene Creed does not reflect a statement that Jesus descended into hell, but the Councils did not negate or refute it. This statement from the Apostolic era of the Church remains a dogma of faith. But what does it mean? What happened between the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus?

Hell on Earth — Or under It?

The phrase, “descended into hell” rests entirely on the language of the Old Testament. The place we commonly understand as hell was not a destination for souls in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The place for the souls of the dead was Sheol (pronounced SHAYole), a Hebrew term of uncertain Hebrew origin. It was simply the abode of the dead and it implied no sense of moral standing, neither salvation nor condemnation, and no distinction between the righteous and the wicked. Depending on the life that was lived, souls could go to Sheol bearing peace or bearing sorrow, but Sheol itself imparted neither. Life in relation to God was this life alone.

In the Old Testament, “to die” meant to descend to Sheol. It was our final destination. To rise from the dead, therefore, meant to rise from Sheol. The concept of Sheol being the “underworld” is a simple employment of the cosmology of ancient Judaism which understood the abode of God and the heavens as being above the Earth, and Sheol, the place of the dead, as below it. This is the source of our common understanding of Heaven and hell, but it omits a vast theological comprehension of the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus and the human need to understand our own death in terms of faith.

If, up to the time of Jesus, “to die” meant to descend into Sheol, then Jesus introduced an entirely new approach to understanding death in His statement from the Cross to the penitent criminal: “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23: 43). This is an account that I once told entitled, “Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found.”

On the Cross, where the penitent thief comes to faith while being crucified along with Jesus, God dissolves the bonds of death because death can have no power over Jesus. It is highly relevant for us that the conditions in which the penitent Dismas entered Paradise were to bear his cross and to come to faith.

It was at the moment Jesus declared, in His final word from the Cross, “It is finished,” that Heaven, the abode of God, opened for human souls for the first time in human history. The Gospels do not treat this moment lightly:

(Luke 23:44-46): “It was now about the sixth hour [3:00 PM], and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the Temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Saying this he breathed his last.”

(Matthew 27:51-54): “And behold, the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the Earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised ... When the centurion, and those who were with him keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake, and what took place, they were filled with awe, and said, ‘Clearly, this was the Son of God.’”

The veil of the Temple being torn in two appears also in Mark’s Gospel (15:38) and is highly significant. Two veils hung in the Jerusalem Temple. One was visible, separating the outer courts from the sanctuary. The other was visible only to the priests as it hung inside the sanctuary before its most sacred chamber in which the Holy of Holies dwelled (see Exodus 26:31-34). At the death of Jesus, the curtain of the Temple being torn from top to bottom is symbolic of salvation itself. Upon the death of Jesus, the barrier between the Face of God and His people was removed.

According to the works of the ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, the curtain barrier before the inner sanctuary that was torn in two was heavily embroidered with images of the Creation and the Cosmos. Its destruction symbolized the opening of Heaven, God’s dwelling place and the Angelic Realm, to human souls.

The Descent of Jesus to the Spirits in Prison

A very different tradition — and a highly perplexing one for Scripture scholars — exists in just a few verses in the New Testament First Letter of Peter (3:18-20):

“For Christ also died for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and declared to the spirits in prison who formerly did not obey when God's patience waited in the days of Noah.”

Interpreting this passage has been a challenge for scholars for centuries beginning with the Fathers of the Church and their predecessors known as the Apostolic Fathers. That is the term applied to certain disciples and successors of the Twelve Apostles. They were Greek-language writers who were among the martyrs and major figures of the 1st and 2nd centuries in the Christian church.

Although their writings were not considered canonical for inclusion in the New Testament, they are ranked as a continuation of the writings of the Apostles themselves and are a valuable source of early Church history. Among them was Clement of Alexandria. He understood the above verses from the First Letter of Peter as evidence that, during the silence of Holy Saturday, Christ descended to the dead to make a final offer of salvation to the deceased sinners of Noah’s day who rejected Noah and his covenant.

A few centuries later, St. Augustine proposed a different and far more complex interpretation. He suggested that Christ, through an exercise of pre-existent divinity, preached to the ancient world through the person of Noah urging disbelievers to repentance before the floodwaters of judgment (according to commentary in the 2010 Ignatius Study Bible New Testament adapted from the Revised Standard Version).

In the 17th Century, St. Robert Bellarmine reconnected this passage with Holy Saturday. He proposed that Christ descended to the souls in prison since the time of Noah to announce his salvation to those who had privately repented before the onset of the flood. A possibly related verse is also found in 1 Peter 4:6:

“For this is why the Gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God.”

However, 20th Century discoveries in Biblical archeology have found yet another interpretation that likely circulated among the earliest Christian communities but was lost after the first few centuries, A.D. These discoveries might possibly link the appearance of Jesus to the spirits in prison not as an event during his descent to Sheol but rather connected to his Ascent as he passed through one of the lower heavens. An element of interest preceding the passage from First Peter above concerns an interpretation of the term “sons of God” from Genesis (6:2). According to some ancient Jewish texts, these were the “Watchers,” rebel angels who corrupted mankind before the flood, and therefore were in part the cause of it. Being spirits, they could not be destroyed by the waters of the flood so the Lord cast them into the prisons of the lower heavens.

These references occur in the Books of Enoch and Jubilees, Jewish apocryphal works that had a strong influence on the Essene community in the Intertestamental period from the First Century B.C. through the First Century A.D. One of these traditions, from the apocryphal First Book of Enoch, describes these spirits imprisoned not in Sheol, but in one of the lower heavens. There is evidence that these traditions were well known to the Essenes and thus had some influence in the Early Church. Thanks to the mid-20th Century discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and related material in and around the area of Qumran in the 1940s, scholars have been able to reconnect with ancient Jewish traditions and lore known to First Century Christians but lost to antiquity for much of the later life of the Church. These remarkable discoveries added context to our understanding of New Testament Scriptures. This was the subject of my post, “Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse.”

In this sense, the spirits in prison to whom Christ is revealed on Holy Saturday between the Cross and Resurrection may not have been human souls at all, but fallen angels whose fall was closely connected to original sin and the flood of Noah’s time.

Whatever the solution to the mystery of Christ’s Holy Saturday mission, the total disabling of the enemy coincides with His triumphant entry into the innermost chambers of Satan’s power. “For to this end, Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord of both the living and the dead.” (Romans 14:9)

On the Third Day He arose again from the dead — from Sheol — and resumed His Earthly body proclaimed in Revelation (1:2): “The Firstborn of the dead.” Death could have no power over Him. The Resurrection and Easter morning followed, then the first eyewitness: Mary Magdalene: Faith, Courage, and an Empty Tomb.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: As described early in this post, some of our Holy Week posts have been gathered into a personal Holy Week Retreat available from now until the Solemnity of Pentecost. Please see our Special Events page.

You may also like these related posts on Sacred Scripture:

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

Casting the First Stone: What Jesus Wrote in the Sand

The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage

Prayerful observance of Holy Week is a challenge in a climate of pandemic restrictions and political outrage. Spend time with us this week Beyond These Stone Walls.

Something timely and fascinating was unearthed in the days just before Holy Week this year. It actually began in 1960 near the Dead Sea in Qumran, an ancient Hebrew settlement in Jordan. Archeologists discovered fragments showing that caves there were used as a hide-out by Bar Kochba’s rebel army which staged a three-year revolt against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem from AD 132-135.

The 1960 discovery included Roman coins, arrows, and a fragment of parchment bearing sixteen verses in Hebrew from the Book of Exodus. In a deep cave in Wadi Haver, archeologists also discovered several of Bar Kochba’s letters on papyri and wood.

Sixty-one years later, on March 16, 2021 the Israeli government announced the discovery of dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments of Hebrew texts from the Prophets Zechariah and Nahum from an adjacent cave. The “Cave of Horrors,” as it is called, contained other evidence that it was used by followers of Bar Kochba to evade the Roman armies. The cave is located in the Judean desert about 262 feet (80 meters) below a cliff top.

The Bar Kochba rebellion took place about 60 years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, an event predicted by Jesus during his triumphant entry into Jerusalem (Luke 19:28ff). In AD 70, Romans destroyed the Temple. The revolt of Bar Kochba was triggered 60 years later when Roman emperor Hadrian decided to erect a shrine to the mythological Roman god, Jupiter, upon the site of the Temple.

Emperor Hadrian came personally to Judea to put down the Bar Kochba revolt which ultimately cost the lives of over a half million Jews. The revolt was called the “Liberation of Jerusalem” by its adherents. It was led by Simon Ben Kosibah, known to the documents of the early Christian Church as Bar Kochba.

Hadrian and his General, Sextus Julius Severus, crushed the revolt by a long, slow starvation of the Jewish revolutionaries and their families who had been driven into the desert to take refuge in the desert caves. When it was all over, Hadrian destroyed what was left of Jerusalem. He then decreed that the whole Jewish nation should be barred, from that day forward, from entering the City of Jerusalem and its surrounding area so that “they may not even view from afar their ancestral home.”

Little is known today about the state of Christianity at the time of the Bar Kochba revolt. It was a time in which a break between synagogue and church was taking place for Jewish Christians. A succession of thirteen Jewish-Christian bishops ruled Jerusalem until the time of Hadrian. At the time of the first destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, Simeon, son of Clopas, was Bishop of Jerusalem and was martyred there. The Second Century historian Eusebius, reported that between the martyrdom of Simeon and the Bar Kochba revolt, “many thousands of Jews had come to believe in Christ.”

A Revolution in the Soul

These remnants of a revolution seem an almost fitting discovery just before Holy Week in this of all years. I believe that the bones of Bar Kochba’s faithful Jewish and Jewish-Christian revolutionaries are calling to us from those caves. I have never written a Holy Week post like this before because we have never had a Holy Week like this before in our lifetimes. For the second year in a row, many Catholics face a drastic reduction in their ability to participate in the liturgy and Sacraments of their Faith.

The first time Holy Week was limited by fears of a pandemic — in Holy Week 2020 — Christianity was caught off guard on a global scale. We never imagined that the restrictions set in place by both civil and religious authorities would further impede our faith as we approach another Holy Week a year later. We never imagined that many of our spiritual leaders would continue their passive acceptance of the severe limits placed on our practice of faith. I wrote of this at the turn of the year in “A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers.”

On what we today call “Passion Sunday,” Jesus entered Jerusalem as the triumphant Son of David, a title given to him by Sacred Scripture. As he entered the Holy City, he wept. It is notable that he did not weep over his knowledge that he enters Jerusalem to commence the Passion of the Christ. Saint Luke’s Passion Narrative makes clear that Jesus wept over Jerusalem and what he knew to be the coming destruction of the Temple and Holy City by Earthly Powers. He knew that many would lose their lives in revolt against it.

Many people in our era are just now awakening to a revolution in the soul as clarity dawns that demonic forces behind so-called “cancel culture” are using a pandemic to suppress our churches, our liturgy, our voices, and our communal values and expressions of faith. Many are also awakening to the reality that some — but certainly not all — of our religious leaders have acquiesced to this suppression, most by their silence, but some by outright endorsement of government-imposed shutdowns.

I have written of at least two instances in which the courts have overruled political impositions on Mass attendance and Catholic practice only to have the local Catholic bishop re-impose the same restrictions the courts had declared unconstitutional. I feel indebted to the many priests — and, in fairness, some bishops too — who have found courage in their fidelity to reject the modern version of one of my most memorable Holy Week posts: “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’.”

That Whisper in the Ear of Judas

There is another force, also seemingly demonic in its origin, that has impinged upon our expressions of fidelity in the public square. I could sense it all around us throughout the last year and it has not abated. It has just festered and grown deeper within many of us as persons and as communities. I had a hard time putting a name on it until I saw it spelled out by one of my favorite columnists in The Wall Street Journal.

On March 9, 2021, political columnist Gerald F. Seib published a masterful analysis entitled “The Perpetual Outrage Machine Churns On.” You may not be able to read it without a subscription but I will give a brief summary of its evidence.

Two months after the January 6 events at the U.S. Capitol, prison-like fencing still surrounded the area. In Minneapolis, the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin over the death of George Floyd — seemingly every horrid moment of it caught on national television — has commenced amid another round of protests. Innocent Asian Americans have suddenly become targets of physical and verbal assault across the nation. Four women at a Bed and Body Works store in Arizona erupted into a wild brawl. Eight persons were killed by a single gunman in a spa in Atlanta. Ten more were murdered while shopping in a Colorado supermarket.

This list of present day atrocities spawned by rage could go on for pages. There is an influence behind it. A master opportunist has been doing what he does best. In Holy Week 2020, I wrote “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness & Light.” Its point was that the whisper into the ear of Judas at the Last Supper was preceded by other events. Before it happened, Satan entered into Judas (Luke 22:3) as Judas entered into a deal with the chief priests to betray Christ. His sin of greed left him vulnerable to the exploitation of Satan and his minions. That is always the case. The mere whisper in the dark is never enough. Through a long, slow, barely noticeable descent toward ever greater darkness, Satan finds an opportunity just as he found one in Judas Iscariot.

Our rage against the affairs of this world can also be a point of vulnerability. The great Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, described that path to spiritual destruction in his allegorical story, The Screwtape Letters (1940). He captures Satan instructing his nephew in the ways of spiritual warfare: “It is the cumulative effect of sin that draws the Man away from the Light and out into the Nothing ... The safest road to Hell is the gradual one, the gentle curves, soft underfoot, without turns, without signposts, without a roadmap. (The Screwtape Letters, p. 61)

Satan exploits fear, rage, even political contention and a pandemic to drive a wedge not only between persons, but within them. If your life of faith has been assailed by the world, the flesh, and the devil in this past year, we invite you to walk the Way of the Cross Beyond These Stone Walls this week.

We are posting on Monday of Holy Week instead of our usual Wednesday post day to present this special Holy Week post and a short list of six others for you to read and share in each day of Holy Week. The list begins in an hour of darkness and ends in the glory of Salvation.

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Satan at The Last Supper: Hours of Darkness & Light

Waking Up in the Garden of Gethsemane

The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’

Behold the Man, as Pilate Washes His Hands

Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found

Mary Magdalene: Faith, Courage, and an Empty Tomb