Did Jesus Descend into Hell?

What the Apostles’ Creed Says

In its traditional English form the Apostles’ Creed says that Jesus Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried: he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead.” Some modern versions read “he descended to the dead.” Both translate the same Latin words, which speak of the lower regions where the dead are.

The line was missing from the oldest form of the creed used at Rome. Around the year 400 Rufinus explained the creed of his own church at Aquileia, which had the line, and he remarked that the Roman creed and the Eastern churches lacked it. Over the following centuries it spread, and it became part of the creed the Western church has recited ever since.

The belief is older than the wording. In the second century Ignatius wrote that Christ raised the prophets who had waited for him, and Irenaeus wrote that Christ went down and preached to the dead. Calvin, who rejected the way the early writers explained the descent, still granted that every one of them mentions it.

Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus

Much of the confusion comes from one English word. In older English “hell” covered more ground than it does now, and the King James Version uses it for three different Greek words.

• Gehenna is the valley outside Jerusalem whose name Jesus used for the place of final punishment, “where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44).
• Hades is the Greek name for the place of the dead. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, the Hebrew Sheol became Hades, and the New Testament writers used the word for the same place.
• Tartarus appears once, when Peter says God cast the angels that sinned down to hell and “delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment” (2 Peter 2:4).

In the Old Testament everyone went to Sheol at death, the righteous as well as the wicked. Jacob, told that Joseph was dead, said, “I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning” (Genesis 37:35), and the word for “grave” is Sheol. In Jesus’ account of the rich man and Lazarus, both men are among the dead in very different conditions, the rich man “in torments” and Lazarus at rest in Abraham’s bosom across a great gulf (Luke 16:23, 26).

Revelation keeps Hades and the place of final punishment apart. At the last judgment “death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them,” and then “death and hell were cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:13–14). The hell that holds the dead is emptied and thrown into the lake of fire, so it is a different place. The creed’s clause concerns Hades. Scripture never says that Christ went to Gehenna.

Acts 2: His Soul Was Not Left in Hell

The first Christian sermon recorded in Acts takes up the question directly. On the day of Pentecost Peter quoted Psalm 16, where David says, “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Acts 2:27). Then he explained that David could not have been speaking of himself:

Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day. Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne; He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.

Acts 2:29–31

David’s body decayed, and his tomb was still in Jerusalem. The psalm therefore speaks of Christ between his death and his resurrection. His body lay in the tomb and did not decay. His soul was in Hades and was not left there. Earlier in the same sermon Peter said that God raised Jesus, “having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it” (Acts 2:24).

Jesus spoke of his death in the same terms. He said that “as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). Jonah had described his own ordeal as a descent to the dead: “Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice” (Jonah 2:2), and the word there is Sheol. Paul also takes the descent for granted in Romans 10:7, where going down “into the deep” would mean “to bring up Christ again from the dead.” God had already brought him up.

The New Testament speaks of Christ rising “from the dead,” a Greek phrase that means from among the dead. He was raised from among them because he had been among them. Richard Bauckham notes that the commonest Jewish belief of the time sent all the dead down to Sheol, so for Jesus’ first followers the descent was part of what it meant that he died.

Ephesians 4: The Lower Parts of the Earth

Paul speaks of the descent in a passage about the gifts the ascended Christ gave his church:

Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. (Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.)

Ephesians 4:8–10

Readers have taken “the lower parts of the earth” in two ways. One reading takes the phrase to mean the earth itself, the lower region compared with heaven, so that the descent is the incarnation. The Geneva Bible’s note read it that way, and the Westminster annotators took it to mean the womb of Mary.

The other reading follows the sense the phrase has in the Psalms, where the lower parts of the earth are where those who seek the psalmist’s life will go when they die (Psalm 63:9). The early church read Ephesians 4 this way, and so does Chris White. On this reading Paul sets the lowest point of Christ’s journey against its highest. He went down among the dead and went up above all the heavens, and he led a procession of captives with him.

1 Peter 3: The Spirits in Prison

The most discussed passage is in Peter’s first letter:

For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.

1 Peter 3:18–20

Christians have disagreed about this passage since the early centuries. Augustine affirmed the descent but thought this verse meant that Christ, in the Spirit, preached through Noah to the people of Noah’s day. Many of the early fathers held that Christ preached to the dead between his death and his resurrection. Calvin took it to mean that the power of Christ’s death was made known to the dead, comforting the righteous and convicting the wicked.

A common reading today identifies the spirits as the angels who sinned in Noah’s time, the ones Peter elsewhere says are held in chains (2 Peter 2:4). Some place Christ’s proclamation of victory to them at his ascension. Renihan places it during his descent, before the resurrection. The book reads the passage as an account of what Christ did between his death and his enthronement, ending with him “gone into heaven,” with “angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him” (1 Peter 3:22).

The descent is one step in a larger account. How Atonement Works traces the whole Day of Atonement through the work of Christ: the blood, the high priest in heaven, the scapegoat that carried sins away, and the defeat of the devil.

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How Christians Have Understood the Clause

Christians who recite the creed have explained the clause in three main ways.

• A real descent to the dead. Christ’s soul went to Hades between his death and his resurrection. This was the view of the early church, and many Christians hold it today. Within it, writers differ on what Christ did there: proclaiming his victory, preaching to the dead, or bringing out the righteous who had waited for him, often called the harrowing of hell.
• The suffering of the cross. Calvin read the clause as a description of what Christ suffered in his soul in Gethsemane and on the cross, when he bore the weight of God’s judgment against sin. The Heidelberg Catechism taught the same. On this view Christ’s soul did not go down to the place of the dead at all, and the creed adds the invisible suffering to the visible events of crucifixion, death, and burial.
• Remaining under death. The Westminster Larger Catechism explains the clause as Christ’s burial and his continuing in the state of the dead, under the power of death, until the third day.

Calvin had a serious reason for his reading. He wanted nothing taken away from the cross. If Christ went to hell after he died, someone might ask whether the cross was enough. Chris White shares that concern. The descent texts, though, describe events after the cross: Christ’s soul not left in Hades, three days in the heart of the earth, a descent before the ascension. The creed’s order, crucified, dead, buried, descended, rose, follows those texts. And in each of them Christ acts or is vindicated. None describes him suffering among the dead. His suffering is on the cross, where he said, “It is finished.”

What Christ Did Among the Dead

The risen Christ told John, “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18). A key gives authority over a place. The one who entered Hades came out of it holding its keys. Jesus had promised that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against his church (Matthew 16:18).

Matthew records that when Jesus died, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection” (Matthew 27:52–53). Paul says the ascending Christ “led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8). Hebrews says Christ died “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). The Greek verb translated “destroy” means to render powerless.

Taken together, these passages present the descent as a victory. In the book’s words, “In the descent, as Scripture describes it, Christ is a victor in the enemy’s own territory.” The descent does not compete with the cross for the work of bearing sin. The question is what Christ, having borne sin on the cross, did next.

The Book’s Reading: The Scapegoat and the Land Cut Off

Everything above is the common teaching of the descent, shared by many Christians across traditions. How Atonement Works adds a further step, which Chris White presents as his own synthesis and holds as the best explanation of the texts: the sins Christ bore were carried down to the realm of the dead and left there.

The argument comes from the Day of Atonement. Two goats made one atonement. The first was killed and its blood carried into the holy place. The second, the live goat, had the people’s confessed sins laid on its head and was sent “into the wilderness,” to “a land not inhabited” (Leviticus 16:21–22). The Hebrew calls it the land cut off. The psalmist uses the same root of the dead, who are “cut off from thy hand” (Psalm 88:5), and Isaiah uses it of the Servant, “cut off out of the land of the living” (Isaiah 53:8).

Hebrews already places the cross outside the camp in Day of Atonement terms: Jesus “suffered without the gate” (Hebrews 13:12). The live goat went further, to the land cut off. The book reads Christ’s descent as the fulfillment of that journey. On Chris White’s reading of Leviticus 16, the goat was sent to Azazel, the one to whom the book of 1 Enoch ascribes all sin, and he identifies Azazel with Satan. So the sins were returned to their source. Nothing was paid to the devil, and he received nothing he had a right to. The result for God’s people is what Leviticus promised: “that ye may be clean from all your sins before the LORD” (Leviticus 16:30).

The book then argues that this explains how Christ’s death disarmed the devil. If the accuser’s power of death rested on the true charges sin gave him, then sins carried away and forgiven left him with no ground. Chapter 14 sets out the question, and later chapters work out the answer. For how the risen Christ completes forgiveness as high priest, see the resurrection and forgiveness.

Where This Understanding Comes From

The descent to the dead was taught widely in the early church. Ignatius and Irenaeus wrote of it in the second century, and Origen, in the third, connected it with the goat sent into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement. Rufinus recorded the early history of the creed’s clause, and Augustine and Calvin shaped how the West read 1 Peter 3. Among modern scholars, Richard Bauckham has shown that the commonest Jewish view in Jesus’ day sent all the dead to Sheol. Samuel Renihan’s primer on the descent traces the history of the doctrine, including how the Reformed churches came to read it differently, and links the two goats with Christ’s descent. Richard Barry has studied the two goats in early Christian thought. Katie Marcar has argued that Hebrews 2:14–15 knows the descent and the release of the dead, building on David M. Moffitt’s work on Passover and Hebrews. How Atonement Works draws on all of them and credits them.