Thank You, Leolaia!
I love the depth of your posts. This confirms what I have felt for a long time, that the Watchtower's interpretations of Gehenna
are utterly artificial and simply ignore the whole context of belief that existed back then. There is every reason to think that both
Jews and early Christians thought that wicked people would be tormented after death, as punishment. Like 'born agains' today,
they saw no contradiction with other Bible texts on the subject. Furthermore, it was clearly a necessary motivation for those
religions - they lived in times in which brutality was extreme ( by our standards) and commonplace. Today, we have public
debates about executing convicted murderers by painless injection - back then, Tiberias had young girls raped so that they could be executed
as non-virgins. Rebels were hung on crosses in public to slowly die amidst agonizing pain.
They had to believe in hellfire, there wasn't any other emotional choice.
metatron