"Today you will be with me in paradise"?

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How is this possible if Jesus “descended into hell” after he died?

Question inspired by Good Friday.
 
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Jesus did not descend into “hell” as we think of it today, which is where unrepentant mortal sinners are punished and where God is always totally absent.

Jesus descended into “Sheol”, which has been translated in English scripture as “Hell” but which actually meant the place of the dead. In Sheol, the righteous who had died were awaiting Jesus to die and redeem mankind, thus opening the gates of Heaven to them. The place where they waited in Sheol, the so-called “Limbo of the fathers”, was pleasant, but it was not Heaven as they could not enjoy the Beatific Vision (i.e. seeing God and being in his presence) there. Having not yet been redeemed by Jesus’ death, they couldn’t go to Heaven yet.

So as soon as Jesus died he went straight down to Sheol and opened the gates of heaven to all those righteous people who died before him, who would have included all the Old Testament patriarchs, his foster father St. Joseph, and John the Baptist.

Scripture tells us that Jesus died before the “Good thief”, because when the soldiers came around checking the crosses, Jesus was dead already, but the thieves weren’t so their legs got broken. The minute Jesus died, he was operating on God’s time which is not the same as earthly time, so no doubt he was able to open the gates of heaven the minute he was deceased. He didn’t need to hang around in Sheol.

When the Good Thief, St. Dismas, died shortly after Jesus, the gates of heaven would have been opened and Jesus already up there (with all the people he’d just let out of Sheol) waiting to welcome him.
 
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Would the idea of both statements being true seem too difficult for Jesus, who would go on to rise from the dead, ascend to Heaven yet still be perpetually present in church tabernacles across the world at the same time?
 
Christ went to the place where the people who died were waiting for him, not being punished.
 
Just for a point to ponder, the original Scriptures did not have Chapter, Verse, or Punctuation.

Therefore the translation that was finally put into that form might as easily have been punctuated, “I tell you today, you will be with Me in Paradise” as it was, “I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise”.

See the difference?
To my mind, it makes more sense being punctuated the former way, because after all, once people are dead they are not in a corporeal linear time frame.

And it obviously confuses people because everything is framed in time as Jesus, once He rose on Earth, was existing ‘back in linear time’ as well as obviously existing ‘out of time’. (He’s God, He can manage it, we can’t).

And it makes people think of eternity as just 'day after day after day, the earthly ‘day’ of 24 hours, over and over, when eternity is ‘outside of that’ for those in heaven.
 
Yes, but Jesus apparently decided he didn’t need Purgatory if he said, “This day you shall be with me in paradise.”
God can be super merciful, and also getting tortured to death for theft (not even murder) might have been purgatory enough.
 
That reading of the syntax, “I tell you today,” is the argument Seventh Day Adventists use to reconcile Jesus’ saying with their belief that once we’re dead, we remain dead (or possibly asleep or unconscious) until Judgment Day, when everyone who ever lived will be resurrected, all of us at once. At least, that’s what I think it is, though my version may be somewhat garbled.
 
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Jesus was speaking while hanging on a cross, suffocating, nearly unable to breathe.

He wasn’t going to throw in an extra word like “today” unless he meant dude was going to paradise with him today.
No need for him to say he’s telling him today, that’s obvious, and a gasping, dying man wouldn’t have added the word.
 
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Well, I’m not sure I want to speak ‘for Jesus’ but I’m saying, the punctuation came later. Jewish speech patterns and words did not mean the same thing they do to English speaking peoples of the 21st century.

It could just as easily have been Him emphasizing to the man, “I tell you this day (or NOW) --meaning, I’m God, I’m telling you right here and now–you will be with me”. Really, it could. It would indeed make sense. . .because the thief had just said Jesus ‘had done nothing wrong’, and 'remember me when you come into your kingdom (and we don’t know exactly what belief the thief had about an afterlife either), for Jesus to reassure the thief that He could tell the thief even before the two of them died, right now, that the thief would be with Jesus.
 
He was likely one of Barabbas’ cohorts, so he would have been guilty of conspiracy to murder, even if he didn’t personally shed anyone’s blood.
 
Then why wasn’t he guilty of murder under Roman law? You’re assuming an awful lot there.

Romans didn’t need a big excuse to crucify people who weren’t Roman citizens. They crucified people by the dozens, just to keep the people in line.
 
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stpurl said:
Therefore the translation that was finally put into that form might as easily have been punctuated, “I tell you today, you will be with Me in Paradise” as it was, “I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise”.
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BartholomewB said:
That reading of the syntax, “I tell you today,” is the argument Seventh Day Adventists use to reconcile Jesus’ saying with their belief that once we’re dead, we remain dead (or possibly asleep or unconscious) until Judgment Day, when everyone who ever lived will be resurrected, all of us at once.
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Jehovah’s Witnesses translate the passage this way also. By placing the comma after “today” they are saying that the only thing that happens “today” is that Jesus is telling the thief something. He is telling him something “today,” as opposed to telling the thief “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” This placement of the comma also implies that Jesus might as well say something contradictory “tomorrow” or perhaps would have said something totally different if you had just asked Him “yesterday.”

It is a ridiculous, unsupportable proposition that no one believes except the JWs and SDAs. The apostolic tradition says that what happens “Today” is that Jesus and the thief are going to paradise. Today, not tomorrow.
 
Because Jesus as God is not constrained by time and place. The body of Jesus in his human nature was in the tomb after he died. The soul of Jesus in his human nature went to that part of Hell called the Bosom of Abraham. Jesus, the Christ, in his divinity, as the second person of the triune God, was in Heaven where he promised Dismas he would be.
 
No, but the Church does grant a plenary indulgence to repentant, condemned criminals, who accept their execution as just. That said, making an act of perfect contrition can greatly lessen the time you need to spend in Purgatory, even if it doesn’t entirely eliminate it.
 
Just because SDA and Jehovah Witnesses translate with the comma after today and place the (false) interpretations that they do, does not mean the possibility I gave (which does not contradict any authoritative Scriptural teaching) would be incorrect.

That would be like arguing that because people nowadays don’t use the Oxford comma, the punctuated sentence of a person who said, “I’d like to thank my parents, God and Margaret Thatcher” would indicate that person really was actually the son of the two parents, “God” and "Margaret Thatcher’ and becoming indignant at the idea that with the placement of the Oxford comma and the sentence’s becoming then, “I’d like to thank my parents, God, and Margaret Thatcher” would be a complete misunderstanding of who the person’s parents really were!
 
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