In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for “hell” was “sheol,” and in the New Testament, the Greek word was “hades,” but the English for both is always “hell”.

The corrupt new bible versions deliberately substitute the word “hell” for the words “sheol”, “hades”, “death”, “grave”, and “the depths”, in order to water down the gospel of hell and eliminate its literal reality.

As King James Bible authority Gail Riplinger writes in her 1993 expose book, New Age Bible Versions, “Using five additional ambiguous words fractures the impact. The shatterment flies in the face of clarity, obscuring God’s warning. . .

“Agnostics atheists, humanists, Jehovah Witnesses and a variety of cults believe eternal death, not hell, lies beyond the last breath. Again, (Grandmother of the New Age Movement, Madame H.P. Blavatsky) dictates and the NIV and its editors comply—replacing the word ‘hell’ with ‘death’. . .

“The NASB, and frequently the NKJV, join the Jehovah Witness New World Bible and leave the Hebrew word Sheol untranslated. The NIV and NKJV join them in not translating the Greek hades. . .

“Thanks to the new bible versions, New Age chieftains like Lola Davis can say: ‘We now know that there is no [down there] where there is a tangible hell.’

“New Agers cling to the ‘new version’ of hades as a second chance: ‘Through the soul in Hades, having awakened to its unfortunate state, desires a change, it can attain such a change through reincarnation.’

“New Agers join ranks with the NIV, NASB, NKJV and Jehovah Witnesses in replacing the ‘torments of hell’ with, as Blavatsky called them, the ‘seven mansions of Hades.’ ”

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Riplinger continues, “A ‘Revised’ and ‘Amplified’ version of hell has been ‘Standard’ and quite ‘International’ since the Assyrio-Chaldean culture. The new ‘Version’ of the facts is not so ‘New’, but represents a historically heathen picture of the afterlife.

“The Assyrian culture introduced the idea of hades as an intermediate state. They called it the Elysian or Happy Fields and described it as having ‘silver skies’, ‘resplendent courts’—‘an abode of blessedness’. Their female goddess Ishtar descended into Hades seeking Tammuz and found it a place of gates and shadows.

“Such ‘cunningly devised fables’ abound in world literature. The Egyptian Hades was called ‘Amenti’, a place of dreamless sleep. Inhabitants did not remain long in this ‘Land of Bliss’, but moved quickly to Amk, the exit gate.

“Scandinavian mythology tells of Frigga’s son, Bal-dur, who found himself upon death, in hades, seated on a stone, reading. In Greek mythology’s Prometheus, Hercules, the Sun god descends into Hades’ cave of Initiation. Aeschylus wrote that this ‘Meadow of Hades’ was the place where both good and evil people were purified by doing good works.”

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In times past, both saints and lost people went to hell because it had two compartments—a paradise side and a torment side. Later, the paradise side was moved into the third heaven, leaving only the torment side still in the heart of the earth. Hence, only lost people go to hell today.

“The geographical location of the torment side hasn’t changed but there aren’t any saints down there anymore because paradise isn’t in the heart of the earth anymore—it’s now in the third heaven,” explains Jordan. “So, you see dispensationally that this has changed, and if you don’t study this doctrine ‘rightly divided,’ you’re going to wind up confused and that’s how you get all these people trying to do away with the doctrine of eternal judgment.

“Invariably, what they do is they start taking verses from back there (in the Old Testament and the Four Gospels) and making out like there’s no dispensational change in at all and that it’s only been one way all through the Bible when it hasn’t been.”

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People who want to tell you hell was only a figure of speech used by Jesus Christ, refer to hell’s usage in the New Testament simply being another name for “gehenna,” which was a Greek word used to describe a garbage dump outside of the city of Jerusalem that had a continual fire burning.

Jordan argues, “When Christ says it’s better for you to cut your hand off or pluck your eye out than go to hell you know He’s not talking about them going to a figure of speech. Why would it be better to cut your hand off than to be cast into a figure of speech? Wherever they’re going to be cast into, it’s going to be real. And it’s not going to be the city dump, because you’d have thrown your hand into the city dump. They’re worried not about him who will destroy your body, but him who will destroy your soul.

“When Christ talks of ‘the fire that never shall be quenched,’ He calls it ‘hell’ three times, and six times He says it’s a fire that shall never be quenched—‘where their worm dieth not.’ Some part of them is never going to die so I know it’s not the city dump, because the city dump outside the city of Jerusalem isn’t there anymore, is it? It’s gone!”

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Jordan makes the point that while the corrupt new bibles don’t change hades to hell as it should be in any English translation of the word, nobody when they smash their finger with a hammer, for example, says, “Aghh, hades!”

“We don’t do that because we’re not trying to pull any punches; the word’s hell in English,” says Jordan. “I have actually heard people say ‘Oh, hades!’ but it’s not very often, and it’s usually some little old blue-haired lady Down South who just doesn’t want to say ‘hell’.

“When I was a kid coming up in Sunday school, I remember we were studying through Matthew 5, 6 and 7 and I was shocked to see the word ‘hell’ in the Bible. I took a red pencil and circled it every time it came up because, boy, if I had said ‘hell’ at home, my momma would have cracked me in the back of the head and knocked me over.

“Now, she would say, ‘If you say hell again, I’m gonna beat the fatal fire out of you!’ Well, what’s the fatal fire? You see that’s what we call ‘wooden swearing.’ Wooden swearing is the little old lady who, instead of cussing when she gets mad, just goes over to the door and ‘kicks the fire out of the door.’ But she isn’t going to cuss. That’s why they call it wooden swearing.

“We do those things. We say, ‘Gosh darn!’ Well what did you substitute? Another is, ‘Oh, geez!’ You get around it, you know. Now, you got to have some expressions like that in your vocabulary or you’re going to wind up saying the things you didn’t want to say.

“Years ago when I was in school I hung around a bunch of guys where we were always trying to figure out what to say. And one guy, he loved to say, ‘Oh, horse feathers!’, until one of the other fellows showed him in Revelation 19 about the horse that’s going to fly out of heaven, and he said, ‘Oh, okay, that’s where that came from—can’t do that, that’s swearing by heaven.’

“So we settled on one—‘Good night, nurse!’ And I’ve thought about that one over the years. When you say ‘Good night, nurse!’ that usually means you’re dying, and if you died and went to hell, well you just said, ‘Oh, hell!’ So the best thing to do is just control your mouth and temper.”