Back to Basics: Did Jesus Descend into Hell?

The Apostles’ Creed, which we often pray along with devotions like the Rosary, professes that Christ “descended into Hell.”  This can cause some confusion and often raises questions.  Why would Christ have to go to Hell?  What did he “do” there?  How are we to understand this affirmation of our Faith?

The first meaning given to Christ's descent into hell is that Jesus, as truly man and like all who are truly human, experienced a real death, and his soul joined the others in the realm of the dead. He descended there, however, not as just another one subject to the dominion of death, but as Savior, proclaiming the Good News to the spirits imprisoned there.

This is also a problem of translation.  When the Apostles’ Creed professes that “He descended into Hell,” this is different from Hell as we commonly understand it.  This is not simply the place of the damned.   It was the state of all those who died before Christ.  That’s why some English renderings of the Apostles’ Creed state instead that Christ “descended to the dead.”  Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which Christ went down, Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek.  Those who were there were deprived of the direct vision of God since the gates of Heaven were closed before the work of the Redeemer. This was the case for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they awaited the Redeemer.  It was the holy souls, who awaited their Savior, whom Christ delivered when he descended to the dead, freeing all the just who had gone before him.

The Scriptures give us a glimpse of this ministry of Christ on Holy Saturday, while His body rested in the tomb.  Peter writes, “For Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous, that he might lead you to God.  Put to death in the flesh, he was brought to life in the spirit.  In it [the spirit] he also went to preach to the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:18-19).

Christ’s descent to the dead brings the Gospel message of salvation to completion.  This is the last phase of Jesus' mission: the spread of Christ's redemptive work to all people of all times and all places.

An ancient homily for Holy Saturday, the day Christ’s body was in the tomb, says:

“Today a great silence reigns on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. . . He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him - He who is both their God and the son of Eve. . . ‘I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. . . I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead.’"