How did people picture hell before Dante?

Afaik early christian concept of hell wasn't a place but existence without God or something like that

>>1428817
Probably the Romano-Greek concept of a very cold and dark place where unglorious (not holy enough) souls would roam for all eternity

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_paintings

>>1429061
Looks like a party

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om nom nom

>>1429083
this is supposed to be from the 8th century, it's the earlies I could find.

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The valley of Gehenna

the same, dante got his inspiration from the general view of hell, he just made a story out of it

>>1429083
Holy shit.

How did Christian view afterlife without God's grace before they appropriated Norse Hel's realm of dead?

>>1429333
They didn't. The New Testament was always clear about Hell being a place of eternal fire and torment. It was never about simply "being out of God's grace". That's revisionism that some people came up with because they felt bad about Hell being so horrible. Same with the concept of Purgatory, which was never mentioned or even implied anywhere in the Bible. It was just made up because early Christians felt bad about their favorite Greek and Roman philosophers and statesmen being sent to hell simply for being pagans.

>>1429351
The new testament being compiled some few hundreds after christianity became a thing

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>>1429083
these faces doe

>Perhaps the most spectacular early discussion of Hell is in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which was actually a medieval document (from the 6th century or so). It was in Latin, but its first half was in Greek and was an older 2nd century work called the Acts of Pilate (Acta Pilati). Thus, most references to the Gospel of Nicodemus usually mention this work. The second half of this resurrection gospel, in Latin and written in the 6th century, includes a tour of Hell as seen by Christ after his crucifixion but prior to his resurrection. In Hell (called infernus in the original Latin, just as was in the Vulgate), Christ gathered Adam and other righteous souls, taking them to paradise and delivering them to the care of the archangel Michael. (Note that, just as John the Baptist had heralded Jesus’ arrival on earth, after his death, he heralded Jesus’ eventual arrival to deliver them from Hell.) While this gospel was never considered canon, and in fact was known by Church scholars as a late work and never taken as authoritative, it had a tremendous effect on medieval thought about Hell. It painted a vivid picture of Hades (the personification of Hell) as lamenting his own defeat at the moment of Christ’s arrival, and of Jesus gathering up the righteous to take them to paradise. Medieval artworks depict various elements of Jesus’ trip to Hell.
http://www.earlychristianhistory.info/hell.html
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelnicodemus-roberts2.html

>>1429358
But both the Muratorian canon and Iraeneus cite Revelation and the four Gospels.

>>1428817
>implying Dante didn't just rip off Virgil's descriptions of the underworld (Orpheus & Eurydice etc)
wew

Hel has always been described as a woman who is half-dead and half-alive.