You have it wrong. You did not quote any scriptures. You made reference to them. Perhaps if you were to quote the scriptures you made reference to and show how they support your position, then we might proceed.
This is such a petty objection on your part that I did not even slightly expect it; I see your literacy and I expect vastly more from you. I did quote from the Scripture, and you know I did, along with pointing at it by means of references. My reason for only quoting and referencing briefly is that it was necessary to _describe_ Gehenna's background in Biblical terms, and therefore necessary not to get lost in irrelevant contextual details.
You are free to select from any of my Biblical points about gehenna and dispute it, claiming specifically which one is out of context and why. Flatly denying that I quoted scripture should not be a strategy thinkable to you, because it is blatantly false.
My claim is simple: I said that Jesus' teaching about Gehenna is completely explained by the Old Testament's teaching about it, specifically by their prophetic teaching about its use as the most extreme punishment. I deny your claim, that Jesus' teaching about gehenna should be explained by invoking a Jewish consensus of eternal torment.
Your claim:
These teachings mirrored what many Jews believed and tacitly reaffirmed and sanctioned the existing Jewish view of eternal hell.
...is false on very many points, because although you've quoted one Jew who explicitly believed that, you have not shown that it was actually a prevailing belief, and most importantly that one who unmistakably believed that the wicked lasted longer than gehenna itself actually was post-Jesus, and couldn't have possibly contributed to Jesus' own teachings, and may not even be reflecting them.
In fact,
Jesus' teachings were radically contrary to the Jewish belief at the time (the link is to an article discussing that point from an actual scholar of Rabbinic writings who reads the originals, David Instone-Brewer, not just someone like you or me quoting from other secondary or tertiary sources).
Here, have a large quote, so you can see what I'm saying:
Instone-Brewer said:
They said there were three groups of Jews: the utterly evil who go to hell; the really good who go to heaven; and the majority in the middle. This third group go to hell, scream in the flames for a short while, and then go to heaven having been punished.
Another view was that this third group went to a second-rate heaven. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai taught this in Galilee. He was there for 20 years at roughly the same time as Jesus, so they probably met each other. He is famous for a parable which is very similar to Jesus’ parable of the banquet.
Yohanan’s parable went like this: ‘A king announced a surprise banquet and told everyone to be ready to come. The wise people got dressed and waited, but the foolish carried on working in their fields. When the banquet doors were suddenly opened, everyone came in, but the foolish didn’t have time to change. The king was angry when he saw their dirty clothes and told them to stand and watch while the wise ones enjoyed the food.’
JESUS’ SHEEP AND GOATS
When we contrast this with Jesus’ parables, we can see Jesus’ different emphasis. He said that those who came in dirty clothes were thrown out (Matthew 22:2-13). And he was very clear that they went to hell, because the king said: ‘throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (v13). In other words, he stressed that the not-so-bad Jews were going to hell.
Jesus was equally scathing about the idea that the not-so-bad went to hell for a short time before residing permanently in heaven. He repeatedly taught that there are only two ways, never three. You can be for God or against God, wheat or weeds, wise or foolish, wicked or faithful etc. There is no middle group. Matthew records the parable of the sheep and goats as Jesus’ parting shot. The only crime attributed to the goats was their failure to help people in poverty and in prison. The sheep go to their ‘eternal life’, but the others go to ‘eternal punishment’ (Matthew 25:46).
Incorrect. Check the bibliography of the articles. Encyclopedias are generally not full of myths and legends.
The ones which document the formation of myths are necessarily full of myths. These books are full of records of the origins of Jewish beliefs elaborating and adding detail which is nowhere found in the Bible, such as Judith or the incredibly speculative book 4Maccabees, or almost any of the Pseudepigrapha. You know that this is the case from the false myth that Gehenna was a garbage dump, which was invented by a rabbi.
You have not clearly shown anything about any of the sources I quoted.
I have not claimed to. Your sources are presumed to be reliable for what they claim to be, and I haven't contested anything about them, except your own personally sourced claims as to the usefulness of the sources in understanding Jesus' teachings, and of course I've pointed out that you carefully cherry-picked your quotes for topic without regard for temporal applicability.
Irrelevant that it is not divinely inspired. It is the only historical evidence I am aware of which shows from Jewish sources what the Jews believed historically.
I didn't say that the dictionaries were not divinely inspired (surely that doesn't need to be said!). I said that the rabbinic traditions they necessarily relied on were not divinely inspired. They are nothing more than human speculation, based in Old Testament hints which are valuable but not enough to determine a single viewpoint.
Furthermore, I've also questioned your claim about the widespread acceptance of this eternal-soul belief, for which you cited only a single source and that post-Jesus -- he was tied to your previous source only by the mutual agreement that gehenna is temporary (which by the way is not a Christian belief, and I personally reject it due to Jeremiah 31:40). The first speaker seems to have believed that gehenna is temporary because all the souls in it rise up (to heaven?), while the second one thought it was temporary because the souls go down and wither in the underworld. They contradict one another, a point you ignore but one which is critically undermining to your claim of consensus.
All irrelevant! The Jews should know what their forefathers believed and they have historical records to support them.
My first response is that we're talking about God's plans for judgment at the end of the age. The ancient Jews had no direct revelation from God about that; all they had was types and figures which were waiting for Jesus and his apostles to expand. They simply did not have enough information about the end of the age for their opinions to have any merit. You can quote as long a pedegree of opinion as you want, they still did not know.
My second response is that your argument depends on the Jewish opinion at the time being all in one direction -- that they all believed in eternal torment, so that Jesus would have to argue against that if He didn't want it believed. But this is radically wrong; the actual Jewish belief on the subject was deeply mixed, and sometimes confusing. Partial universalism (for ethnic Jews) and eternal destruction (for gentiles and traitors) was the order of the day, with eternal torment for the angels -- and this only in some incredibly vivid descriptions. We can gain from reading Jesus' words in contrast to this, but we must not let that context override Jesus' teaching.
My third response is that it appears you don't have much experience in historiography, or any familiarity with the transmission of Jewish teaching prior to Jesus. The Jews transmitted myth and history alike in the exact same narrative, which is now collected in a set of Talmudim. There you can read how they determined when a given Rabbi served by recounting a story he told about someone else conquering a coven of shape-changing witches. It's all very intelligently done, and one must suppose that they knew the difference between the story and the factual background (and in fact in the middle of that particular narrative the Talmudic collator breaks off to discuss some textual variants). But they did not distinguish them in the early written records they left; the reader has to do that work. I'm no expert in this, although I've college classes in textual transmission due to my study of Homeric Greek and Classical Latin. But this is something you can pick up if you read translations of the original sources a bit, which I have.
The late written records are clearer, because in the first century AD it became acceptable to directly quote scripture in written discourse; prior to that, Scripture could only be loosely alluded to by at most its opening lines (except in speech). Prior to that every scripture reading was accompanied by a Hebrew reading and a spoken loose translation; after that, the translations (Targumim) were written down in a number of languages, giving us more clues about how the Jews had interpreted their (and our) scriptures.