What we read in this passage is two Jewish men who die. One is a desired Jewish man with worldly possessions and the other is a wretched man, feeble and an embarrassment. Both die, one go to Abraham's side, the other Hades. The parable tells of a great chasm between the two that cannot be cross and tell us of torment from fire in Hades so bad that the slightest drop would be comforting.
I see a lot of these elements as spiritual metaphors not as physical images of the afterlife.
First Lazarus is brought to Abraham's side or Abraham's bosom. What does this mean? This is the embrace of Abraham only given to his sons and for the account this shows us Lazarus is considered a child of Abraham and the rich man is not. This is a classic separation of the redeemed and unredeemed, sheet/goats etc... in this case it is contrasting earthly honor/heavenly honor. A child of Abraham is a child of God and Abraham is a biblical type of the Father in this account.
These afterlife places are separated by a chasm that cannot be crossed. This chasm is sin and it separates us from God. We cannot be called children of God when we are separated from God and we must be in relationship with him to be called his child. Only Christ can restore this relationship through his death and resurrection. His explicit work is not the the direct focus of the text but it is implicit as he is the only one who can cross the great chasm into relationship at the side of God as his child.
The place of torment, named as hades. "hades" is a greek mythological place of the dead and the text borrows the term but this doesn't mean it inherits the mythology with it. The text shows us the rich man is in torment by fire. Does this mean "hell" is a place of eternal torment and burning? I don't think it does, because although fire is a common image of torment in the afterlife it is not the only image. Never ending decay is also another one, and another is simply an image of suffering.
What I think these images show us is a glimpse of afterlife for the unredeemed using concrete analogies like fire and decay. We don't know what buring forever really feels like but we do know getting burnt hurts and so burning forever would be the extreme limits of this pain and this gives us a taste of what it would be like. It's like someone saying "what is hell like" then the answer being pricked by a needle, then saying now imagine being pricked by 1 million needles at once and it never stopping. This is not saying hell is a bunch of needles but it does help in that we understand the little pain of a needle then it's blown up to it limits and I think that's what the text is telling us. Not to diminish hell, whatever it is there is strong warning against it as a place of unimaginable torment but I don't see the text demanding it is fire, rather it is the concrete it uses as we all understand the fire is painful.
the text concludes with the rich man request to warn his brother being rejected with the argument saying "If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead". This is a little tongue and cheek because of course his brothers would take it seriously if he was resurrected but this isn't want Jesus was really saying as he was foreshadowing his own resurrection.
This whole account has lots of analogies and spiritual metaphors and this tells me it is a parable and not a mirror of the afterlife. The point of the parable is not to show us what the afterlife looks like it is first I think to signal out the pharisees as would identify themselves at first as the rich man and be offended when they heard he was not counted as a child of God, it also shows us to store up riches in heaven not on earth and that heavenly honor uses a different measure than earthly honor. This goes in line with a lot of other parables and uses the same sort of contrasts and images, specifically the immediate parables that Jesus just spoke. I think when our take away from this is this detail image of a place overlooking hell that can't be crossed like layers is the wrong focus and misses the point of the text completely.
Let's step outside the text itself for a moment. Luke was either a gentile or a Hellenistic Jew who wasn't with Jesus when all these events were occurring, and his book was probably written after the books of Matthew and Mark. So here was have a man who was not there at the time giving us an account that wasn't given to us by those who were there, as this parable cannot be found in the books of Matthew, John, or even Mark (who also probably wasn't there). Of course, for the purpose of this argument, I assume that these books were even written by the supposed authors, but that's a different discussion.
Now, to say that this is not a parable is ridiculous to me. Every other story Jesus tells is a parable, yet some hard-boiled Christians (those who aren't truth seekers but instead just stew in whatever doctrine their churches teach and then try to ignorantly argue it like they know what they're talking about) cling to the idea that this is some kind of real story, something uncharacteristic of the rest of the gospels. If Lazarus is literally burning in a place called Hades, are we then to assume that the rich man is literally with Abraham? This is where things really become problematic.
As a 34-year-old man who has studied the Greek of the New Testament since 11th grade, I have found little to no evidence to suggest within the Koine Greek that people go to a place called Heaven or a place called Hell when they die.
In Old Testament times, it was clear that EVERYONE went to the place referred to as Sheol, the good and the bad. The KJV is sneaky, in that it translates Sheol as "Hell" when it refers to the place where evil people will go (ex. Isaiah 14:15) but will otherwise be translated as "grave" when the text is speaking of good people (Gen 17:38). You have to remember that anyone in those times reading the text would see "Sheol" in all instances, not some biased English translation. So then there was no Heaven or Hell in Old Testament times, not in the sense of places one goes when they die. If you look closely, people in the Old Testament looked at their reward for good and evil in terms of the physical realm, i.e. the status of their crops or whether their cities were invaded. The Old Testament points out that the dead know nothing (Ecc. 9:5); that "there will be
no work or planning or
knowledge or wisdom" (Ecc. 9:10) in Sheol; Psalm 115:17 says "The dead do not praise Yah, nor do any who go down into silence"; and Isaiah 38:18-19 say that the dead in Sheol (referred to in the previous verse as the "pit of destruction") can't praise Yah, nor can they hope for his faithfulness, but the living can. So it seems to me that the idea they had in those times was that when someone died, they were buried in the ground and were gone forever.
Likewise, in the New Testament, Hades is usually translated as "Hell" when it is actually used as a Greek stand-in for the Hebrew Sheol. This can be seen in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament that far predates any Hebrew manuscript of the OT we have today, where Sheol is translated "Hades" in every single instance. In other words, Hades, as used in the New Testament, is the place where EVERYONE goes. Revelation 20:13 says that Death and Hades will give up the dead, and they will be judged. How can they be judged if they are already in a place of torment? Would they not then already be judged? It makes no sense. So then, the view of Sheol and Hades is consistent throughout the Bible.
Except here in Luke. The usage in Luke 16:23 is inconsistent with every other usage of the word throughout the Bible. Here we have a conscious person tormented in flames calling out to someone who is supposedly with Abraham.
If we take this literally and say that it is not just another one of Jesus's parables, we have to then wrestle with the task of justifying how this view is in direct violation of not only the rest of the Bible, but also how the Jews of that time generally looked at the afterlife. Remember that the Sadducees believed that the dead stayed dead and that spirits weren't a thing (the Old Testament view), while the Pharisees believed in a resurrection in which the dead would get new bodies and the wicked would be eternally tormented(a relatively new set of ideas that came about after the Hellenists took over the area). Paul was a Pharisee, so it makes sense that his ideas would sound more like theirs. And Luke was one who traveled with Paul, as we see in Acts. Ta-da! Makes sense why Luke's gospel would reflect this idea, right?
Bad doctrine tends to spawn more bad doctrine. It's like these people are solving a math equation but are really bad at it, so they add in more variables to the equation to try to get it to the answer that they want. Is that really the way we should look at the Bible? Yet this is how a lot of churches teach! That's why I don't even go to church anymore. I'd rather just stick to the Word of God and not go by what some pastor educated in a particular doctrine tells me to believe.
So no, I don't think you should take the parable literally.
