What are the spirits in prison mentioned in 1Peter 3:19? Aren’t they condemned souls suffering in hell that Yahshua preached to?

   What are the spirits in prison mentioned in 1Peter 3:19? Aren’t they condemned souls suffering in hell that Yahshua preached to?

That is the common interpretation, but a closer look reveals otherwise. If the widely-held understanding is correct, what would be the point of Yahshua’s going to hellfire to preach to those who are already lost? In Yahshua’s parable of Luke 16:26, He has Abraham saying that in “hell” there is a “great gulf fixed, so that they which would pass from here to you cannot.” Being that they would be forever stuck in hell, to preach to them would only be adding insult to agony. The Bible tells us that the dead are just that: “For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten” (Eccl. 9:5).

“For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?” (Psalm 6:5). Yahshua was put in the tomb because He was dead, not alive in the underworld. And if He never died, then we are all dead in our sins.

The passage does not say that Yahshua Himself preached to the spirits in prison, but “by which,” meaning by the Spirit. It was the Holy Spirit, the same that Yahshua had, that was in Noah, and by the Holy Spirit Noah preached to the “spirits in prison” in the days that the ark was being prepared (verse 20). Noah is called a preacher of righteousness in 2Peter 2:5. “Spirits in prison” is a metaphor meaning people in bondage to sin and death (see Isa. 42:6-7; 61:1).

“His breath goes forth, he returns to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish” (Psalm 146:4).

Hell is sheol in Hebrew and its Greek equivalent word is hades  –  both simply mean the grave. The pagan Greeks gave it the meaning of an unseen world of torture, not Yahweh’s teachings.

If the dead never die then Yahshua never died and we have no sacrifice for our sins. If there was anything we learned from the Old Testament sacrifices it is that sin requires a sacrifice that dies, not one that lives on in another form. The wages or payment for sin is death, Romans 6:23. If Yahshua didn’t pay that debt with literal death then you and I must pay for our sins with our own deaths and that would mean we have no hope of everlasting life.

The notion that the dead live on in a tortured state for eternity is right out of Greek paganism and from the writings of Plato as well as the thirteenth century Italian poet Dante Alighieri.