The Harrowing of Hell: Where the Story Comes From

What the harrowing of hell is

The harrowing of hell is the belief that Christ, in the interval between his death and his resurrection, went down into the realm of the dead, smashed its gates, bound Satan and brought out the righteous who had died before him. The English name comes from Old English hergian, to raid or plunder: it is a story about a break-in.

It is one of the most depicted scenes in Christian art and one of the least biblical. Millions of Christians say weekly that Christ descended to the dead. Almost nobody has read the book the descent actually happens in, because that book never got into a Bible.

Where each part of the story comes from

The New Testament supplies three or four hints and no narrative. The First Epistle of Peter says that Christ “went and preached unto the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:19, King James Version), which is a single clause whose meaning has been argued over for eighteen centuries. Everything cinematic in the story — the dialogue, the gates, the rescue — comes from elsewhere.

One more early witness deserves a mention because it is the strangest. The Gospel of Peter has the guards at the tomb see a cross walk out behind the risen Christ, and a voice from heaven ask whether he has preached to those that sleep — the cross answers yes. That is a second-century text taking the descent for granted decades before anyone wrote it as a scene.

The book that tells it

The Gospel of Nicodemus, also called the Acts of Pilate, is a two-part apocryphon. Part one is a courtroom drama: Jesus before Pilate, the witnesses, the crucifixion, the arguments in the council afterwards. Part two, the Descent into Hell, is the harrowing itself, and was probably attached later — the first part reads as fourth century, the descent perhaps fifth.

The descent survives in three forms: Greek, Latin A and Latin B. Constantin von Tischendorf edited them in his Evangelia Apocrypha of 1853, working the Acts of Pilate from eight Greek manuscripts, and the chapter and verse numbers everyone still cites are his. M. R. James printed all three forms in 1924 and gave his preference to Latin A, which is the version quoted throughout this page and printed complete here.

The narrative frame is unusually careful. The story is not told by an apostle but by two dead men: Karinus and Leucius, sons of the high priest Simeon who held the infant Jesus in the temple. They are among the dead raised at the crucifixion, are found alive in Arimathaea, and are made to write down what they saw — each on his own sheet, and the text says the two were found the same, neither more nor less by one letter. Scholars have long noticed that the two names look suspiciously like a split of Leucius Charinus, the name later tradition attached to the apocryphal Acts; the observation is old, and it is not provable.

After a prayer asking leave to speak of what they saw, their account opens in the dark, before anything happens:

“Now when we were set together with all our fathers in the deep, in obscurity of darkness, on a sudden there came a golden heat of the sun and a purple and royal light shining upon us.”

Satan and Hell argue

The most original stroke in the whole tradition is that the underworld has two rulers who disagree. Satan is the prince who arranged the crucifixion; Hell is the place itself, personified, and he is terrified of the guest Satan is bringing home. Their quarrel is the dramatic engine of the story, and it exists nowhere in the Bible.

“And while all the saints were rejoicing, behold Satan the prince and chief of death said unto Hell: Make thyself ready to receive Jesus who boasteth himself that he is the Son of God, whereas he is a man that feareth death…”

Hell is not persuaded. His objection is evidence-based, and the evidence is Lazarus — a prisoner he had lawfully held and lost, pulled out through the roof of his own house by nothing but a sentence.

“Who is this Jesus which by his own word without prayer hath drawn dead men from me? Perchance it is he which by the word of his command did restore to life Lazarus which was four days dead and stank and was corrupt, whom I held here dead.”

“Neither could we keep Lazarus, but he like an eagle shaking himself leaped forth with all agility and swiftness, and departed from us…”

The eagle image is the sort of detail that shows an author writing rather than compiling. Hell finishes his argument by predicting exactly what is about to happen to him: if Satan brings this man here, every prisoner in the place walks free.

Lift up your gates

The turning point is a shout from outside. It is Psalm 24, which Christians had been chanting liturgically for centuries, suddenly given a location: the psalm's demand that the everlasting doors open for the King of glory is delivered at the gates of hell, and hell answers back.

“suddenly there came a voice as of thunder and a spiritual cry: Remove, O princes, your gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.”

Hell's first move is to throw Satan out of the house before the fighting starts, telling him that if he is such a mighty man of war he can go and fight the King of glory himself. Only then does he give the siege order.

“Then said Hell unto his wicked ministers: Shut ye the hard gates of brass and put on them the bars of iron and withstand stoutly, lest we that hold captivity be taken captive.”

The brass gates and iron bars are lifted from the Psalms, where God is praised for breaking exactly those things. Here the borrowing is literal: the fortifications named in the hymn are the ones that fail. When the doors go, the devils see what has come in, and their reaction is a piece of genuine theology delivered as panic:

“Who art thou that art so great and so small, both humble and exalted, both soldier and commander, a marvellous warrior in the shape of a bondsman, and a King of glory dead and living, whom the cross bare slain upon it?”

Adam taken by the right hand

The rescue itself is described in two short sentences, and both were copied by artists for a thousand years. Christ tramples death, hands Satan over to Hell as a prisoner in Adam's place, and pulls the first man out of the dark by the hand — the moment nearly every Byzantine Anastasis icon shows, though in the icons he usually takes Adam by the wrist rather than the hand.

“Then did the King of glory in his majesty trample upon death, and laid hold on Satan the prince and delivered him unto the power of Hell, and drew Adam to him unto his own brightness.”

Hell then turns on his own former ally with the bitterest speech in the book, and its logic is the tree: what Satan won by one piece of wood in Eden he has just lost to another.

“O prince Satan, holder of the keys of hell, those thy riches which thou hadst gained by the tree of transgression and the losing of paradise, thou hast lost by the tree of the cross, and all thy gladness hath perished.”

The same figure is turned into an invitation a moment later, when Christ calls the dead to himself:

“And the Lord stretching forth his hand, said: Come unto me, all ye my saints which bear mine image and my likeness. Ye that by the tree and the devil and death were condemned, behold now the devil and death condemned by the tree.”

“And the Lord stretched forth his hand and made the sign of the cross over Adam and over all his saints, and he took the right hand of Adam and went up out of hell, and all the saints followed him.”

What follows is a procession: David, Habakkuk and Micah each shout a verse, the saints answer Amen, Alleluia, and the archangel Michael takes them into paradise. There they meet Enoch and Elijah, who are waiting to fight Antichrist, and then a stranger arrives whose description is one of the best small images in apocryphal literature — “behold there came another man of vile habit, bearing upon his shoulders the sign of the cross.” It is the thief from Golgotha, carrying his pass.

How the scene conquered the Middle Ages

A story with no canonical narrative became one of the most reproduced images in Christendom, in three media at once. The Eastern church made it the picture of Easter itself: the Anastasis, Christ standing on the broken doors with locks and nails scattered beneath him, hauling Adam and Eve up by the wrists — the fresco in the parekklesion of the Chora church in Constantinople, painted around 1315–21, is the most famous version.

In the West it became theatre. All four surviving English mystery cycles — York, Chester, Towneley and N-Town — stage the harrowing as its own pageant, with devils, shouted psalm verses and a set of gates the actors physically broke. A Middle English poem of around 1250 carries the title outright, and Langland put the whole confrontation into Piers Plowman, where Christ and Lucifer argue law in front of the gates.

Meanwhile the Gospel of Nicodemus itself was translated into Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, Irish, Welsh, German, French and Italian, and copied in hundreds of manuscripts. It was never in anybody's canon. It was simply everywhere — which is a useful correction to the assumption that a book outside the Bible was a book nobody read. Several of the so-called lost gospels were never lost to the Middle Ages at all; they were lost to us.

What the creed does and does not say

The Apostles' Creed contains the clause descendit ad inferos, he descended to the dead. The Nicene Creed does not contain it, and never did. The descent entered the creed regionally, which is documented from the inside by a bishop who noticed the discrepancy while writing a commentary.

Rufinus of Aquileia, around 404 CE, remarked that the creed of his own church included the descent while the Roman creed did not, and argued that the Roman clause about burial carried the same meaning. That is as close as we get to watching a creed acquire a line. The story behind the line was never voted on, never canonised, and never forgotten — it just circulated in a book that stayed outside.

Held next to the Apocalypse of Peter, the shape of early Christian imagination about the underworld becomes clear. One book sends a living man down to look at hell and write an inventory. The other sends God down to empty it. The first was nearly canonised and then dropped; the second was never canonised and became the picture behind a line of the creed. Neither is in the Bible, and both are readable in full — the Apocalypse of Peter and the Gospel of Nicodemus — which is the only way to judge what the church was actually arguing about.