In this segment of Catholic Answers Live, the caller asks Brandon Vogt why the Apostles Creed says that Jesus descends into Hell.
Transcript:
Host: Jésus from that old Texas town of El Paso, listening on Guadalupe Radio, you are on with Brandon Vogt, what’s your question, Jésus?
Caller: Okay yes, thanks for taking my call. My question is, and it’s just something for me, because in the Apostles’ Creed it says, of course, that the Lord was crucified, died, and was buried, and then he descended into Hell. Why? What was the purpose of Him going into Hell?
Brandon: That’s a great question. The Catechism of the Catholic Church talks about this, somewhere around the 600s, like 620 or 630, something like that. So go in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and you’ll read the section in there on this part of the Creed, and it says that Jesus descended into Hell as a saviour to preach the good news to those who had died and gone before Him. You also find this echoed, by the way, in the letter of 1 Peter, that Jesus preached the good news to the spirits in prison there.
Does this mean that Jesus went down to save those who were damned? No. Does it mean that Jesus destroyed the Hell of damnation? No. Scripture uses that word “Hell” in a couple different ways. It usually, in the Old Testament, refers to Sheol, or the Abode of the Dead, which consisted of both the righteous and the unrighteous who are in there together, so–and this line in the Creed refers to Jesus going down into Sheol to preach the good news to the righteous and welcome them into his kingdom.
So again, look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church, I don’t have it right in front of me, I think it’s somewhere around paragraph 600, 620, something like that, and you’ll find a good explanation of that part of the Creed.
Host: Okay, Jésus?
Caller: Thanks, yes. Could you answer another question?
Host: Sure Jésus, real quick.
Caller: My question was about [Mary], about the Virgin, if–did she write the Magnificat?
Brandon: That’s a really interesting question, I was just looking into this the other day. So the Magnificat, of course, is found in Luke chapter 1, and many Catholics wonder, how could Mary possibly have spoken in such eloquent poetic language? So was the Magnificat something that Luke came up with, or was he recording the accurate words that Mary spoke?
We gotta keep a couple things in mind before answering that. First of all, the Magnificat is an echo of the canticle of Hannah from the book of 1 Samuel. And so when Mary’s singing the Magnificat, she’s signaling that she is a new Hannah, which would mean that her son Jesus is a new Samuel. And so there’s a theological significance to the words that she uses, and I think that’s the important takeaway from the Magnificat. It’s not, “Oh, look how beautiful these words are,” it’s, “What are these words pointing to?”
That said, even though Mary was likely a young illiterate girl, it is plausible to think that she would have been familiar with Hannah’s canticle, and thus plausible to think that she could have spoken the Magnificat the way it’s written down. But again, not super important whether these are the exact words that Mary spoke, or whether Luke was exercising literary poetic flair; the important thing is that Mary’s signaling herself as a new Hannah.