To what extent does the biblical depiction of Hell and the modern evangelical version of Hell differ? And what are some reason for this disconnect?

Modern evangelical/pop culture Hell seems to have a few consistent traits: it's a state of eternal damnation, God decides who goes there and not to Heaven, there's awful punishment going on there, it's full of demons, and it is hot with flames and brimstone. Hell is described a bit more vaguely in the Bible, but the Evangelical version of it seems to come from Revelation more than anything else. Revelation 21:8 mentions a lake of fire where sinners will be cast in: sinners "shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death". The Evangelical version of Hell is largely an elaboration of this verse and a few others in Revelation, which make similar statements about fire, brimstone, Satan, and punishment for sinners. Jesus also mentions that there'll be fire in Mark 9:47–48. In Evangelical belief as well as in Revelation, Hell is also described as an eventual fate - everyone will be sent to their appropriate afterlife when Jesus returns for the Day of Judgement, not immediately after death. However, in the Gospels, Jesus seems to describe someone going to Hell immediately after death: in Luke 16:19-31, he tells a parable about two dead men and says that one was "suffering in Hell". However, Evangelicals usually argue that since it was just a parable, an example, it's possible that he didn't actually mean that people proceed directly to the afterlife - he might have been going with the usual assumptions of the time in order to communicate to his audience. I'd say Revelation seems to feature more prominently in Evangelical faith in general, especially the churches which have theologies about what'll happen on the Day of Judgement. Revelation is also a lot more visual; the Gospels have less imagery attached to Hell. Interestingly, Jewish teachers in the Mishnah and Talmud - major Jewish works of scriptural interpretation - seem to have agreed that Hell was not permanent. Rather, God would release people from it after they learnt their lesson and the most anyone ever stayed was 12 months. (1) Hell was also known as Gehenna, and derived that name from a desolate valley where child sacrifice was said to have taken place. Some of the exact wording in the Book of Chronicles is that kids were "made to pass through the fire", which is ambiguous but was interpreted as child sacrifice. This would have been the more common image of Hell at the time of the Bible's writing, however rejecting the temporary nature of hell seems to have been a logical consequence of Christian belief in the necessity of salvation through Christ, which emerged as early as the Gospel of John (the most recently-written Gospel). God wasn't able to simply spring people from Hell at will, not before Christ died and rose. Rather, the Atonement was necessary, and it was only possible to get freed from Hell through Christ. This element of necessary faith for salvation was re-emphasized during the Reformation, especially with Luther's doctrine of salvation Sola Fide, by faith alone. Evangelical sects are all eventual products or offshoots of the Reformation, and they kept to similar doctrines of salvation. Since the fire imagery is really the most concrete description of Hell that the Bible offers, people seized on it early and seriously. For example, Tertullian (an early Church Father who really liked vivid description) talks about "governors who persecuted the name of the Lord melting in flames fiercer than those they kindled for brave Christians"(2), among other flammable enemies roasting in Hell. It has remained pretty consistent, I think, that fire has been part of the conception of Hell, except in theologically-liberal churches as of the mid-to-late 1900s, who go back to an earlier Jewish idea of Hell as a sort of loneliness, yearning and separation from God or adopt theologies of universal reconciliation in which there's heaven for everyone. However, Seventh Day Adventists and a few other denominations have come more recently to believe that people get destroyed in the lake of fire instead of burning in it forever. It was later sources that added on different divisions of Hell for different crimes, like Dante's Inferno as you mention. The fire concept is the most biblical and the most widely agreed upon, and beyond that it gets more cultural than Biblical or even church-related. The Dante-influenced version was never adopted by religious authorities; churches didn't have doctrines about different divisions of Hell. However, literary and (later) cinematic culture is as big an influence as religion, and when people tried to imagine the torments of Hell - which are supposed to be the worst of pain, as Revelation emphasizes - they may well have been influenced by the idea of personalized torments. I'm honestly less knowledgeable about the cultural/literary aspects than the religious/biblical ones. Whether a nasty individual would go to Hell immediately or after the Day of Judgement is more of a contentious question, partly because of the possible contradiction in the Biblical sources. To try and sum it up quickly, the Catholic Church's belief, according to the Catechism, is that one would go to Hell immediately after death if they'd behaved in a way that merited it. This conclusion was hammered out in Late Antiquity. After the Reformation's renewed emphasis on scripture over tradition, different off-shoot churches, for example Baptists, arrived at the conclusion that people would slumber until the Day of Judgement.

Extrabiblical Citations: (1) Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 235. (2) Tertullian in Taylor, Richard P. 2000. Death and the Afterlife : A Cultural Encyclopedia.