Christian tradition has long held that between his death on the cross and his resurrection, Jesus descended to the realm of the dead, variously called Hades, Sheol or hell depending on the language and tradition, a belief given creedal expression in the line of the Apostles' Creed stating that Christ descended to the dead. Unlike most major events in Jesus's life, the descent is not directly narrated as an event in any of the four canonical Gospels, which describe his burial and then move to the discovery of the empty tomb, without an intervening account of what, if anything, occurred during the time between.
The doctrine draws chiefly on a brief and much debated passage in the First Letter of Peter, describing Christ as having gone and preached to spirits in prison, understood by much of the tradition as a reference to this period, alongside broader early Christian reflection connecting Jesus's death to a victorious proclamation over the powers of death itself.
Eastern Orthodox iconography developed an especially vivid visual tradition around this belief, the Anastasis icon, depicting Christ standing on broken gates, pulling Adam and Eve up from their tombs, a scene functioning in Orthodox tradition as the primary image of the resurrection itself rather than as a separate or secondary theme.