The argument put forward by kingjames1 is that Jesus not only taught a doctrine of hell but also transmitted that doctrine to his disciples and the apostles of the early church. In other words, the thought of hell gets passed on from the particular context of Jesus’ mission to Israel to the universal context of ‘the narrative of God’s plan for the world’.

It would seem so, judging from Paul’s language of fire and everlasting punishment against those “who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus”, concomitant with the Lord’s coming “with his powerful angels” (2Th.1:7-10; cf. Mt.13:40-42), and the ‘lake of fire’, from which “the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever,” (Rev.14:11) in John’s Apocalypse - the second death, which is the terrible destiny of those whose “name is not found written in the book of life” at the last judgment in chapter 20. 

But more importantly to your question, I wonder if you are not over-determining the ‘contextualization’ of Jesus’ words in confining them to his historic mission to Israel, thereby delimiting the ‘theological context’ of his preaching/teaching both geo-politically and eschatologically.  We should bear in mind that Jesus’ central message of the coming kingdom (his theological context) was eschatological in the fullest sense of that term.  Its implications were by no means restricted to the borders of first-century Palestine.  Rather, the coming Kingdom was univeral in implication, indeed, cosmic.  One cannot, it seems to me, divorce his teachings regarding the immediate implications for his original, Jewish audience of the coming judgment and blessings of God’s reign from their implications for human history in toto.  We see from the kingdom-parables, for example, that the kingdom of God has a reality that is both present in Jesus’ mission (Mt.13:10-15, 18ff., 32, 34-35, 37, 44-45 - the kingdom is apparently small, insignificant, hidden, the word of which is ‘scattered’ by the Son of Man in his earthly ministry) to Israel in particular (Mt.15:24; 10:6), and for the whole world (13:38; cf. 8:12; 15:26-28), both now (cf. 21:28-45; 22:1-13) and extending on to the end of history (13:39-43, 49-50; cf. 25:31-46).  Certainly we can distinguish his teachings regarding, say, the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 (see esp. Lk.21:5-24) as the tragic downfall of Jerusalem, for which Jesus wept (Lk.19:41-44; cf. Mt.23:37-38) and the future, eschatological judgment “when the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him” and the “cursed [depart] into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” and the “righteous to eternal life” (Matthew 25:46; cf. 16:27). But we must understand both within the overarching theological context of the kingdom as the in-breaking of God’s reign in Jesus Christ, with profound (eternal) implications for judgment and blessing (both in his first advent and second). 

More specifically, our Lord’s language of ‘their worm does not die, the fire is not quenched” (Mk.9:48) is taken from Isaiah 66:24 - the last verse of the book in fact, in which the eschatological horizon entails “the new heavens and the new earth”, in which “all mankind will come and bow down before me.”  In other words, if Jesus intentionally refered to Isaiah’s apocalyptic vision in his language concerning ‘gehenna’ (which he no doubt did), then it seems unwarranted to restrict the meaning/application of such language to only his historic mission in Palestine and the judgment in AD 70 (as though these events exhausted the prophetic significance of Isaiah’s visions).  It seems our ‘hermeneutical horizon’ must go well beyond the first century, even as the Olivet Discourse itself does (referring both to the imminent judgment against Jerusalem and to the Last Day, e.g., Mt.24:30-31). 

Your thoughts?