Ancient cities were surrounded by high
walls to protect them against their enemies. Entrance to the city was by way of
gates in its walls. Before the invention of battering-rams the strength of a
city lay in the strength of its gates. For this reason gates soon came
to mean strength or power. Hence gates of hell refer to the forces of
evil, which Christ well knew would be loosed against His Church. Many
non-Catholic scholars take gates of hell as equivalent to sheol, i.e.,
the place of the dead, and then death itself. Taken in this sense, the words of
Christ are even more striking, for if death can never prevail against the
Church, neither can it perish or fail. Death to a society can be only its
destruction by dissolution or essential change. (E. Sylvester Berry, The
Church of Christ: An Apologetic and Dogmatic Treatise [Frederick County,
Md.: Mount Saint Mary's Seminary, 1955; repr., Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock,
2009], 33 n 12)