116 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
henna's "fire" -itself only an image, surely-as one of anni-
hilation or as one of purification; his metaphors could be in-
terpreted in either way. In support of the former possibility,
one can point to the images of total destruction that Jesus fre-
quently employed, such as dead branches or darnel weeds or
chaff being incinerated in ovens, not to mention his claim that
it lies in God's power to destroy both the body and the soul
in the Gehenna (Matthew 10:28). In support, however, of the
latter possibility-which, incidentally, can explain these seem-
ingly "annihilationist" images equally well- there are those
metaphors used by Jesus that seem to imply that the punish-
ments of the world to come will be of only limited duration:
If remanded to prison, "you shall most certainly not emerge
until you repay the very last pittance" (Matthew 5:26; cf. Luke
12:59); the unmerciful slave is "delivered to the torturers, until
he should repay everything he owes" (Matthew 18:34). It seems
as if this "until" should be taken with some seriousness. Some
wicked slaves, moreover, "will be beaten with many blows"
while others will be "beaten with few blows" {Luke 12:49).
I think we can assume that Jesus's listeners were not such pre-
cocious mathematicians that they could foresee the discovery
of greater and lesser infinite sets. And, of course, "everyone will
be salted with fire" (Mark 9:49). This fire is explicitly that of
the Gehenna, but salting here is an image of purification and
preservation-for "salt is good" (Mark 9:50). We might even
find some support for the purgatorial view of the Gehenna
from the Greek of Matthew 25:46 (the supposedly conclu-
sive verse on the side of the infernalist orthodoxy), where the
word used for the "punishment" of the last day is K0Aaai5,, ko-
lasis-which most properly refers to remedial chastisement-
rather than n11-wp[a, timoria-which most properly refers to
retributive justice. By the late antique period, admittedly, ko-