Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 117
lasis might have become a word for any sort of legal penalty;
the evidence is mixed. But the word's special connotation of
corrective rather than retributive punishment was still appre-
ciated and observed by educated writers for centuries after the
time of Christ.
Then, of course, one possibility yet remains: that the Ge-
henna, in Christ's teachings, was a place of neither annihila-
tion nor purification, but rather of eternal conscious torment
in a vast torture chamber devised by the God of love ( to prove,
it seems, the magnitude of that love). To be honest, I see noth-
ing in the gospels that obliges one to believe this. I think, on
the whole, that the variety and apparent incompatibility of the
metaphors Jesus used to describe the Age to come in his public
ministry should be taken as a prohibition upon any dogmatic
pronouncements on the matter. I will say, however, that the
idea of an eternal punishment for the reprobate-in the sense
not merely of a final penalty, but also of endlessly perduring
torment- seems to have had some substantial precedent in
the literature of the intertestamental period, such as 1 Enoch,
and perhaps in some early schools of rabbinic thought. But I
find no warrant in that for assuming that the highly pictorial
and dramatic imagery of exclusion used by Jesus to describe
the fate of the derelict when the Kingdom comes- barred or
locked doors, the darkness of the night outside the feasting
hall, wails of despair and teeth grinding in frustration or anger
or misery- corresponds to any particular literal state of affairs,
or to some specific perpetual postmortem state of the damned
from which there is no hope of deliverance. I am not even will-
ing to presume that the "inexcusable" blasphemy against the
Spirit, mentioned in all three synoptic gospels, is one for which
an everlasting penalty must be exacted- whether that be end-
less torment or final annihilation - rather than merely one that