118 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
necessarily requires purification instead of pardon. The texts
of the gospels simply make no obvious claim about a place
or state of endless suffering; and, again, the complete absence
of any such notion in the Pauline corpus ( or, for that matter,
in John's gospel, or in the other New Testament epistles, or in
the earliest Christian documents of the post-apostolic church,
such as the Didache and the writings of the ''.Apostolic Fathers,"
and so forth) makes the very concept nearly as historically sus-
pect as it is morally repellant. All that can be said with perfect
certitude is that to read back into these texts either the tradi-
tional view of dual eternal postmortem destinies or the devel-
oped high mediaeval Roman Catholic view of an absolute dis-
tinction between "Hell" and "Purgatory" would be either (in
the former case) a mere dogmatic reflex or (in the latter) a feat
of pure historical illiteracy.
It is hard, I know, to convince most Christians that the
picture of hell with which they were raised is not lavishly on
display in the pages of scripture. In part, conventional prac-
tices of translation-such as the aforementioned custom of
using the single English word "hell" as a collective transla-
tion for Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus-are much to blame
for this. I have even seen translations that do not follow the
established pattern in this regard, mine among them, accused
of attempting to expel the traditional picture of hell from the
text. But surely translators who have merely rescued distinc-
tions in meaning present in the original Greek can no more
be said to have expelled hell from scripture than a workman
who oils the hinges on an upstairs door, repairs the window
casement around a loose sash, and cuts away the tree branches
that scrape against the eaves can be said to have "exorcised"
the ghost that the residents of the house had imagined was re-
sponsible for all the strange noises keeping them up at night.