124 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
that Satan's kingdom will last only till the end of the present
"age." And, if one is willing to consult the witness of pagan
writers-and, after all, the Platonists believed in the torments
of "hell" long before the Christians fastened upon the idea -
it is worth noting that, as late as the sixth century, the Neo-
platonist philosopher Olympiodorus the Younger (c. 495-570)
thought it obvious that the suffering of wicked souls in Tar-
tams is certainly not endless, atelevtos, but merely very long in
duration, aionios. There were, moreover, regions of the Chris-
tian world where such thinking persisted well beyond an -
tiquity. East Syrian tradition remained especially hospitable to
the notion of a temporary hell and of God's eventual universal
victory over evil. In the thirteenth century, for instance, the
East Syrian bishop Solomon of Basra (fl. 1220s and after), in his
marvelous Book of the Bee, remarked in a quite matter-of-fact
manner that in the New Testament le-alam or aionios does not
mean "eternal," and that of course hell is not an interminable
condition. And the fourteenth-century East Syrian Patriarch
Timotheus II (presided 1318-c. 1332) clearly saw it as uncontro-
versial to assert that hell's aionios pains will eventually come to
an end for everyone, and that the souls cleansed by its fires will
enter paradise for eternity.
Admittedly, reflection on the Greek can cast only so
much light on the ministry of Christ in Galilee and Judaea.
Jesus, according to Luke, was a literate son of the synagogue.
This could mean that he was able to read Hebrew or Greek
or both (the Jewish Bible of the time, even in the hinterlands
of the Galilee, was probably often the most popular Greek
version, the Septuagint). Some New Testament scholars and
Christian historians down the years have doubted that he was
able even to speak Greek fluently, or at all, but I suspect that
this is wrong, a hasty conclusion based upon the pronounced