With this post, we’ll be looking at the final use of fire in Matthew.  Let’s consider the full passage in which it occurs, Matthew 25:31-46.

[31] And whenever the Son of Man would come in his glory and all the angels with him, then he shall sit upon his throne of glory. [32] And he shall gather before him all the nations, and he shall separate them from each other, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the young goats, [33] and he shall stand the sheep on his right, and the goats on his left. [34] Then the king shall say to the ones on his right, come hither, blessed ones of my father, inherit the kingdom that has been prepared for you from the founding of the cosmos. [35] For I was hungry and you gave to me something to eat, I thirsted and you gave me something to drink, I was a foreigner and you gathered me in, [36] naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you cared for me, in prison and you came to me. [37] Then the righteous shall respond to him saying: Lord, when did we see you hungering and we fed, or thirsty and we gave drink? [38] When did we see you a foreigner and gather you in, or naked and we clothed you? [39] When did we see you sick or in prison and we came to you? [40] And responding the king shall say to them: truly I say to you, when you do this to one of the least of my brothers, you do this to me. [41] Then he shall say to the ones on his left: depart from me accursed ones into the aeonian fire which has been prepared by the slanderer and his angels. [42] For I hungered and you did not give me anything to eat, I thirsted and you did not give me anything to drink, [43] I was a foreigner and you did not gather me in, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not care for me. [44] Then these ones shall respond also, saying: Lord, when did we see you hungering or thirsting or a foreigner or naked or sick or in prison and we did not serve you? [45] Then he shall respond to them saying: Truly I say to you, whenever you do not do for one of the least of these, neither do you do to me. [46] And these shall depart into aeonian correction, and the righteous into aeonian life.

This is one of my favorite passages in Matthew. It is unique to Matthew, and I think is truly one of the under-considered passages among the loudest denominations of Christianity.  The distinction between the righteous and unrighteous here is that the righteous are universally charitable to the lowly, and the people consigned to the aeonian fire are the ones who lack this universal charity.  This should give us pause, because who among us, for example, has not brushed aside a request for something from a homeless person?

Considering just vv. 41 itself, obviously at this point we have discussed the word ‘aeonian’ a few times before. This word could be translated as “for an age” or as “eternal,” and for the most part I leave it transliterated rather than picking a specific definition because I think that you should be deciding for yourself what the appropriate usage is in a given circumstance. 

The phrase “by the slanderer and his angels” also deserves close attention.  The word that I have translated as ‘slanderer’, διάβολος diabolos, when used as an adjective means ‘slanderous’ and when used as a noun means ‘a slanderer.’ Obviously this word closely resembles English words like ‘diabolical’ and this word is translated as ‘devil’ in the major translations of the New Testament. Just as with the conversion of ‘Gehenna’ into ‘hell’ in most translations, this translation projects medieval theology into the translation and obscures the text itself. With that being said, the reasoning behind διάβολος diabolos as ‘slanderer’ is also something of a mystery to me.  The verb from which it is descended also has a possible meaning of ‘to mislead,’ so possibly a more apt translation would be ‘the deceiver.’ This perhaps makes more sense in the context of things like the narratives in which the slanderer/deceiver tries to tempt Jesus, and perhaps in the sense of the slanderer/deceiver as someone who misleads people away from the righteous path.

Also worth mentioning is that major translations describe eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil, whereas I describe it as having been prepared by the slanderer and his angels. The actual Greek is grammatically ambiguous.  The word διάβολος diabolos appears in something called the dative case, which could be translated as either ‘by the slanderer’ or ‘for the slanderer’ with equal validity. At least part of the reason that I have translated this passage the way that I have is to have this opportunity to highlight how translation decisions shape the meaning of passages in translation, because obviously ‘prepared for the devil’ and ‘prepared by the deceiver’ have totally different meanings. 

Making the impact of translators’ choices apparent is probably sufficient justification for this choice, and one of the goals of this blog is to make these sorts of choices clear to folks so that they have a better idea of the ambiguity of the actual text of the Bible. I also tentatively prefer ‘by the deceiver’ because it creates the sense that the aeonian fire has been created by the slanderer through his deceit, and because it gives the impression that the deceiver is working on behalf of God to accomplish the plan to separate the sheep from the goats and deliver to each their appropriate outcome.  I have not actually done the necessary due diligence to conclude that this is actually how I should interpret the relationship between God and the deceiver, so take this interpretation with a grain of salt. 

As a final note on translation for vv. 41, I should add is that for the phrase ‘the slanderer and his angels’, the word for ‘angel,’ ἂγγελος ayyelos, literally means ‘messenger.’ If you think about the context of angels in parts of the Hebrew Bible, (for example the angel who visit Lot to warn of the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah), they were often literally acting as messengers, but in the New Testament sometimes the use of ἂγγελος ayyelos suggests that they exist as generic celestial agents (it seems that they appear in the latter sense in this passage). 

Ultimately, I think how punitively we view the aeonian fire in vv. 41 should be shaped by how we interpret aeonian correction in vv. 46.  The word translated as ‘correction,’ κόλασις kolasis, is the noun form of a verb that means primarily ‘to prune,’ but also means ‘to confine or punish’ with the connotation of ‘to correct.’  David Bentley Hart has a long footnote about this word in which he suggests that by the time of the New Testament, the distinction between κόλασις kolasis as punishment-as-correction and other words that explicitly meant punishment-as-retribution may have been lost. Depending on whether we interpret this as punishment intended to shape and improve the punished, we might view the aeonian fire as fire which burns away their impurities.