Chapter 10 — Jesus on Body and Soul: The Texts Fudge Could Not Ignore

There are some texts you simply cannot walk past. No matter how committed you are to a particular reading of Scripture, some verses sit in your path like boulders in a stream, forcing the water to go around them. Matthew 10:28 is one of those boulders. Luke 12:4–5 is another. They are among the most direct, most unflinching statements Jesus ever made about the human person—about what we are, what can be done to us, and what God alone has the power to do. And Edward Fudge, to his credit, did not try to walk past them.

This matters. As we have seen in earlier chapters, Fudge ignored a staggering number of biblical passages that bear on the body-soul question—roughly forty-eight of them, by our count. But he did not ignore these. He could not. Matthew 10:28 is, after all, one of the most important verses in the entire annihilationist case. It is the verse conditionalists point to when they want to show that God has the power to destroy the wicked completely, body and soul. Fudge devoted significant attention to it in The Fire That Consumes, and rightly so.¹

But here is the problem. Fudge handled this passage in a way that served his case for conditional immortality while quietly undermining the very anthropology the verse teaches. He focused entirely on the word “destroy”—and almost entirely ignored what Jesus said about the word “soul.”

Let me walk you through his argument carefully, because fairness demands it. Fudge’s treatment of Matthew 10:28 appears on pages 123–125 of The Fire That Consumes, where he places the verse within the broader context of Jesus’ discourse on persecution in Matthew 10:24–31.² He begins by quoting the verse in full: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” So far, so good.

Then Fudge makes his central move. He argues that the key insight of the verse is the contrast between human power and divine power. Humans can kill the body; God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. According to Fudge, this proves that God’s judgment goes beyond what humans can do. The destruction God inflicts is total, reaching what Fudge calls “deeper than the physical.”³ He takes this as strong evidence for conditionalism: God does not merely torment the wicked forever—He destroys them. On this point, I agree with Fudge completely. The verse does teach divine destruction, and it does undermine the traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment.

But watch what happens next. When it comes to the meaning of “soul” (psyche in Greek), Fudge leans heavily on the work of Alexander Sand, who wrote in the Expository Dictionary of the New Testament that the soul in this passage means “the life, the person.”⁴ Sand argues that Jesus is contrasting God’s power to destroy the “entire person”—the “real Self”—with the limited power of human persecutors who can only end a person’s earthly, bodily existence. Fudge also cites Ulrich Luz, who interprets the passage as teaching complete destruction “body and soul,” and Robin Nixon, who claims that “the soul in biblical thought is not immortal” and that hell is “the place of its destruction.”⁵

Fudge further notes that Jesus appears to equate “kill” and “destroy,” making them interchangeable in this context. He writes that this equation “is not surprising to the ordinary person in normal discourse, but it flies in the face of traditionalists who always define ‘destroy’ as alive but wishing not to be.”⁶ Again, on the question of what “destroy” means in the context of final punishment, I think Fudge is on solid ground. The traditionalist attempt to redefine “destroy” as “ruin” or “ongoing torment” is, in my judgment, exegetically strained.

What Fudge does not do, however, is grapple honestly with the anthropological implications of what Jesus actually said. He treats the word “soul” as essentially a synonym for “the person” or “the life,” and he moves on. He does not ask the question that the text demands: If “soul” simply means “the person” or “the life,” then how is it that humans can kill the body but cannot kill the soul? Humans can certainly kill persons. Humans end lives every day. If psyche just means “the life” or “the whole person,” Jesus’ statement becomes incoherent. A murderer kills the whole person—that is what murder does.

Fudge recognized the importance of Luke 12:4–5 as the Lukan parallel to Matthew 10:28, and he touched on it at several points in his discussion.⁷ Luke’s version reads: “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him” (Luke 12:4–5, NIV). Fudge noted that Robert Peterson equated “destroy” in Matthew 10:28 with “throw into hell” in Luke 12:5, and then observed—correctly, in my view—that it makes more sense to interpret Luke’s general phrase in light of Matthew’s more specific word “destroy.”⁸ Specific words clarify generalities. That is good interpretive method, and Fudge was right to point it out.

But once again, what Fudge did not do is just as important as what he did. He did not engage the anthropological question that Luke’s version raises in its own way. Luke says that after the body has been killed, God has authority to “throw you into hell.” Who is the “you” who gets thrown into Gehenna after the body is already dead? If there is no immaterial soul that survives the death of the body, then there is no “you” left to be thrown anywhere. The verse presupposes that something—someone—endures beyond the death of the body. That someone is the soul.

Fudge’s overall approach to these passages can be summarized like this: he saw what the texts teach about destruction (correctly), but he refused to see what they teach about anthropology (incorrectly). He used Matthew 10:28 as a weapon against eternal conscious torment while ignoring that the same verse is an equally powerful weapon against physicalism.

There is a revealing moment in Fudge’s treatment where this becomes especially clear. When he engages the traditionalist responses to Matthew 10:28, he is sharp and incisive. He takes Robert Peterson to task for claiming that “destroy” must mean “ruin” rather than actual destruction. He pushes back against Dixon and Davies, who argue that apollymi can have secondary meanings and therefore does not mean “destroy” here. He dismantles John Gerstner’s claim that God gives the wicked indestructible resurrection bodies so that they “cannot die.”⁵⁴ On all of these points, Fudge is devastating. He shows that the traditionalists are reading their theology into the text rather than drawing their theology from it.

But here is the irony. The same charge applies to Fudge himself when it comes to the word “soul.” Just as the traditionalists empty “destroy” of its plain meaning, Fudge empties “soul” of its plain meaning. Just as the traditionalists read eternal conscious torment into a verse about destruction, Fudge reads physicalism into a verse about the soul’s survival. The method is the same. Only the direction of the distortion is different.

B. Identifying the Weaknesses in Fudge’s Reading

Fudge’s treatment of Matthew 10:28 has several specific weaknesses that need to be identified and named. I do this not to dishonor his broader work—which has been enormously valuable to the CI movement—but because these weaknesses are serious, and they have shaped how an entire generation of conditionalists thinks about what a human being is.

The “Soul as Life” Substitution

The first and most significant weakness is what I call the “soul as life” substitution. Fudge, following Sand and others, quietly replaces psyche (soul) with “life” or “person” throughout his discussion—as if these words are interchangeable in this context. But they are not. The Greek word psyche does have a range of meanings, and it can sometimes function as a synonym for “life” or “person.”⁹ No one disputes that. The question is whether it functions that way in this specific verse. And in Matthew 10:28, the answer is clearly no.

Think about what Jesus actually says. He draws a sharp contrast between two things: the body (soma) and the soul (psyche). He says human beings have the power to kill one of these things (the body) but not the other (the soul). If psyche here means “the life” or “the person,” the verse collapses into nonsense. Can human beings kill a person? Of course they can. That is precisely the scenario Jesus is describing—persecution, arrest, execution. The whole point of the passage is that Jesus’ disciples may be killed by their persecutors. If “soul” just means “person,” then Jesus is saying: “Don’t fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the person.” But they can kill the person. That is what killing is.¹⁰

John W. Cooper makes this point with devastating clarity. He notes that the monist strategy of reading soma and psyche as cases of synecdoche—two words for the same thing viewed from different angles—simply does not work in this passage. “Each term cannot stand for the whole bodily person in this text,” Cooper writes, “for whatever soul is, it can exist before God without the body, whatever it is. ‘Body’ and ‘soul’ cannot both be referring to the same thing in different ways.”¹¹ A human being who lacks a body is not the same as a human being with a body, no matter how we define these terms. The verse requires two distinct referents. It demands that body and soul are not just different words for the same reality.

The Ignored Logic of the Two Contrasts

The second weakness in Fudge’s treatment is that he collapses two distinct contrasts into one. Jesus is not making a single point in Matthew 10:28. He is making two.

The first contrast is between what humans can do and what God can do. Humans can kill the body. God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. This is the contrast Fudge focused on, and he handled it well. It supports his conditionalist reading: God’s destruction is total, encompassing the whole person.

But there is a second contrast that runs underneath the first, and Fudge essentially ignored it. That is the contrast between body and soul. Humans can kill the body. Humans cannot kill the soul. This distinction is not incidental. It is the logical backbone of the verse. The reason we should not fear human persecutors is not merely that God is more powerful than they are—it is that there is a part of us they cannot reach. There is something about us that outlasts the death of the body. Jesus identifies that something as the psyche.¹²

Remove this second contrast, and the encouragement Jesus offers evaporates. If all of me dies when a persecutor kills my body, then what comfort is there in saying God can destroy me even more thoroughly? The comfort only works if something about me survives the persecutor’s power. My soul survives. That is why I do not need to fear human death. Because my soul is beyond their reach.

The Selective Use of Scholarship

A third weakness is Fudge’s selection of scholarly voices. He cites Sand, Luz, France, and Nixon—all of whom support his conditionalist reading of “destroy.”¹³ But he does not engage the major dualist scholars who have written extensively on this passage. There is no interaction with Cooper’s detailed analysis in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. There is no engagement with J. P. Moreland’s philosophical arguments about the soul in The Soul or Body & Soul. There is no wrestling with the intertestamental evidence that the Jews of Jesus’ day—including the Pharisees, whose views shaped much of the New Testament worldview—held a form of holistic dualism that assumed body and soul were distinguishable realities.¹⁴ Fudge treats the anthropological question as settled by a handful of citations and moves on to his real interest: what “destroy” means.

This is not unusual for Fudge. Throughout The Fire That Consumes, his focus is relentlessly on the question of final punishment. That is, after all, what his book is about. But the anthropological assumptions he brings to the text shape how he reads it, and those assumptions go unexamined. He assumes that the Old Testament’s holistic language about human nature means there is no immaterial soul. He assumes that psyche in Matthew 10:28 functions the same way nephesh does in much of the Old Testament. And he assumes that the dualist reading of the verse is either wrong or irrelevant to his argument. None of these assumptions are justified.

The Irony Fudge Missed

Perhaps the deepest weakness of all is the irony that Fudge never seemed to recognize. Matthew 10:28 is arguably the single strongest proof text in the entire Bible for conditional immortality. It is the verse CI advocates cite more than any other when they want to show that God can and will destroy the wicked completely. And yet this same verse requires substance dualism to make sense.

Think about it. The verse says God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. That word “both” (kai … kai in Greek, functioning as a “both … and” construction) presupposes two things that are being destroyed together.¹⁵ If there is no soul—if the soul is just a way of talking about the life or the person—then Jesus could simply have said, “Fear him who can destroy you in hell.” He did not say that. He said God destroys both soul and body. The language of the verse assumes that the human person has two components that can be addressed distinctly. One of them (the body) can be killed by human beings. The other (the soul) cannot. And God, at the final judgment, destroys both.

CI’s strongest verse actually teaches substance dualism. The very passage that demolishes the traditionalist doctrine of eternal conscious torment also demolishes the physicalist doctrine that human beings are nothing more than physical organisms. This is the irony Fudge missed, and it is an irony that the entire CI-physicalist movement has inherited from him.

C. The Dualist Response: What Jesus Actually Taught

We have seen what Fudge argued and where his argument falls short. Now it is time to do what this book is really about: build the strongest possible case for the dualist reading of these texts. And when we do, I think you will see that Jesus’ teaching on body and soul is far clearer—and far more significant—than the physicalist reading allows.

Matthew 10:28 — “Do Not Be Afraid”

The context is crucial. Jesus is sending out His twelve disciples on their first mission. He has given them authority and instructions, and now He turns to the hardest part of the briefing: what will happen to them when the world turns hostile. They will be arrested. They will be hauled before courts. They will be hated. Some of them will be killed. In the midst of this warning, Jesus offers a reason not to be afraid. And the reason He gives is intensely anthropological. It depends on a specific understanding of what a human being is.

First: “Do not fear those who kill the body.” The Greek word for “kill” here is apokteinontón, a present participle from apokteinο, the standard word for putting to death.¹⁶ The “body” (soma) refers to the physical, material dimension of the human person. Jesus is acknowledging the grim reality: persecutors have the power to end your physical life. They can destroy your body. This is not hypothetical. Jesus knows exactly what awaits His disciples.

Second: “but cannot kill the soul.” Here the Greek is tên dè psychên mê dynaménοn apokteinai—literally, “the soul not being able to kill.”¹⁷ This is a stunning claim. Jesus says that the same act that kills the body does not kill the soul. The soul survives the event that destroys the body. No matter how you translate psyche—whether as “soul,” “self,” “inner person,” or even “life” in some extended sense—the verse says it cannot be killed by the same act that kills the body. This only makes sense if the soul is something distinct from the body, something that continues to exist after physical death.

Third: “But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” The word for “destroy” here is apolesai, from apollymi. This word has a range of meanings, including “ruin,” “lose,” and “destroy utterly.”¹⁸ In the context of Gehenna—the place of final judgment—apollymi carries its strongest sense: total destruction, utter perishing. Fudge was right about this, and the traditionalists who try to soften “destroy” into “ruin” are working against the grain of the text. God’s judgment in Gehenna is not ongoing torment. It is destruction.

Fourth: the word “both” (kai … kai) ties soul and body together as two distinct objects of divine destruction.¹⁹ God does not merely destroy the body (as human persecutors do). He destroys the soul as well. And He destroys them together, in the same act of judgment. The “both” only works if there are two things being described. If the soul is just another word for the body or the person, then “both soul and body” would be redundant. Jesus is not being redundant. He is being precise.

Every step of this logic requires a real distinction between body and soul. Step 2 only works if the soul is not identical to the body. Step 3 only works if the soul has some mode of existence that does not depend on the body’s continued functioning. Step 4 only works if there are genuinely two things to destroy. Step 5 confirms that the final destruction of the wicked encompasses the entire person—which is exactly what conditionalism teaches. But it describes that entire person as composed of two realities, body and soul, and it says God destroys both.

This is substance dualism. It is not Platonic dualism—the verse does not say the soul is inherently immortal. The soul can be destroyed by God. But it is a genuine, ontological distinction between the material body and the immaterial soul, and it affirms that the soul survives the death of the body until God acts to destroy it at the final judgment.

Cooper’s Analysis: The Synecdoche Argument Fails

John W. Cooper’s treatment of this passage in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting is one of the most careful and persuasive in the scholarly literature, and it deserves extended attention here. Cooper identifies the most common monist strategy for handling Matthew 10:28: the claim that soma and psyche are cases of synecdoche—two different words that each refer to the whole person, viewed from a different angle.²⁰

Cooper responds that synecdoche simply cannot work in this text. The reason is straightforward. In a genuine case of synecdoche, the part-word stands for the whole. When we say “all hands on deck,” we mean “all sailors.” The word “hands” stands for the whole person. But in Matthew 10:28, “body” and “soul” are contrasted with each other. One can be killed; the other cannot. If both words refer to the whole person, then the verse says human persecutors can kill the whole person but cannot kill the whole person—a flat contradiction.²¹

Cooper then addresses a more subtle version of the monist argument. Some scholars, like Eduard Schweizer, have tried to link Matthew’s use of soma and psyche directly to the Old Testament usage of basar (flesh) and nephesh (soul). Schweizer argued that Matthew, “like the Old Testament and most of the New Testament, simply cannot conceive of life apart from the body.”²² His strategy was to treat Matthew’s vocabulary as identical with the Old Testament’s and to construe “body” and “soul” as different aspects of the one undivided person.

Cooper dismantles this argument in three steps. First, if psyche is no more than the life-force or the bodily person (as nephesh sometimes functions in the Old Testament), then it makes no sense to say that killing the body does not kill the psyche. In the Hebrew mind, Cooper observes, killing the body is killing the nephesh—unless the Israelites were dualists. But Matthew assumes the soul survives bodily death. So Matthew is not thinking in the same categories as the Old Testament’s most holistic passages.²³

Second, Cooper notes that the mention of Gehenna is a decisive factor. Gehenna is not part of Old Testament eschatology. It is a product of the intertestamental period. And in intertestamental Judaism, Gehenna is the place of final punishment where the inhabitants are present in body and soul. The Jews who spoke of Gehenna were holistic dualists—they believed that souls exist temporarily without bodies but that both components will be reunited for eternity.²⁴ When Matthew uses the language of Gehenna alongside the language of body and soul, he is operating within a dualist conceptual world, not a monist one.

Third, Cooper draws the conclusion that the evidence strongly favors reading Matthew as expressing Jewish holistic dualism. Matthew is not intending to teach an anthropology in this passage—his purpose is to encourage persecuted disciples. But he is using an anthropology. And the one he uses assumes a real distinction between body and soul, a distinction in which the soul survives bodily death and awaits God’s final judgment.²⁵

Luke 12:4–5 — “After That Can Do No More”

Luke’s version differs from Matthew’s in several ways, and these differences are instructive. Matthew mentions the “soul” explicitly; Luke does not. Matthew uses the word “destroy” (apolesai); Luke uses “cast into hell” (embalein eis tên geennan). But the underlying logic is the same, and in some ways Luke’s version makes the dualist implication even sharper.

Notice the phrase “after that have no more that they can do.” The Greek is meta tauta mê echontοn perissoteron ti poiesai—“after these things not having anything more to do.”²⁶ Luke is saying that once the persecutors have killed the body, their power is exhausted. They have reached the limit of what they can do. But notice: the person is not thereby annihilated. If death was the end of the person’s existence, there would be nothing more for anyone to do—not even God. The person would simply be gone. But Jesus goes on to say that God has power to do something after the killing of the body. God can “cast into hell.” There is a “you” who survives the death of the body and who can still be acted upon by God.

This is the point that physicalism cannot explain. On a physicalist reading, death is the end of the person. There is nothing left to cast into Gehenna. The physicalist must argue that God recreates or resurrects the person at the final judgment before casting them into Gehenna—which is certainly true, but it does not account for the continuity implied in Luke’s language. Jesus does not say, “Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to remake you and then cast you into hell.” He says God has power to cast you into Gehenna after the body has been killed. The “you” persists between bodily death and final judgment.²⁷

Now, to be fair, Luke does not use the word “soul.” The physicalist could argue that Luke is simply speaking loosely, or that the “you” who is cast into Gehenna is the resurrected person at the final judgment, not a disembodied soul. That is a possible reading. But it is not the most natural reading, and it does not account for the logic of the verse, which explicitly says that after the body has been killed, the persecutors have “no more that they can do.” If the person ceased to exist at death, nobody—including God—would have anything left to do. The verse only works if there is a continuing subject of divine action between bodily death and final judgment.

Reading Matthew and Luke together, we get a full picture. Matthew tells us what survives bodily death: the psyche, the soul. Luke tells us the consequence of that survival: the person remains within the reach of God’s power even after human persecutors have done their worst. God alone has authority over the soul, and God alone can destroy it.

The “Second Death” Connection

It is worth noting the connection between Matthew 10:28, Luke 12:4–5, and the concept of the “second death” found in Revelation 2:11; 20:6, 14; and 21:8. An important study published by Alberdina Houtman and Magda Misset-van de Weg concluded that although the exact term “second death” appears in the Bible only in Revelation, the authors of the Gospels may have been familiar with the concept. They suggest it is quite possible that the Apostle John was influenced by or drawing upon the very ideas expressed in Matthew 10:28 and Luke 12:4–5, where the threat of something beyond ordinary death lies within God’s power alone.⁵⁰

Think about this connection carefully. The “first death” is ordinary, physical death—the kind that persecutors can inflict. This is the death of the body. But Jesus warns of something worse: a death that goes beyond the body, a death that reaches the soul. This is the “second death”—the destruction of the entire person, body and soul, in Gehenna. The concept of a “second death” only makes sense if there is something about the person that survives the “first death.” If the whole person perishes at physical death, there is no one left to experience a second death. The very idea of a second death presupposes an intermediate state in which something endures between the two deaths. On the dualist reading, that something is the soul.

Bruce Metzger described this second death as “absolute, unmitigated death”—a “final and complete separation from God, the source of life.”⁵¹ Richard Bauckham pointed out the “special appropriateness” of this imagery for the early Christians who faced persecution. They were tempted to abandon their faith for fear of the first death, the death that the Roman Empire could inflict. Jesus’ response was to redirect their fear: do not fear the first death, which can only destroy the body. Fear the second death, which is the final, irrevocable destruction that only God can enact. The first death separates soul from body. The second death destroys the soul itself.⁵²

In non-Christian Jewish literature, Houtman and van de Weg found the expression “second death” in six Targums, where it sometimes referred to a refusal of resurrection—meaning annihilation—and sometimes to resurrection followed by a decision about who would live eternally and who would die a final death.⁵³ Both senses are perfectly consistent with the CI + substance dualism position. The wicked are raised, they face judgment, and they are destroyed completely—body and soul. The second death is the death of the soul alongside the body. And you cannot have a death of the soul unless the soul exists as a real entity that can be destroyed.

The Pastoral Weight of Jesus’ Words

Before we turn to the intertestamental background, I want to pause and note something that gets lost in academic debates about Greek semantics and philosophical anthropology. Jesus was not having a seminar discussion. He was talking to friends who were about to walk into a meat grinder. These twelve men were being sent out with no money, no extra clothes, and no guarantees of safety. Jesus told them plainly: you will be arrested, you will be beaten, and some of you will be killed. Families will turn against you. The authorities will hunt you. And yet—do not be afraid.

Why not? Because there is something about you that your enemies cannot reach. Think about how powerful that statement is, and how hollow it would be if it were not true. If there is no soul, if the whole person dies when the body dies, then Jesus is essentially saying, “Don’t worry about being killed, because … well, because God will kill you even more thoroughly later.” That is no comfort at all. That is a threat wrapped in reassurance. The comfort only lands if there really is a part of the disciple’s being that the executioner’s sword cannot touch—an immaterial self that continues in God’s care even when the body is laid in the ground.

This is why getting the anthropology right matters so much. It is not merely an academic exercise. It is a question about what we say to the persecuted. It is a question about what we say to the dying. When a believer faces death—whether from persecution, illness, or old age—do we say, “You will cease to exist, but don’t worry, God will recreate you later”? Or do we say, “Your body will die, but you will be with Christ, because there is more to you than flesh and bone”? The first answer is cold comfort. The second is the gospel. And the second is what Jesus taught.

The Intertestamental Background: Jewish Holistic Dualism

To understand what Jesus meant, we need to understand how His original audience would have heard these words. And here the intertestamental evidence is decisive.

Cooper demonstrates at length that the dominant Jewish anthropology of Jesus’ day was not monism or physicalism. It was what scholars call “holistic dualism”—the view that human beings are integrated unities of body and soul, but that the soul can exist temporarily without the body between death and the final resurrection.²⁸ This was the view of the Pharisees, as Josephus reports. It was the view reflected in intertestamental literature such as 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch. It was the view that shaped the development of Gehenna as a concept—a place where both body and soul face divine judgment.

The Pharisees, in particular, held that the soul survives death and awaits the resurrection. Acts 23:8 confirms this: “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit, but the Pharisees confess both.”²⁹ Paul himself, a former Pharisee, identified his hope in the resurrection with his Pharisaic heritage (Acts 23:6; 26:6–7). The Pharisaic worldview—which included the survival of the soul between death and resurrection—was not a peripheral curiosity. It was the dominant theological framework within which Jesus taught.

When Jesus spoke of body and soul as distinct realities—one killable by humans, the other not—His audience would have understood Him within this holistic dualist framework. They would not have heard “soul” as a mere synonym for “life” or “person.” They would have heard it as the immaterial self that endures beyond bodily death and faces God’s judgment. The physicalist reading imposes a modern conceptual framework on a first-century Jewish text and asks us to believe that Jesus’ audience heard something entirely different from what the words naturally conveyed.

The Theological Significance: Why the Dualist Reading Matters for CI

Some readers may be wondering: Does any of this really matter for the conditionalist case? After all, Fudge and I agree that the wicked will be destroyed. We agree that “destroy” in Matthew 10:28 means actual destruction, not ongoing torment. Does it matter whether we read the verse as dualist or physicalist?

On the dualist reading, Matthew 10:28 teaches a beautifully coherent picture. Human beings are composed of body and soul. The soul survives bodily death and continues to exist in a conscious intermediate state—the righteous with the Lord (as Paul teaches in Philippians 1:23 and 2 Corinthians 5:8), the unrighteous in Hades (as Jesus teaches in Luke 16:19–31).³⁰ At the final resurrection, body and soul are reunited. The wicked, now reconstituted as whole persons, face the final judgment. And there, God destroys both soul and body in Gehenna. The destruction is total. The second death is real. But it is the destruction of a complete person who has existed consciously throughout the period between death and resurrection.

On the physicalist reading, this coherence fractures. If there is no soul that survives death, then the person ceases to exist at bodily death. There is no one in Hades. There is no conscious intermediate state. There is no “you” between death and resurrection. At the final judgment, God must somehow recreate the person from nothing in order to judge them. And then He destroys this recreated person. But the language of “both soul and body” becomes puzzling, because on physicalism there is no “soul” to destroy alongside the body. The verse is reduced to saying that God destroys the whole person—which is true, but which strips the verse of its internal logic and its two-part anthropology.³¹

CI is actually stronger on the dualist reading. When a conditionalist says, “God will destroy the wicked completely”—and then cites Matthew 10:28—the dualist conditionalist can say, “Yes, and here is what that looks like: God destroys the immaterial soul and the resurrected body, together, in the lake of fire. Nothing is left. No part of the person endures. That is the second death.” The physicalist conditionalist, by contrast, must explain why Jesus bothered to mention “soul” at all, since on physicalism it adds nothing to the picture.

The Greek Word Psyche in Its Matthean Context

It is worth pausing to consider how Matthew uses psyche elsewhere in his Gospel, because context is always the best guide to meaning. In Matthew 16:25–26, Jesus says: “For whoever desires to save his life (psyche) will lose it, but whoever loses his life (psyche) for My sake will find it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul (psyche)? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul (psyche)?”³²

Here psyche appears four times. In the first two instances, it functions as “life”—the earthly life one might cling to or lose. But in the third and fourth instances, it takes on a different shade. What good is it to gain the world and lose your psyche? Here the psyche is something of ultimate value, something that transcends the material world. It is the “you” that persists beyond the loss of everything this world has to offer. The physicalist reading flattens all four uses into “life,” but this misses the escalation in Jesus’ rhetoric. He moves from “life” in the ordinary sense to “soul” in the deepest sense—the irreducible self that outlasts the world.

Matthew 10:28 sits within this same theological framework. The psyche that cannot be killed by persecutors is the same psyche that is more valuable than the whole world. It is the immaterial self, the real “you,” the person who stands before God after the body has been laid in the grave.

Jesus’ Anthropology Is Not Platonic—But It Is Dualist

I want to be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that Jesus taught Platonic dualism. Platonic dualism holds that the soul is inherently immortal, that the body is a prison, and that death is liberation. Jesus taught none of these things. His anthropology is thoroughly Jewish, not Greek. He affirms the goodness of the body. He promises bodily resurrection. He does not treat the soul as inherently indestructible—He explicitly says God can destroy the soul in Gehenna.³³

What Jesus teaches is substance dualism within a framework of divine sovereignty. The soul is real. It is immaterial. It survives bodily death. But it exists only because God sustains it. God has the power to create the soul and the power to destroy it. This is perfectly consistent with conditional immortality: the soul is not inherently immortal. Immortality is a gift given only to those who are in Christ. The souls of the wicked are sustained by God through the intermediate state, but at the final judgment, God withdraws that sustaining power and destroys them along with their resurrected bodies.³⁴

This is exactly what Luz means when he notes that “the Greek concept of the immortal soul is not taken over here. God can destroy the soul in hell.”³⁵ Fudge cited this very line approvingly, not realizing that it actually strengthens the dualist case rather than the physicalist one. Luz is saying that the soul is real but not inherently immortal—which is precisely what substance dualism within CI affirms. The soul exists. The soul can be destroyed. Both statements are true. Both require dualism.

Moreland and the Philosophical Case

The philosophical arguments for substance dualism have been laid out in detail by J. P. Moreland and Brandon Rickabaugh, and I will not reproduce them in full here (we treated them more extensively in Chapter 3). But it is worth noting how the philosophical case intersects with the exegetical case at precisely this point.³⁶

Moreland argues that mental properties—consciousness, intentionality, qualia, first-person perspective—are fundamentally different from physical properties. You cannot weigh a thought. You cannot measure the color of a sensation. These properties belong to a subject that is not identical to the brain or any other physical organ. That subject is the soul.³⁷

Now apply this to Matthew 10:28. Jesus says that when the body is killed, the soul is not killed. Moreland’s philosophical analysis tells us why: because the soul is not a physical entity, it is not subject to the physical processes that destroy the body. A sword can cut flesh. It cannot cut consciousness. A disease can destroy organs. It cannot destroy the self that is aware of its own existence. The reason human persecutors “cannot kill the soul” is not merely that God protects it (though He does), but that the soul is the kind of thing that is not susceptible to physical destruction. Only God, who created the soul by a direct act of power, has the ability to uncreate it.³⁸

This is why Jesus’ language is so precise. He does not say, “Do not fear those who kill the body, because God will raise you later.” He says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” The comfort is not merely eschatological (you will be raised). The comfort is anthropological (there is something about you that death cannot touch). And that anthropological comfort only works on a dualist understanding of the human person.

The Connection to the Broader Argument

Matthew 10:28 and Luke 12:4–5 are not isolated texts. They sit within a larger web of New Testament teaching in which Jesus and the apostles consistently assume or affirm a dualist anthropology. Jesus committed His spirit to the Father at death (Luke 23:46). Stephen asked the Lord Jesus to receive his spirit (Acts 7:59). Paul spoke of being absent from the body and present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8). The souls of the martyrs cry out from under the altar (Revelation 6:9–11). James writes that the body without the spirit is dead (James 2:26).³⁹

Each of these passages receives its own detailed treatment in subsequent chapters of this book. But the point I want to make here is that Matthew 10:28 is not an outlier. It is not a difficult or ambiguous text that might be read either way depending on your starting assumptions. It is a clear, direct statement by Jesus that fits perfectly within the dualist framework that runs throughout the New Testament. Fudge treated it as a proof text for CI. He was right. But he failed to see that it is also a proof text for substance dualism. And you cannot have the one without the other.

D. Counter-Objections

Every argument worth making will face objections. And the dualist reading of Matthew 10:28 has faced its share. Let me address the strongest ones honestly and directly, because our case should be able to withstand the best counterarguments the other side can muster.

Objection 1: “Psyche Just Means ‘Life’—It Doesn’t Require Dualism”

This is the most common physicalist objection, and we have already engaged it at length. But let me address it one more time in its strongest form. The objector might say: “Greek psyche and Hebrew nephesh have a wide semantic range. They can mean ‘life,’ ‘self,’ ‘person,’ or ‘breath.’ You are reading too much into the word by insisting it means an immaterial substance in this passage.”

The response is simple. Nobody denies that psyche has a wide semantic range. The question is what it means in this context. And in this context, it refers to something that (a) is distinguished from the body, (b) cannot be killed when the body is killed, and (c) can be destroyed by God alongside the body in Gehenna. Whatever psyche means here, it must be something that survives bodily death. If it meant “life” in the ordinary sense, it would be destroyed when the body is killed—because killing the body is taking the life. The verse forces us to read psyche as something that outlasts bodily death. That something is the immaterial soul.⁴⁰

Cooper reinforces this point by noting that we should not assume Matthew’s vocabulary is identical to the Old Testament’s most holistic uses of nephesh. Matthew was writing in a first-century Jewish context shaped by intertestamental dualism. The more Matthew’s language is compared with the Old Testament’s holistic uses, Cooper observes, the less Matthew sounds like the Old Testament and the more he sounds like his own contemporaries—who were holistic dualists.⁴¹

Objection 2: “Jesus Is Just Speaking Phenomenologically, Not Philosophically”

A physicalist might respond: “Jesus is not teaching a philosophical anthropology. He is using the language of His day to make a practical point about not fearing persecution. We should not read a metaphysical theory of the soul into a passage about courage.”

I agree that Jesus is not giving a philosophy lecture. His primary purpose in this passage is pastoral, not philosophical. He wants His disciples to be brave in the face of death. But here is the thing: the comfort He offers depends on an anthropological claim. The reason they should not fear is that their persecutors cannot touch the most important part of who they are. If that anthropological claim is not true—if there is no soul that survives death—then the comfort evaporates.⁴²

Think of an analogy. If I said to a friend, “Don’t worry about losing your job—they can take your paycheck but they can’t take your reputation,” I would be making a practical point about courage. But the practical point depends on the factual claim that a reputation is something different from a paycheck and that it persists even when the paycheck is gone. If there were no such thing as a reputation, my encouragement would be meaningless. In the same way, Jesus’ encouragement depends on the factual claim that the soul is something different from the body and that it persists even when the body is destroyed. The practical point presupposes the metaphysical reality.

Cooper makes a similar observation. He notes that although Jesus is not intending to teach an anthropology in Matthew 10:28, He is clearly using one. “Is it assuming too much,” Cooper asks, “for us to infer from this verse that humans can in fact kill the body but not the soul? And is it improper to suppose that the anthropology he uses in chapter 10 is presupposed in his teachings on final judgment, reward, and punishment in chapters 24 and 25?”⁴³ If it is presupposed, then the body-soul distinction is part of what Matthew teaches.

Objection 3: “The Old Testament Teaches Holism, Not Dualism, and Jesus Was a Jew”

This objection runs like this: “The Old Testament teaches that human beings are unified wholes, not composites of two substances. Jesus was a Jew, not a Greek. We should read His language through the lens of Hebrew holism, not Greek dualism.”

The response has two parts. First, as we demonstrated in Chapters 5–9, the Old Testament is not as thoroughly monist as the physicalist claims. The Old Testament narrates the departure of the soul at death (Genesis 35:18; 1 Kings 17:21–22), the return of the spirit to God who gave it (Ecclesiastes 12:7), the conscious appearance of Samuel after death (1 Samuel 28), and the body-soul distinction in prayer and longing (Psalm 42:1–2; Psalm 63:1; Isaiah 26:9). Cooper argues convincingly that the Old Testament, while emphasizing the functional unity of the human person, is most naturally read as holistic dualism—a view that affirms the integration of body and soul while acknowledging their distinguishability and separability at death.⁴⁴

Second, even if the Old Testament’s anthropological language is more holistic than dualistic (which I would dispute), the New Testament is not bound to repeat the Old Testament’s exact categories. The New Testament introduces new revelation about the intermediate state, about the resurrection, and about Gehenna that the Old Testament does not contain. Matthew 10:28 is one such instance of new revelation. Jesus reveals that the soul can survive what the body cannot. This is new information, built on Old Testament foundations but going beyond them. The physicalist error is to assume that the Old Testament’s most holistic passages set the ceiling for what the New Testament can teach about human nature.⁴⁵

Objection 4: “CI Does Not Need Dualism—God Can Destroy the Whole Person Without a Soul”

This is perhaps the most honest physicalist objection. Someone might say: “Fine, maybe psyche here does mean ‘soul.’ But even if Jesus teaches a body-soul distinction, that doesn’t change the eschatological outcome. The wicked are still destroyed. CI still works. Why does the anthropology matter?”

It matters for several reasons. First, it matters because we should care about getting the text right, not just getting the conclusion right. If Jesus teaches that the human person has an immaterial soul, we should believe it—regardless of whether it complicates our systematic theology.⁴⁶

Second, it matters because the intermediate state matters. On a physicalist view, there is no one between death and resurrection. The believing dead are not “with Christ” (Philippians 1:23). The unbelieving dead are not in Hades (Luke 16:23). There is simply a gap. Substance dualism fills that gap with the conscious soul, providing a coherent account of what happens between death and the final judgment.

Third, it matters because personal identity at the resurrection depends on it. If the person ceases to exist at death and is then recreated at the resurrection, is the recreated person the same person? The soul provides the thread of continuity. The resurrected person is the same person who died because the same soul that was in the dying body is reunited with the resurrected body.⁴⁷

Fourth, it matters because CI is stronger on dualism, as we have already shown. The verse itself says God destroys both soul and body. The destruction encompasses the immaterial and the material dimensions of the person. Nothing survives. That is a more powerful statement of annihilation than the physicalist reading, which merely says God destroys the whole person. The dualist reading says God destroys every component of the person—the visible and the invisible, the body and the soul.

Objection 5: “Fudge’s Scholars Support a Conditionalist Reading, Not a Dualist One”

Someone might point out that the scholars Fudge cites—Sand, Luz, France, Nixon—all interpret Matthew 10:28 as teaching the destruction of the wicked, not a body-soul distinction. Does their combined weight favor the physicalist reading?

No, and the reason is important. These scholars were answering a different question. They were asking: “Does Matthew 10:28 teach eternal conscious torment or final destruction?” And they answered: “Final destruction.” On that question, I agree with all of them. But none of them were asking: “Does Matthew 10:28 presuppose a body-soul distinction?” The anthropological question was not on their radar. When Luz says “the Greek concept of the immortal soul is not taken over here,” he is denying Platonic immortality, not denying the existence of the soul as such.⁴⁸ And when Nixon says the soul is not immortal except when new life is conferred through Christ, he is affirming conditional immortality in a way that is entirely consistent with substance dualism. The soul is real, but its continued existence depends on God. That is exactly what we have been arguing.

Conclusion

Matthew 10:28 and Luke 12:4–5 are among the most important verses in the entire debate over human nature. They are not obscure passages buried in the prophets or tucked away in the wisdom literature. They are the direct words of Jesus Christ, spoken to His disciples in a moment of extreme urgency, as He prepared them to face persecution and death.

And what Jesus taught them is this: You are more than a body. There is a part of you that no human weapon can reach. Your persecutors can kill your body, but they cannot kill your soul. Only God has that power. And at the final judgment, God will exercise that power against the unrepentant wicked, destroying both soul and body in Gehenna. The destruction is complete. The second death is total. But the anthropology that undergirds this warning is unmistakably dualist.

Fudge saw the eschatological implications of this verse with brilliant clarity. He saw that “destroy” means destroy. He saw that God’s judgment is final and complete. He saw that eternal conscious torment cannot survive the plain meaning of this text. On all of these points, Fudge was right, and I honor his contribution.

But Fudge did not see—or chose not to see—the anthropological implications of the same verse. He did not see that “soul” means soul. He did not see that Jesus’ logic requires two distinct realities, body and soul, and that the soul survives what the body cannot. He did not see that CI’s strongest proof text for divine destruction is simultaneously a powerful proof text for substance dualism.

We can correct that oversight. We can hold the eschatology and the anthropology together. We can affirm that the wicked will be destroyed—and that they will be destroyed as what they truly are: creatures of body and soul, more than dust, more than mere physical organisms, fearfully and wonderfully made by a God who has the power to give life and the power to take it away.⁴⁹

In the next chapter, we will examine the passages Fudge did not discuss—the texts where Jesus attributes experiences to His own soul, distinguishes spirit from flesh, and presupposes the very dualist anthropology that Fudge’s reading of Matthew 10:28 was designed to avoid.

Notes

↑ 1. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 123–125. This is the most sustained treatment of Matthew 10:28 in the book and represents Fudge’s mature conditionalist reading of the passage.

↑ 2. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 123.

↑ 3. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 123. Fudge writes: “God’s ability to kill and destroy is limitless. It reaches deeper than the physical and extends beyond the present.”

↑ 4. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 123–124, citing Alexander Sand in the Expository Dictionary of the New Testament.

↑ 5. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 124, citing Ulrich Luz, R. T. France, and Robin E. Nixon.

↑ 6. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 123.

↑ 7. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 124–125. See also the footnote on p. 675, where Fudge notes that Jesus mentions Gehenna eleven times in the Gospels, including Matthew 10:28 and Luke 12:5.

↑ 8. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 125. Fudge observes that Peterson “equates ‘destroy’ in Matt. 10:28 with ‘throw into hell’ in Luke 12:5” and then argues it is “more natural, appropriate, and helpful to explain Luke’s broader ‘throw into hell’ by Matthew’s focused word ‘destroy.’”

↑ 9. See the standard lexicons: BDAG (A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed.) lists multiple senses for psychê, including “life,” “soul,” “person,” and “seat of inner life.” Context determines which sense is operative in a given passage.

↑ 10. This argument is developed at length in Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5, “The Monism-Dualism Debate about New Testament Anthropology.”

↑ 11. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper writes: “For starters, synecdoche can be ruled out; each term cannot stand for the whole bodily person in this text. For whatever soul is, it can exist before God without the body, whatever it is. ‘Body’ and ‘soul’ cannot both be referring to the same thing in different ways.”

↑ 12. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. See also Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014), chap. 5.

↑ 13. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 123–124.

↑ 14. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4, “The Anthropology of Intertestamental Eschatology.” Cooper demonstrates that intertestamental Judaism, especially among the Pharisees, held a form of holistic dualism in which the soul survives death and awaits bodily resurrection.

↑ 15. The Greek construction kai psychên kai sοma (“both soul and body”) uses the correlative kai … kai to coordinate two distinct items under a single verb. See Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), pp. 671–672.

↑ 16. BDAG, s.v. apokteinο, “to deprive of life, kill.”

↑ 17. The Greek reads: tên de psychên mê dynamenοn apokteinai. The participle dynamenοn (from dynamai, “to be able”) is negated by mê, yielding “not being able to kill.” The object tên psychên (“the soul”) is placed forward for emphasis.

↑ 18. BDAG, s.v. apollymi. The lexicon lists meanings including “destroy, ruin utterly,” “lose,” and “perish.” In eschatological contexts involving Gehenna, the strongest sense—utter destruction—is most appropriate. See also Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 123.

↑ 19. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, pp. 671–672, on the correlative use of kai … kai.

↑ 20. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5.

↑ 21. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5.

↑ 22. Eduard Schweizer, as cited by Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Schweizer asserts that Matthew “simply cannot conceive of life apart from the body.”

↑ 23. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5: “If psyche is no more than the lifeforce or bodily-person in the Old Testament, it makes no sense to say that killing the body does not kill the soul. In the Hebrew mind, killing the body is killing the nephesh. Unless the Israelites were dualists, nephesh could not survive bodily death. But Matthew assumes it can.”

↑ 24. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5: “Gehenna is not part of Old Testament eschatology but a product of the intertestamental period … It is the place of final punishment whose tormented inhabitants are often said to be present in body and soul.” See also chap. 4, on Pharisaic belief.

↑ 25. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5: “All things considered, the evidence strongly favors reading Matthew as expressing Jewish dualism.”

↑ 26. The Greek phrase meta tauta mê echontοn perissoteron ti poiêsai is a genitive absolute construction: “after these things, [they] not having anything more to do.” The temporal marker meta tauta (“after these things”) places the limit of human power at the moment of bodily death.

↑ 27. This point is developed by Robert A. Morey, Death and the Afterlife (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1984), pp. 72–74, and by Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5.

↑ 28. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4, “The Anthropology of Intertestamental Eschatology.” Cooper surveys the evidence from 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and other sources.

↑ 29. See also Josephus, Jewish War 2.163; Antiquities 18.14, where the Pharisaic belief in the soul’s survival is described. Cooper discusses this evidence extensively in chap. 4.

↑ 30. These passages are treated in detail in Chapters 13–14 of this book. The conscious intermediate state is a major theme of the New Testament that physicalism cannot adequately account for.

↑ 31. This point is developed more fully in Chapter 27, “Does CI Require Physicalism?—Absolutely Not.”

↑ 32. Matthew 16:25–26 (NKJV). The parallel in Mark 8:36–37 is treated in Chapter 9.

↑ 33. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 124, citing Ulrich Luz: “The Greek concept of the immortal soul is not taken over here. God can destroy the soul in hell.” This confirms that Jesus’ anthropology is not Platonic even though it is dualist.

↑ 34. On the soul’s dependence on God for its continued existence, see Moreland, The Soul, chap. 7. See also the theological commitments outlined in Chapter 2 of this book.

↑ 35. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 124, citing Luz.

↑ 36. See Chapter 3 of this book for a full discussion of the philosophical arguments for substance dualism. See also Rickabaugh and Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness, chap. 3, “The Modal Argument.”

↑ 37. Moreland, The Soul, chaps. 3–4. See also Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), pp. 159–200.

↑ 38. Moreland, The Soul, chap. 5. Moreland argues that the soul’s immateriality is precisely what makes it immune to physical destruction and what requires a divine act for its termination.

↑ 39. These passages are treated in Chapters 12–15 of this book. Each contributes to the cumulative case for a dualist New Testament anthropology.

↑ 40. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper notes that the monist must demonstrate that “soul” and “spirit” do mean “surviving person” in the texts where separation from the body is described. “Otherwise dualism remains without foundation.” But in Matthew 10:28, the text itself provides the demonstration: the soul survives the killing of the body.

↑ 41. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5: “The more they are compared, the less Matthew sounds like the Old Testament.”

↑ 42. Cooper makes this point in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5, and it is also developed by Moreland, The Soul, chap. 5.

↑ 43. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5.

↑ 44. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 2–3. Cooper argues that while the Old Testament’s terminology does not establish a Platonic body-soul dichotomy, the narratives about death, Sheol, and the departed presuppose that the person continues to exist after the body dies. This is holistic dualism, not monism.

↑ 45. Joshua Farris makes a similar argument in “Substance Dualism,” in The Soul of Theological Anthropology, chap. 2. Farris contends that if the New Testament affirms soul-body dualism, then it is methodologically unsound to insist that the Old Testament’s functional anthropology rules it out. See also Bruce Waltke, Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), p. 224.

↑ 46. This is a fundamental hermeneutical principle: we must allow each text to teach what it teaches, even if it complicates our systematic framework. The text drives the theology, not the other way around.

↑ 47. The personal identity problem for physicalism is addressed in detail in Chapters 24–25 of this book. See also Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 7; and Rickabaugh and Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness, chap. 6.

↑ 48. Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8–20, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), on Matt. 10:28. Luz is denying the Platonic claim of inherent immortality, not denying the existence of the soul as such.

↑ 49. Psalm 139:14; see Chapter 5 of this book for a full treatment of this passage.

↑ 50. Alberdina Houtman and Magda Misset-van de Weg, as cited in Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 249–250. Their extensive study concluded that the concept of a “second death” may be presupposed in the Gospel texts about body and soul.

↑ 51. Bruce M. Metzger, as cited in Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 250.

↑ 52. Richard Bauckham, as cited in Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 250. Bauckham highlights the pastoral logic of the contrast between first and second death for persecuted early Christians.

↑ 53. Houtman and van de Weg, as cited in Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 250. The six Targums include uses where “second death” refers to permanent annihilation and uses where it refers to a post-resurrection final death.

↑ 54. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 124–125. Fudge cites and critiques Peterson, Dixon, Davies, Gerstner, and Blanchard. Gerstner’s claim that “God has given the wicked resurrection bodies so that they cannot die” is particularly creative but wholly without scriptural support, as Fudge rightly observes.

Jesus on Body and Soul—The Texts Fudge Could Not Ignore

A. Fudge’s Argument: Redefining What Jesus Said