Mark 9:48 — “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”: destruction or eternal torment?

“And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.”

Mark 9:47-48 (ESV)

Context: the end of a series of warnings in Capernaum

Mark 9:48 is not an independent doctrinal statement about the hereafter, but the closing chord of a threefold admonition. Jesus has come with the disciples to Capernaum (v. 33); on the way they had argued about who was the greatest. He sets a child in their midst, warns against the offence given to “one of these little ones” (v. 42), and appends to this the familiar formula: hand, foot, eye — better to “enter life” maimed than to be thrown whole “into hell” (vv. 43-47). The verse under discussion here hangs upon the third and last member of that series.

Decisive is the antithesis that carries the whole passage. Three times the positive pole is called “to enter life” (vv. 43, 45) or “to enter the kingdom of God” (v. 47); three times the negative pole is called “to be thrown into Gehenna.” The contrast is therefore not: a good life against a bad life, but life against the loss of it. Whoever removes this frame reads the closing sentence as a self-standing description of the hereafter — yet the text itself gives it as the reverse side of the word “life.”

The sentence itself is a full quotation. Isaiah 66:24, the last verse of the book, reads: “And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” Mark takes over the second half almost verbatim in the wording of the Septuagint. What he takes up brings its context with it: those looked upon in Isaiah are not sufferers but the fallen on a battlefield — and the place of this viewing lies outside the gates of the new city.

The word “Gehenna” too has a prehistory that belongs precisely here. Gê-Hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom south of Jerusalem, was the site of child sacrifice to Molech (2 Kings 23:10); Jeremiah announces that it will be called the “Valley of Slaughter,” and that “the dead bodies of this people will be food for the birds of the air, and for the beasts of the earth” (Jer 7:32-33; cf. 19:6-7). The imagery of worm, fire and unburied corpse is thus at home in the very place from which the name derives. Whoever hears Mark 9:48 hears a valley full of the dead, not a dungeon full of the living.

A text-critical finding rounds out the picture. The refrain “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” stands three times in many older translations — as verses 44, 46 and 48. The oldest manuscripts, among them Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, know it only once, namely at v. 48; the two other occurrences are later assimilations by copyists, which is why critical editions and the more recent translations omit them. In the course of transmission the sentence has therefore been reinforced rather than softened — an indication of the direction in which the history of interpretation has worked.

The Socinian thesis: worm and fire dispose, they do not preserve

The Socinian reading begins with a simple question: upon what are worm and fire at work? The source text answers unambiguously — upon dead bodies. In the Old Testament worm and fire form a fixed pair for that which consumes a body completely: the one slowly and from within, the other swiftly and from without. Both are images of disposal. Neither is ever an image of preservation.

This also settles what the two negations refer to. It is not the victim that is declared immortal, but the worm; it is not the tormented that goes on burning, but the fire. Grammatically and materially it is the instruments to which unceasingness is ascribed — and in the imagery of the ancient Near East that means: they are not interrupted, they do not stop before their work is complete. A fire that cannot be extinguished is a fire that consumes everything; a worm that does not die is one that does not leave off beforehand. The statement concerns the inescapability of the judgment, not the duration of a consciousness.

Biblical usage confirms this at passages whose outcome we know. Jeremiah threatens the gates of Jerusalem with a fire “that shall not be quenched” (Jer 17:27), and in 2 Chronicles 36:19 we read how it was fulfilled: the city burned down. Ezekiel announces to the southland a “blazing flame” that “shall not be quenched” (Ezek 20:47-48). John the Baptist says the chaff will be burned “with unquenchable fire” (Matt 3:12) — chaff being the very emblem of what passes away without remainder. In none of these cases is anything still burning today. “Unquenchable” describes a fire from which nothing escapes, not a fire that finds fuel forever.

From here the verse fits seamlessly into Socinian anthropology. Man does not possess immortality by nature; he receives it as a gift, and whoever does not receive it falls to what the Racovian Catechism calls “eternal death”: not an eternal dying with life preserved, but a death from which there is no return. Jesus’ warning thereby loses nothing of its weight — on the contrary, it gains in definiteness. It threatens not with an unimaginable condition, but with the loss of what the passage has just named three times: life.

And finally: what is thrown into Gehenna is, according to Mark, the whole man — hand, foot, eye, “you.” Of a soul that survives the body and would be the true bearer of the punishment there is nowhere any mention. The Socinian exposition made the same observation at Matthew 10:28, where God can destroy “soul and body” in Gehenna — the verb used there is a word for ruining, not for tormenting.

Key terms

σκώληξ (skṓlēx) — the worm

The Greek skṓlēx denotes the maggot that forms in decaying flesh — not the earthworm, and certainly not some fabulous creature. In the Septuagint it renders the Hebrew tôla‘, which appears at Isaiah 14:11 as the bed and covering of the fallen king: “Maggots are laid as a bed beneath you, and worms are your covers.” At Job 21:26 righteous and ungodly lie alike in the dust, “and the worms cover them.”

Later Jewish wisdom literature also stays with this image. Jesus Sirach writes: “the punishment of the ungodly is fire and worms” (Sir 7:17); Judith speaks of fire and worms that God appoints for the enemies of his people (Jdt 16:17). In all these cases the worm is what works upon the dead. The notion of a worm that gnaws a living being forever without ever consuming him is foreign to the biblical world of imagery; it is an addition of later interpretation.

The phrase “their worm” deserves particular attention here. The possessive binds the worm to the deceased, as one speaks of a person’s “grave”: it is the worm that belongs to them because they have become its object. This very possessive comes from Isaiah 66:24, where it refers to the dead bodies mentioned just before — Mark has taken it over together with its point of reference.

ἄσβεστος (ásbestos) — unquenchable

The adjective describes a fire that one cannot put out — that is, one from which its object is not snatched away. It says something about man’s power of disposal, not about the durability of the fuel. When Jeremiah says that God’s wrath will “burn and not be quenched” (Jer 7:20), it is not asserted that Jerusalem will never cease to burn, but rather: no one will stay the hand of this judgment.

In the preaching of John the Baptist the word stands beside an unambiguous object: “the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Matt 3:12). Chaff is the epitome of what passes away without remainder; it is gone in minutes. Whoever inferred from the epithet of the fire an eternal continuance of the chaff would turn the image into its opposite.

γέεννα (géenna) — Gehenna

The name is a Graecized loanword from the Hebrew Gê-Hinnom, “Valley of Hinnom.” It denotes in the first place a geography, not a cosmology: the ravine south and southwest of the old city of Jerusalem, associated with child sacrifice under Ahaz and Manasseh and therefore defiled by Josiah (2 Kings 23:10). Jeremiah makes of it the place of judgment where burial takes place “because there will be no room elsewhere” (Jer 7:32).

Only in post-biblical Jewish tradition is the name transferred to a place of punishment for the deceased. Sozzini knows this finding exactly and expressly records in his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount that the transfer was “received among the common people of the Hebrews and among the Pharisees themselves, although no evident indication of it was found in Holy Scripture itself.” Christ, he says, “therefore used the popular manner of speaking here” — which sufficed for his warning, without his thereby authenticating the popular embellishment.

εἰσελθεῖν εἰς τὴν ζωήν — “to enter life”

The phrase is the positive pole of the whole series and is replaced in v. 47 by “to enter the kingdom of God” — both expressions therefore stand for one another. It is remarkable that it does not read “into the blessed life” or “into the better life,” but simply “into life.” The contrast is thereby marked out in advance: whoever does not enter does not enter another life, but remains outside of life.

This manner of speaking runs throughout the New Testament. “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life” (Rom 6:23); God “alone has immortality” (1 Tim 6:16); Christ has “brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim 1:10). Where life appears throughout as a gift, its absence cannot be that same life in a painful form.

Sozzini in his own words

Sozzini did not treat Mark 9:48 in a work of its own, but he did treat the parallel passage in the Sermon on the Mount, where the same formula stands. His exposition sets in remarkably far upstream: not with the question of how long the punishment lasts, but with the question of where the word “Gehenna” got its otherworldly sense at all.

“The interpreters further maintain, and we readily believe it, that among the Hebrews that place was by transference so named to which after death those men came who had been wicked — which was received among the common people of the Hebrews and among the Pharisees themselves, although no evident indication of it was found in Holy Scripture itself —, and that Christ therefore used the popular manner of speaking here.”

Fausto Sozzini, Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, “The fire of Gehenna” (on Matthew 5:22)

This is a philological, not a polemical observation. Sozzini does not dispute that Christ spoke of the fire of Gehenna; he disputes that the use of a current expression already amounts to adopting the popular notion attached to it. Whoever speaks a language does not ratify every opinion that resonates in its words. For the interpretation of Mark 9:48 a rule about the burden of proof follows from this: what the verse says about the punishment must be drawn from the image itself and from its Old Testament provenance — not from what contemporaries imagined under the name.

On the formula itself, which Mark 9:43-47 shares with Matthew 5:29-30, Sozzini made the decisive observation: it is built as a comparison, and its two members belong to the same order.

“It seems to me at present that Christ wished to speak in such a way that he named only one eye, in order to prepare his way and fittingly to establish that contrast which he sets up between a single member and the whole body. And in this way what he wished to urge becomes in a certain sense more persuasive. For he says that he speaks thus because it is better that one of our members should perish than that the whole body should be thrown into Gehenna.”

Fausto Sozzini, Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, “The plucking out of the eye as a remedy against desire” (on Matthew 5:29)

The “contrast between a single member and the whole body” is a proportion of magnitude, not a difference of kind. What is compared is loss with greater loss: one eye against the whole man. Mark puts it still more sharply, because he names the positive pole outright: one-eyed into life — or whole into Gehenna. If the second half denoted an endless continued life under pain, the two members would no longer compare unequal things of the same kind, but incomparable things; the rhetorical gradient of the admonition, to which Sozzini expressly points, would be lost.

How the end of the ungodly is to be described positively, Sozzini says elsewhere, in his principal work, quite without embarrassment. He is treating there of the justice of God that stands alongside his mercy, and describes its effect with a verb that admits of no secondary meaning:

“For in Psalm 5 David speaks of that justice, because it punishes and destroys the unjust and the ungodly, that is, those who persist in wickedness and do not expiate their sins by repentance and do not sincerely take refuge in God himself and in his help and mercy.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Iesu Christo Servatore), First Book

“Punishes and destroys” — both in one breath, as though they were two descriptions of the same thing. Exactly so does the Socinian tradition read the imagery of Mark 9:48 as well. The Racovian Catechism compresses the same matter, in its examination of the doctrine of satisfaction, into a sentence that falls as an aside and for that very reason shows how self-evident the point was held to be there: it stands fast “that the punishment which men had deserved by their sins is eternal death.” And because this is the punishment, salvation can be described accordingly — Christ will, as Sozzini says, “by his power in the judgment deliver us, who obey him, from the decree of God concerning eternal death.”

The arguments in detail

1. The verse is a quotation and brings its context with it. Mark 9:48 reproduces Isaiah 66:24 verbatim. There the objects of worm and fire are expressly “the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me.” An interpretation that turns those looked upon into the living silently alters the object of the sentence quoted.
2. Worm and fire are images of disposal. Throughout Scripture both work upon the dead and leave nothing over (Isa 14:11; Job 21:26; Sir 7:17). Not a single passage uses them for the preservation of a living being in pain.
3. The negations concern the instruments, not the victims. It is not the one judged that is declared immortal, but the worm; it is not the sufferer that goes on burning, but the fire. The sentence says: this process will not be interrupted — it does not say: its object remains in being.
4. “Unquenchable” always has an end in biblical usage. The fire that was to consume Jerusalem’s gates has gone out (Jer 17:27; 2 Chr 36:19); the flame over the southland has gone out (Ezek 20:47-48); the chaff has been burned (Matt 3:12). The word denotes unstoppability, not endlessness.
5. The antithesis of the text is life against the loss of life. Three times the positive pole is called “to enter life” or “to enter the kingdom of God.” Were the negative pole another, enduring life, the text’s choice of words would be misleadingly chosen.
6. The place itself is a place for dead bodies. In Jeremiah the Valley of Hinnom is where burial goes on until there is no room left, and where the unburied become food for the birds (Jer 7:32-33). The source of the image supplies its interpretation along with it.
7. The comparative logic of the formula requires magnitudes of the same kind. “Better one-eyed into life than with two eyes into Gehenna” compares loss with greater loss. Sozzini describes precisely this “contrast between a single member and the whole body”; it breaks down if the second half denotes something categorically different.
8. What is threatened is the whole man, not a detached soul. Hand, foot, eye, “your body” — the text speaks throughout of the bodily man. An immortal soul that would remain behind as the true bearer of the punishment does not occur in the passage.
9. The transmission reinforced the refrain, it did not soften it. The oldest manuscripts offer it only once (v. 48); verses 44 and 46 are later assimilations. Where a text comes to be set down three times in the course of time, the direction of its copyists’ interest shows itself.
10. Elsewhere the punishment is expressly called death. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23); the ungodly will suffer “eternal destruction” (2 Thess 1:9); the outcome is called “the second death” (Rev 20:14). Mark 9:48 must be interpreted in the light of these clear statements, not the other way round.

The two readings side by side

Objections and replies

1. “If the worm does not die, there must be something for it to gnaw — so the one punished lives forever.”

The objection demands of the image a precision no image affords, and demands it at one point only. For it takes the immortality of the worm literally but the gnawing of the worm figuratively — otherwise one would have to assume that in the judgment of God there really are maggots living in the flesh of the condemned. But whoever grants that the gnawing is an image cannot retain the continuance of the gnawer as a factual statement about the duration of the gnawed.

Besides, already in Isaiah the phrase aims not at continuance but at completeness. The prophet describes the battlefield after the judgment: what lies there is not buried but left to decay and to the fire — and in such a way that no one carries the dead away and no one smothers the fire. “Their worm shall not die” here means: there is no escape, no rescue at the last minute, no half destruction. Precisely in this lies the terror of the image.

Finally, the objection would have to hold consistently for the chaff at Matthew 3:12 as well: if an unquenchable fire requires an indestructible object, then the chaff would have to go on burning forever. But no one wishes to assert that. The epithet qualifies the fire, not its fuel.

2. “Jesus ought to have corrected the false popular belief instead of using it.”

It is at just this point that Sozzini’s philological observation sets in. He records that the transfer of the name “Gehenna” to an otherworldly place of punishment was “received among the common people and among the Pharisees, although no evident indication of it was found in Holy Scripture itself,” and that Christ “therefore used the popular manner of speaking here.” To use the language of an age is no confession of everything it carries with it — otherwise Jesus would have authenticated ancient cosmology by using the word “sunrise.”

Moreover the objection misses the point. Here Jesus is precisely not using a popular embellishment, but quoting Scripture — and quoting it as it stands. When he draws on the closing verse of the book of Isaiah to explain Gehenna, he thereby puts into his hearers’ hands the standard by which they are to measure their own notions. It is the shortest conceivable form of correction: not contradiction, but a leading back to the text.

And finally the warning is wholly in earnest on either reading. Whether Jesus threatens with the loss of life or with endless pain — in both cases the demand is the same: part with what is dearest to you rather than miss the goal. The Socinian reading does not weaken the threat, it only determines its content differently.

3. “Matthew 25:46 sets ‘eternal punishment’ and ‘eternal life’ in parallel — so the duration must be the same.”

The parallelism of the adjectives is not disputed by the Socinian exposition; what is disputed is that a parallelism of the processes follows from it. “Eternal” determines in both members the belonging to the coming age and the finality of the verdict. With the nouns, however, lies the difference: life is a condition that endures; punishment can be an act whose effect endures. An eternal redemption (Heb 9:12) is not an eternally continuing process of redeeming, but a redemption that is never undone.

The New Testament supplies an express example of this. Jude 7 says that Sodom and Gomorrah lie there “as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.” Sodom is not burning today; it is ash (cf. 2 Peter 2:6). The fire is called “eternal” because it has irrevocably done what it did. Thus it is attested within the canon itself that with terms of punishment “eternal” can denote the finality of the result.

For Mark 9:48 it is moreover to be noted that the word “eternal” does not occur there at all. The verse speaks of a worm that does not die and of a fire that is not quenched — both statements about the unstoppability of the execution. The recourse to Matthew 25:46 shifts the dispute to another passage, which for its part must be interpreted, and deprives the image present here of its own language. See on this Matthew 25:46.

4. “Revelation 20:10 speaks of torment ‘day and night, forever and ever.’”

The passage names as the object of this torment the devil, the beast and the false prophet — two of these are not persons but entities of the vision: a world power and a propaganda. What is said of them cannot without further ado be transferred to the men of whom the same chapter says something different a few verses later. For of those whose names are not in the book of life it is said: they are thrown into the lake of fire, and the lake of fire is expressly interpreted — “this is the second death” (Rev 20:14).

This interpretation comes from the book itself and is therefore the strongest available information about its own imagery. Where a text explains its symbols, the explanation takes precedence over our inferences from the symbol. The lake of fire is defined not as a place of endless existence, but as death — and indeed as the second death, upon which no resurrection any longer follows.

To this must be added the hermeneutical rule that the Racovian Catechism already formulates for dark and figurative passages: few and unclear testimonies may not reinterpret the many and clear ones, but must be understood in accordance with them. The Apocalypse is the most image-laden book of the canon; it is the worst conceivable starting point for a doctrine that stands opposed to the clear statements of Paul and the Gospels. Cf. Revelation 20:14 and Revelation 14:11.

5. “If the ungodly simply cease to be, the judgment loses its terror.”

The objection presupposes that only pain is an evil — and overlooks that Scripture treats the loss of life itself as the uttermost evil. Christ says: “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36), and means by that the loss of life, not its painful continuation. Whoever takes from a man everything that he is and will be has not taken little from him.

To this must be added that the finality of the destruction has a weight of its own. Out of a punishment that lasts something may in theory still come; the Roman doctrine of purgatory built a whole system upon just this possibility — Sozzini rejected it at length in his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount. But out of the second death nothing further comes. It is the end of every possibility, and precisely therein lies the terror with which the text threatens.

Finally it is to be considered upon whom the objection lays the burden of proof. The Socinian exposition takes nothing away from the reality of the judgment: it takes place, it is God’s work, and its verdict is irrevocable. It disputes only that God must for this purpose keep a creature alive in order to let it suffer endlessly. Sozzini can therefore say in one breath that God’s justice “punishes and destroys” those who persist in wickedness — punishment and destruction are not here two things of which the one would defuse the other.

Dogmatic consequences

• Anthropology: man possesses no nature that does not know death. Immortality is a gift to those who enter life — and only where it is a gift is the gospel a message.
• Eschatology: the judgment does not end in an eternal side-realm of suffering, but in an outcome: life or the second death. Creation is not permanently divided in two.
• Doctrine of God: God’s justice executes a verdict and does not keep a creature alive expressly in order to punish it. Punishment and destruction fall into a single sentence in Sozzini.
• Hermeneutics: figurative words are interpreted from their provenance. Where the New Testament quotes the Old, the quoted context is the first commentary.
• Ethics: the warning stands in full severity — it threatens with the loss of that for which it is worth giving up everything else.

Biblical cross-references

• Matthew 10:28 — God can “destroy both soul and body in hell”; the verb denotes the ruining of the whole man, not his preservation in pain. The passage is the most direct commentary on what happens in Gehenna.
• Matthew 5:29-30 — the same formula of member and whole body, on which Sozzini worked out the comparative character of the admonition. Mark adds to it the positive pole “into life.”
• Romans 6:23 — “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life.” Paul names the punishment outright, and he names it death, not torment.
• 2 Thessalonians 1:9 — “eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord”; the expression denotes ruin whose effect remains, not a continuing process.
• Revelation 20:14 — the book interprets its own lake of fire: “This is the second death.” This self-interpretation takes precedence over any reading we may extract from the image.
• 2 Peter 2:6 — Sodom as an “example” to the ungodly, turned to ashes; Jude 7 calls this very fire “eternal,” although it has long since gone out.
• Malachi 4:1 — the day that “burns like an oven” and leaves the ungodly “neither root nor branch”; the prophetic root image that stands behind Mark 9:48.
• Matthew 25:46 — the passage at which the dispute over the word “eternal” is decided: does it denote the duration of the suffering or the finality of the verdict?
• 1 Timothy 6:16 — God “alone has immortality”; where this holds, the continued existence of the lost cannot follow from their nature.

Summary

Mark 9:48 is the closing sentence of an admonition whose pair of opposites the text itself names three times: “to enter life” or “to be thrown into Gehenna.” The sentence that elucidates this negative pole is a verbatim quotation from Isaiah 66:24 — and there those who go out look upon dead bodies. Worm and fire are the pair that in Old Testament usage disposes of a body without remainder; that neither ceases says that their work is not interrupted. Everything the verse says about duration it says about the instruments of the judgment, nothing about the continuance of those upon whom it is carried out.

Sozzini contributed two observations on this formula which complement one another. First, “Gehenna” is inherited popular idiom: the transfer of the valley’s name to an otherworldly place of punishment was “received among the common people of the Hebrews and among the Pharisees themselves,” although “no evident indication of it was found in Holy Scripture itself” — Christ, he says, “therefore used the popular manner of speaking here,” without thereby authenticating its embellishment. Secondly, the formula is built as a comparison of magnitudes: it establishes “that contrast which he sets up between a single member and the whole body” — loss against greater loss, not loss against an evil of another kind.

What follows from this is no mitigation, but a determination. The punishment of sin is, according to the Racovian Catechism, “eternal death,” and Sozzini describes God’s justice as one that “punishes and destroys” those who persist. The judgment is thereby neither unreal nor harmless: it is irrevocable. Out of a punishment that lasts, something could still be conceived; out of the second death, nothing more. The gravity of Jesus’ warning lies exactly where the text places it — not in the length of the suffering, but in the finality of the loss.

And the hope that corresponds to this lies just as little in the constitution of man. It lies in this, that Christ will, as Sozzini says, “by his power in the judgment deliver us, who obey him, from the decree of God concerning eternal death.” Whoever reads the verse in this way need take nothing away from its hardness. He need only allow that “life” here means what it means everywhere else.