ABSTRACT
Bede expected the day of judgement to occur once every stage of the end-time sequence had been accomplished and the test of patience was complete. At the very end of time, it was anticipated that Christ would return to judge the whole of humankind, determine the eternal fate of each individual and separate the evil from the righteous. After the day of judgement, Bede expected the world to undergo an enormous transformation so that the elect and the reprobate could enjoy either perennial rest with the Lord or suffer in hell without relief. The Scriptures do not transmit a coherent and complete picture of the last judgement or the eternal afterlife. Bede’s impression of what would happen on and after the day of judgement, like his vision for the end-time sequence, was constructed from a succession of unconnected parts of Holy Scripture and filtered through layers of patristic interpretation. As the foremost intellectual of his era, Bede was required to understand the relevant parts of the Bible, interact with different interpretations from a wide variety of contexts and explain his ideas about judgement and the afterlife to his readers. His status as an expert on these matters was recognised in his own lifetime, by 716 at the latest. In this year, Bede fielded a question from Bishop Acca about what would happen to the damned after the day of judgement (this episode is recounted in the short tract De eo quod ait Isaias and examined in detail below). By 716, Bede had already written commentaries on some of the most significant eschatological parts of the Bible: he had treated the Book of Revelation in full, the relevant passages in the Gospel of Luke had been examined in In Lucae evangelium expositio and it is likely that Bede’s commentary on 2 Peter was already complete. These commentaries, along with Bede’s later exegetical writings, are important, but relevant material is also presented in Bede’s homilies, poems and educational texts. Bede’s hexameter poem De die iudicii, which includes detailed descriptions of judgement day, heaven and hell, is indispensable. In the case of the everlasting punishments of hell, De die iudicii offers an insight into a subject that – with the exception of the aforementioned tract De eo quod ait Isaias – is rarely addressed in any significant detail elsewhere in Bede’s corpus of writings.
