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But they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God. The end of all things is at hand; therefore keep sane and sober for your prayers. (1 Pet 4:5-7)

This is a very problematic passage. Scholars would like to know who wrote it and what it means. The passage, though unlikely to have been written by Peter, surely gives witness to the notion that Christ can preach to the dead, evidently in the hope of saving them, though exactly which dead-whether the damned or those already saved who are rising to their beatified place at the end of time-is not entirely clear.

In two cases, stories illustrating the problem occur in Christian Apocrypha. In the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, a third-century Latin work, which we have already looked at briefly, Perpetua writes in her diary in prison of a vision of her brother Dinocrates who died at age seven of a facial tumor. He comes to her in a vision, begging relief from his discomfort, which has followed him into the tomb. Perpetua is able to help, as she later sees him playing, with the tumor gone and drinking comfortably again, which was not possible when he was sick.

So martyrs both reveal the truth of the faith and help the faithful perform the miracle of resurrection on others. Similarly the martyr Thecla was able to save the dead daughter of her recently acquired pagan friend Tryphaena. The resurrection of various sinners in the Christian Apocrypha affords them a further chance at salvation. For instance, Callimachus dies while defiling Drusiana’s corpse, but, when raised up by John, he repents his error and becomes a Christian (Acts John 73-78).

In the Ascension of Isaiah, a Christian work based on an earlier Jewish apocryphon, Isaiah sees Abel, Enoch, and the righteous of previous generations. They are wearing their robes; but they may not sit on their thrones or don their crowns until the arrival of Christ.110 These are narrative traditions, which aid in the acceptance of the notion that the dead are able to be saved.

But there are documents that explicitly offer salvation generally to the dead. These may include the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Gospel of Peter, especially 39-42. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa favored the notion that God could not leave any soul unsaved, allowing reincarnation for the purpose of further trial and improvement. Ambrose, Augustine’s mentor, was at least expansive in his estimate of who was saved at Christ’s descent. Ambrose also posited a “baptism of desire” for the deceased emperor Valentinian II, at his funeral oration in 392. Although Valentinian II had been assassinated (or committed suicide) while still a catechumen, Ambrose assured his funeral audience that his intention to be baptized was sufficient for his salvation.111

The doctrine is both attractive and dangerous. Many of the earliest descent traditions indicate that only the righteous of the Old Testament were rescued by Christ, so it is not a blanket offer of amnesty. Around the turn of the third century, for example, Hippolytus and Tertullian manifest the same idea: The purpose of the harrowing of hell was to “preach to the souls of the saints” (meaning “the Patriarchs,” Hippolytus, Antichr. 26) or “for the purpose of informing the Patriarchs and prophets that he had appeared” (Tertullian, An. 55:2).

It was Augustine who finally settled the matter. Throughout his career, Augustine articulated a single view on the righteous before the coming of Christ: Their salvation is in accord with the opportunity of their respective eras. They were natural Christians before the incarnation and hence needed no posthumous salvation since they had lived properly during their lifetime.112 But the events of Augustine’s day made him more strict about the unbaptized, even unbaptized infants, after the incarnation. Aware of the views of Pelagius that unbaptized