The Last Judgment, the extraordinary conclusion to Christ's parousia, played a consequential role in Byzantine religious culture. However, the scarcity of biblical information and the lack of an official council-sanctioned theology of the afterlife resulted in the creation of varying and sometimes contradictory narratives. The most systematic treatment of questions pertaining to the Last Judgment is by Joseph Bryennios (d. c. 1430/1), a theologian and court preacher, in a series of two sermons. This paper offers a detailed investigation of Bryennios’ eschatological thought and discusses its sources and its importance as ‘official’ theology in the last decades of the empire.
