Thanks heaps Sonia, that’s great initiative! The more experts we find on this the better
A list of other useful things that Dr. Orville Boyd Jenkins has written about Greek
The argument that gets to me regularly is, given it’s now so obviously not everlasting, why is it taking so long to update the lexicons and mainstream translations?
Well spotted my friend
, Julie Ferwerda"]ETERNITY VS. AGES
Throughout previous chapters I have mentioned the non-existence of the concept of eternity in Scripture. This chapter is crucial to our understanding of the false teaching of a place of eternal torment or even everlasting separation from God, without reducing the permanence of our future life with God.
How did translators go awry and begin inserting the concept of eternity into the Scriptures? Earlier we learned that the Hebrew word, olam (Strong’s #5956), actually means something like, “behind the horizon” or “to conceal,” and simply does not mean or imply eternal. It has been frequently mistranslated as everlasting and eternal throughout the Old Testament, though most literal translations and the Hebrew Interlinear render olam as “age.”**
So now let’s turn to the Greek word frequently translated eternal, forever, or everlasting in the New Testament. Aion is a noun that actually translates as “eon,” or the more common modern English equivalent, “age” (Strong’s #165), and is one of the most mistranslated and inconsistently translated words in the Bible.
An eon or age, is defined as a period of time with a beginning and an end. Consider the myriad of ways this one word (with one meaning) has been translated in two of our more popular New Testament versions today:
]Age or ages: NASB–26, KJV–2/:m]
]Ancient time: NASB–1/:m]
]Beginning of time: NASB–1/:m]
]World or worlds: NASB–7, KJV–78/:m]
]World without end: KJV–1/:m]
]Course: NASB–1/:m]
]Eternal: NASB–2, KJV–2/:m]
]Eternity: NASB–1/:m]
]Ever: NASB-2, KJV–71/:m]
]Forever: NASB–27, KJV–30/:m]
]Forever and ever: NASB–20, KJV–21/:m]
]Forevermore: NASB–2/:m]
]Long ago: NASB–1/:m]
]Never: NASB-1, KJV–6/:m]
]Old: NASB–1/:m]
]Time: NASB–1/:m]
]“Miscellaneous”: KJV–5/:m]
** The scribes of the Septuagint translated the Hebrew olam into aion (age) in the Greek in noun form, and aionios (pertaining to an age) for the adjective form.