Greek word - (aionios G166)
Quiz - Choose the answer that is closest to what you think ETERNAL is.
A - never ending
B - forever
C - very long
D - that spans all time
Problem - Incorrect
KJV Example - "And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal" (Matthew 25:46).
Explanation
Let me warn you that this word is complicated. So stay with me. I will do my best to explain it clearly and simply.
As I translated the New Testament from Greek for the Breakthrough Version, I frequently came across the Greek word for eternal (aionios, an adjective) and its noun form, aion, which is usually translated as world. It bothered me that world and eternal do not match up in meaning.
Eternal.
World.
They are two different things.
I also was noticing that the noun and its modifiers are seldom translated literally. This signaled to me the possibility that these two words had not been translated correctly.
As I dug deeper into the way the noun is used in the Bible, I found that six times it is said to have an end (Matthew 13:39, 40, 49; 24:3; 28:20; Hebrews 9:26). So the noun obviously is not eternal.
If it is a world, what kind of world? There are other Greek words for world: kosmos (the physical world) and ge (the earth). Aion has to be something different. But what is it?
After years of study and thought, I came up with "span of time". Aion is the span of time of something or its timeline.
A building has a span of time. A car has a span of time. This world has a span of time.
The Bible mentions this world's span of time. It started when this world started and will end when this world ends.
Other worlds will exist that will have their own span of time.
God also has an aion, a span of time. God's aion is eternal since God is eternal.
That is the noun, aion. Since it is closely related in Greek to the adjective, eternal, aionios, understanding the noun helps us understand the adjective.
If the noun is translated as world (as it is in most Bibles), then its adjective must be translated the same way, as world.
The noun - world, the adjective - world.
If it is modifying life, it would be world life, not eternal life. If it is modifying punishment, it would be world punishment, not eternal punishment. But that does not fit with what the Bible says.
If the noun were eternity, then its adjective would be eternal. But as I have already shown, it is not eternity because it can have an end.
It is the span of time of something. Its adjective must be similar to this. In English we do not have such an adjective so we have to make one up. I first used "that spans the time." Modifying life, it is life that spans the time. That sounds a little awkward, so I replaced "the" with "all," life that spans all time. This gives a richer and more accurate translation to the Greek word for eternal.
In the Bible, eternal is "that spans all time".
Modern Synonym - that spans all time
Bible Version Tally (how other versions translate this word) - eternal, everlasting, or forever (49 of 50), age-during (1 of 50)
Breakthrough Version - "And these people will go off into torment that spans all time, but the people who did what is right into life that spans all time" (Matthew 25:46).