G166

• {"n":"John 3:16b","s":"Everlasting life. The Greek adjective is built on the word for age, not the word for endless.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=john-3-16b","r":"John 3:16","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"King James reads everlasting. Most modern versions read eternal. Neither carries the age sense, and no major version attempts it."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"**Medieval architecture.** That does not mean architecture that lasts a long time. It means architecture belonging to a particular age. Now imagine your only word for that idea had drifted to mean unending, and you had been reading it that way your whole life."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Aionios is the adjective from aion, an age or era, and one influential scholarly reading treats its primary force as belonging to the age to come rather than lasting without end, with endlessness following as a consequence of which age you belong to rather than the word's own content. That reading is contested, not settled: standard lexicons such as BDAG also list a distinct sense, without beginning or end, and note that Greek had a separate word for strict endlessness, aidios, which New Testament writers mostly did not reach for. Which sense is primary in a given verse is part of a live debate tied to larger arguments about universalism, annihilationism, and eternal punishment."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English eternal and everlasting are both about duration. There is no English adjective meaning of the coming age, so the temporal reading is the only one on offer."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Adjectives built on nouns usually carry the noun with them. Find the noun before you accept the adjective."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Nothing textual is at stake, but the semantic question underneath is genuinely live, not settled: whether aionios here primarily means belonging to the age to come or primarily means without end is disputed among lexicographers and theologians. English eternal and everlasting both commit to the duration sense regardless of which side is right, so no English version marks that a real dispute exists underneath the word."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u03b1\u1f30\u03ce\u03bd\u03b9\u03bf\u03c2 aionios \u00b7 G166"}],"src":["aion as age: Matthew 12:32, neither in this world nor in the world to come; Ephesians 1:21","aionios of things explicitly bounded: Romans 16:25, kept secret since the world began","John 17:3 defines the life by relationship rather than by duration","BDAG's separate 'without beginning or end' sense for aionios, and aidios as Greek's dedicated word for strict endlessness"]}