“Eternal Life”, “Eternal Punishment”: What Did Jesus Really Mean?

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Abstract In his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi: On Christian Hope Pope Benedict xvi cautioned: “The term ‘eternal life’ … is an inadequate term that causes confusion” (12). He also warned that ‘eternal’ should not be interpreted as ‘everlasting’. This caution applies equally to the term ‘eternal punishment’. Both phrases originate primarily in one sentence of Jesus’ parable of the “last judgment” (Matthew 25:46), where the Son of Man divides those gathered before him into two groups, those on the left and those on the right (“like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats”), and explains that whatever they did to other people they did to him: to those on the right, he says, “for I was hungry and you gave me food” and to those on the left, “for I was hungry and you gave me no food”. The parable concludes: “And they [those on the left] will go into eternal punishment [in Greek, kolasis aionios], but the righteous into eternal life [zoe aionios]”. What exactly do those Greek phrases, “kolasis aionios” and “zoe aionios”, really mean? This article argues that this question, much debated over the centuries and crucial to Christianity, cannot be properly answered without some input from linguistic semantics and without a coherent semantic methodology. The author, a linguist who has written many books on semantics, three of them (2001, 2019, and to appear) on biblical semantics, offers a fresh answer to that vital question, based on her expertise and experience in cross-linguistic semantics and its applications to the New Testament.