Chapters 8 to 9 - Christ’s Teachings and Today’s Christianity

- 29 - it not be forgiven the spirits in the Beyond? They are, after all, the same spirits, whether they inhabit a mortal body or have become separated from it by human death. • It is t h e s a m e ‘ I ’ with all its spiritual attributes in the Here and in the Beyond. Hence a change of heart may occur in spirits in the Beyond as well as while they reside on earth. Proof that the tortures of hell are everlasting is sought by invoking the Bible, by citing the word ‘eternal’ used in your translations of the New Testament in connection with punishment in the Beyond. But what is the word in the original Greek texts that your translators have rendered as ‘eternal’? What matters are not your translations, but the sense of the word as it occurs in the original text. • It so happens that wherever your translators of the Scriptures use the words ‘eternity’ or ‘eternal’, the Greek text has ‘eon’. You, too, have adopted this word and speak of ‘eons’ to designate long periods of time. That is correct; for also in Greek the word ‘eon’ never signifies ‘eternity’ or the idea of anything everlasting, but merely an indefinite period of time. Antiquity was an ‘eon’, the Middle Ages were an ‘eon’, the Modern Age is an ‘eon’. The Romans regarded an ‘eon’ as the equivalent of a hundred years. An ‘eon’ is therefore a period of time, the limits of which are sometimes seen to be closer together, sometimes further apart. Even a human lifetime is sometimes so designated. Never, however, can ‘eon’ be used to describe a never-ending period of time. So, you may never translate ‘eon’ as ‘eternity’, or the adjective derived therefrom as ‘eternal’. The correct equivalents are ‘time’ and ‘temporal’. • First I want to call your attention to the interesting circumstance that in many passages of the Bible the word ‘eon’ and the corresponding adjective have been correctly translated as ‘ t i m e ’ and ‘temporal’, because in those particular places the word ‘eternal’ would be nonsensical. Only when p u n i s h m e n t i n t h e B e y o n d is involved have the translators used the word ‘eternal’. Indicating clearly that they were influenced by the Christian religions that preach eternal damnation. Let us consider a few of the numerous passages in the Bible in which the word ‘eon’ can be translated only as ‘time’ or ‘pertaining to time.’ Thus, it is said that b l a s p h e m y a g a i n s t t h e S p i r i t shall not be forgiven, either in this ‘eon’ or in that which is to come, that is, neither in this age nor in the next, or neither in this life nor in the next. Inasmuch as there is only one eternity, you cannot rationally translate that it will not be forgiven in ‘this eternity’ or in the ‘eternity that is to come.’ For there is no such thing as two eternities. In the p a r a b l e o f t h e s o w e r , it is said that some of the seeds were choked by the cares of this ‘eon’, which again has been correctly translated as ‘by the cares of this “life”’. Here also the rendering of the word as ‘eternity’ would obviously be inappropriate. The same is true of the p a r a b l e o f t h e w e e d s a m o n g t h e w h e a t , in which Christ explains that the harvest will be the end of this ‘eon’, that is, the ‘end of this age or this world.’ Here, too, it cannot mean ‘eternity’. In this passage the word ‘eon’ occurs twice more, both times in a limitative sense.

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