Who Determined This?

[JamesH]

Who determined the idioms εις τον αιωνον and εις τους αιωνας των αιωνων means forever and forever and ever? I'm studying Mounce's Greek Grammar and in one of the vocab sections he has those translated as forever. When did those idioms become forever and forever and ever? Did the early church believe they mean forever,etc? Or did this start during the medieval period,Protestant Reformation or maybe later?

[marie glen]

 :Chinscratch: Good question.. One I hope someone answers.. Because I'd like to pin it down too! :thumbsup:

               Now, it's a habit for folks to think in terms of 'forever' ...Some verses, which in the interlinear, have no time word at all.. there will be that word - forever! :mshock: To say nothing of course, all those verses where a duration of time is referred to as forever.. Oy.

[WhiteWings]

Who determined the idioms εις τον αιωνον and εις τους αιωνας των αιωνων means forever and forever and ever? I'm studying Mounce's Greek Grammar and in one of the vocab sections he has those translated as forever. When did those idioms become forever and forever and ever? Did the early church believe they mean forever,etc? Or did this start during the medieval period,Protestant Reformation or maybe later?

Here you can find information about UR in the first centuries.

http://radical-reaction.com/MyChristianSites/ShepherdsVoice/the_prevailing_doctrine.htm
http://richardwaynegarganta.com/first500years.htm

[marie glen]

Thought I'd post this page I'm reading.. So far it seems very good, usually most sites, books, etc, have something in them not quite on track - don't you think? - but if we worried about that too much we'd never read anything..

I keep forgetting about Plato! How Augustine was a student of his... Plato the Greek.. a lot of immortality of the soul, etc.. (so you need a place for the eternal 'wicked')

My dilemma too, is Origen was not a 'hell' promoter, but I have read he was big time into too much metaphor, which surely(?) can be a means of adding to and taking away from God's Word(s)..  :Chinscratch: who as first? Origen before Augustine? --

Origen 184 - 253, Augustine 354-430

Someday I hope to remember the church fathers and in order and what they wrote about.. I know Polycarp was a 'student' of the apostle John

In his later years, he tried to settle disputes about the date to celebrate Easter, and he confronted one of the church's most troublesome heretics, the Gnostic Marcion, calling him "the first born of Satan," when he ran into him in Rome. Polycarp was also responsible for converting many from Gnosticism

In Irenaeus' letter to Florinus, he attempts to bring an old friend back from heresy by recounting their time together under Polycarp's tutelage, reminding him of when Polycarp spoke of his own study under the apostle John and others who'd had firsthand experience with Jesus.

..that was from google search

Here you can find the information about UR in the first centuries.

http://radical-reaction.com/MyChristianSites/ShepherdsVoice/the_prevailing_doctrine.htm
http://richardwaynegarganta.com/first500years.htm

   :thumbsup:

[marie glen]

Quote - http://brazenchurch.com/how-hell-invaded-church-doctrine/

Plato made several philosophical arguments that have ironically come to define our mainstream Christian paradigms.

First, Plato believed that the soul was separate from the body and that the soul was fundamentally pure but tends to become deformed through association with the body.
Second, like his teacher Socrates, Plato believed that the soul itself was immortal, thus necessitating an eternal destination for the soul after the body dies.
Third, Plato proposed that good actions result in a reward in this life, but more importantly, a greater reward after death. Similarly, bad actions result in consequences in this life, but even greater punishment after death.
Plato linked some of his ideas to prevailing Greek mythology, including the locations of Hades and Tartarus. In Greek mythology, Tartarus is the location deep below Hades where the Titans were enslaved and the wicked were tormented. According to Plato, this is where divine punishment was meted out.

It is of this philosopher that St. Augustine remarked,

"The utterance of Plato, the most pure and bright in all philosophy, scattering the clouds of error . . ."

These ideas proposed by Plato are not from the Bible. They are Greek philosophy. BUT we have spent centuries reading them into the Biblical text and even translating the Biblical text through their lens.

But if we go back before the time of Augustine, we find 5 centuries of Church fathers who never carried this lens.

For 5 centuries, Christian doctrine remained unaffected by Hell until St. Augustine forcibly inserted it into orthodoxy, using a combination of power and violence to ensure it’s survival. Since that time, we’ve seen the gradual evolution of Christian doctrine in and around this concept, until today, the average believer has no idea that the concept of eternal torment isn’t even Biblical.

[Augustine] was the first in the long line of Christian persecutors, and illustrates the character of the theology that swayed him in the wicked spirit that impelled him to advocate the right to persecute Christians who differ from those in power. The dark pages that bear the record of subsequent centuries are a damning witness to the cruel spirit that actuated Christians, and the cruel theology that impelled it. Augustine was the first and ablest asserter of the principle which led to Albigensian crusades, Spanish armadas, Netherland's butcheries, St. Bartholomew massacres, the accursed infamies of the Inquisition, the vile espionage, the hideous bale fires of Seville and Smithfield, the racks, the gibbets, the thumbscrews, and the subterranean torture-chambers used by churchly torturers.[v]

:faint:          (rev 12:13,13)

[marie glen]

P.S. - then I'm done pasting  :laughing7:

Samuel Dawson, author of, The Teaching of Jesus: From Mount Sinai to Gehenna a Faithful Rabbi Urgently Warns Rebellious Israel, says:

Most of what we believe about hell comes from Catholicism and ignorance of the Old Testament, not from the Bible. I now believe that hell is the invention of Roman Catholicism; and surprisingly, most, if not all, of our popular concepts of hell can be found in the writings of Roman Catholic writers like the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), author of Dante's Inferno. The English poet John Milton (1608–1674), author of Paradise Lost, set forth the same concepts in a fashion highly acceptable to the Roman Catholic faith. Yet none of our concepts of hell can be found in the teaching of Jesus Christ![vi]

Following on the heels of Augustine, the greatest influence on today's hell theology via most modern Bible translations came from Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Jerome translated this tainted version of the Scriptures from a very inferior Latin text in the late 4th century:

..and the KJ was translated from Latin versions..

..so that's one source anyway.. Latin!.. from the hebrew sheol where "all go to and meet in" where Jacob (or Joseph?) asked Yhvh to hide him.. where there was neither thought nor doing - to the greek hades - "unseen"/"place of the dead" - to the latin "inferno"

Jesus likely spoke Aramaic of which Hebrew was a dialect..

p.s.s - http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/ :thumbsup:

[marie glen]

...Um... here's another, though I'll not source it as a lot of what else I read I find very misleading.. :gsmile:

The first adoption of the pagan beliefs by a Christian writer was in the Apocalypse of Peter, probably written between 125 and 150 CE that remained in various church lists as a canonical text for centuries. It contains what the author claimed were the words of Yeshua as he instructed Peter after the resurrection about the signs of the end times. It also contains a variety of punishments awaiting sinners in hell and the pleasures of heaven. The descriptions clearly came from Homer, Virgil, Plato, and Orphic and Pythagorean traditions. The hell myth wasn't in the Old Testament or Christian tradition before this writer developed it out of pagan traditions.

In the New Testament canon, Yeshua referred to "Gehenna," the valley of Hinnom, where garbage burned continually, corpses were sometimes deposited, and in earlier times, people had been sacrificed. He only referred to it to illustrate his lessons about spiritual growth and the Earthly realm--that the earthly body was meaningless and would be thrown on the garbage dump. Some suggest he was warning the entire Jewish nation that it must turn away from its Earthly focus and reform by being more concerned with spiritual growth and the inner person, and if it didn't, the Jews would be destroyed in fire. He was right, of course. Jerusalem and the temple were torched in 70 CE.

However, he didn't refer to a hell as everlasting torment for people who didn't swear allegiance to him. By the time of the first English translations of the New Testament, the hell myth had been so well rooted in church tradition that where the translators saw "Gehenna," they simply inserted "hell" as the translation. That led to the misconception about hell being in the New Testament and in Yeshua's teaching.

The Old Testament

The Old Testament refers to "Sheol" (Hebrew) or "Hades" (Greek) as the place of the dead where all who die go. It simply means "unseen." In no instance in the Old Testament does it refer to a place of torment where people go after death. The Anglo-Saxon (English) word "hell" originally also meant "unseen," so it was a suitable translation from "Sheol" or "Hades." However, hell came to be the place of torment, fire, and brimstone in church tradition, so it lost its original meaning in Anglo-Saxon.

p.s. from the same article

Yeshua would have found the judgment and cruelty ascribed to him distressing, and would have overturned the tables where the authors sat writing the myths.

:thumbsup:

http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/ -

The Anglican Church's King James Bible took decades to overcome the more popular Protestant Church's Geneva Bible. One of the greatest ironies of history, is that many Protestant Christian churches today embrace the King James Bible exclusively as the "only" legitimate English language translation... yet it is not even a Protestant translation! It was printed to compete with the Protestant Geneva Bible, by authorities who throughout most of history were hostile to Protestants... and killed them. While many Protestants are quick to assign the full blame of persecution to the Roman Catholic Church, it should be noted that even after England broke from Roman Catholicism in the 1500's, the Church of England (The Anglican Church) continued to persecute Protestants throughout the 1600's. One famous example of this is John Bunyan, who while in prison for the crime of preaching the Gospel, wrote one of Christian history's greatest books, Pilgrim's Progress. Throughout the 1600's, as the Puritans and the Pilgrims fled the religious persecution of England to cross the Atlantic [mg's note - rev 12:12,13 - the faith given eagles wings to fly/sail? to a new place] and start a new free nation in America, they took with them their precious Geneva Bible, and rejected the King's Bible. America was founded upon the Geneva Bible, not the King James Bible.