ESV’s footnote is the literal translation. G165 is aion. G166 is aionios.
He found a real bargan! I use Thayer’s at Blueletterbible.org, but I’d love to have a hard copy.
Lexicons are tools, but hardly authoritative and inspired. The Wikipedia article on Thayer states:
I seems a little too much to call it “obsolete” – it’s still very useful, but we need to remember that these tools are man-made, reflecting the ideas and biases of the men who write them and constrained by limited understanding, thus are always open to examination and question.
If you want another source that says “aionios” doesn’t mean never-ending, I can refer you to the newer Packer article Joe gave you in which he states:
Packer does go on to argue that aionios must imply “unending continuance” based on the idea that the Jews conceived of the age to come as being endless, which is a construct that I would disagree with. But the point is that Packer affirms that aionios does not by definition mean “never-ending.”
Oh, I see. I’m sure there are other folks here that can answer that for you! My impression is that there’s no argument that “age” or “eon” is our most literal translation of “aion”. But words are not always used in their most literal sense, so they’re translated according to the translator’s best understanding of usage, given the context. This necessitates that interpretation is also happening during translation–and that same applies as well to word definitions.
Ok, this is a bit off topic. This was one of many points Packer made that lent itself to a case for EU. I was surprised at how much he bolstered our view.