I have mentioned this many times. The only place in the Bible that defines aionios life is John 17:3 and it makes absolutely no sense to interpret it as a duration, long, short, infinite or otherwise.
It makes perfect sense if you know a bit about creative glosses.
For example, the 3rd century Alexander of Aphrodisias once wrote τοῦτο ἐστιν ὁ θεός: ἡ αἰώνιος καὶ ἀρíστη ζωή. Literally this seems to make little sense: “this is God: the everlasting and great life.” But it’s almost certainly to be understood as something like “this is what it means to be divine: having life that’s everlasting and supremely great.”
Of course, is that all being divine is?
And we in fact do very similar things even today, when we say “this is [phenomenon/emotion/object/etc.],” followed by a clearly secondary gloss. For example, do a Google search for “This is happiness,” or phrases similar to this. I find a picture of a happy snowboarder captioned with this; I find a song lyric “This is happiness: to be everything at once”; and I find “happiness is a good bar of chocolate” and “happiness is when everyone loves your cooking,” etc.
Or search for “This is courage.” I find this as a caption of a picture of Caitlyn Jenner and of a Native American; I find a quote from Euripides (though almost certainly a misquote), “This is courage in a man: to bear unflinchingly what heaven sends.” But is this all that courage is? What about climbing a mountain or fighting in a war or standing up to a corrupt but powerful politician; or, you know, a much more general definition that doesn’t refer to such specific things, like “the ability to do something that frightens one” or “strength in the face of pain or grief,” etc.?
This is how we can still translate John 17:3 in its straightforward sense: “this is everlasting life, that they may know [God].” This is almost certainly just a creative way of saying that knowing God – believing in him, following his commands and so on – leads to eternal life.
If someone said “this is happiness: a good bar of chocolate,” no one would ever be forced to rethink their definition of happiness. And the same should go for “everlasting life” in John 17:3.
