I think koine_lingua is currently about where I am on the topic
I’ve certainly been accused of being a pedant before, but I have to disagree with a few of the things you said here—just to be 100% clear about my positions.
the Greek adjective, and its related Greek prepositional phrases . . . have a variable-application meaning, which as Paidion likes to say, could be translated into English vernacular as “lasting”.
I think suggesting that trying to incorporate its various uses into a single meaning here runs into the same problems as when people try to say that the fundamental meaning of aion is “age” (and thus that the fundamental meaning of aionios must be “age-lasting”). But, again, “age” is not the fundamental meaning of aion. As I suggest, aion in face has no singular fundamental meaning. Even historically speaking, some of the absolute earliest Greek uses of the word are in the sense of “spinal marrow” or even something like “life-force,” which obviously bear little to no relationship to time whatsoever.
Of course, we don’t have any comparable use of the adjective aionios in the sense of “pertaining to spinal marrow” or anything like that. But 95%+ of the uses of aionios are used in the sense of permanence in particular. By contrast, if you analyze how aion is used in the first 3 or 4 centuries of ancient Greek, I’d imagine you’d find a fairly even split between “life” or “life-force,” “spinal marrow,” “age,” and “eternity.” (See also here Helena Keizer’s monograph on aion, which is entitled Life–Time–Entirety.)
This is why it’d be a mistake to try to reduce the primary denotation of aionios to “lasting,” based merely on the very few uses of it that don’t suggest permanence in particular. That is to say, I think there’s a real sense in which we can characterize some of the rare/idiosyncratic uses of aionios as more or less variations on its base denotation of permanence. But, again, the keyword here is “rare/idiosyncratic.” It’s pretty clear when it’s being used in a rare or unusual sense—like in Diodorus Siculus 17.112.2, in some of its Septuagint usage (especially when we can characterize it as a “mistranslation”), or in Romans 16:25.
Maybe you actually agree with me on some/most of these things; but again I just wanted to be very clear.
(Although I don’t think we can rule out the influence of Platonic thought in the NT usage for the adjective meaning something like “divine”, coming uniquely from God. The conceptual links would be overlapping anyway.)
I’m unaware of any evidence that it suggests anything even close to “divine,” Platonic or otherwise.
It’s permanent until when-if-ever it isn’t permanent, and that could be pretty quick (and depends on God typically), but it could also be ages of ages, and might be permanently forever. In effect, context determines how far the meaning goes, which is what I have always argued; and that neutral stance is plenty to allow universal salvation.
I mean, in some sense I’d agree with what you said here. I would disagree, though, in that I don’t think BIblical readers could have ever reasonably been expected to hear about “permanent/everlasting punishment,” but then to do complex exegetical connect-the-dots to somehow realize that God may bring this otherwise permanent punishment to an end (“permanent until when-if-ever it isn’t permanent”).
By the same token, I don’t see how anything in the Bible could be taken at face value, if someone could always say “oh but if you just look at this obscure passage in Ezekiel, you can see where [whatever] really means the opposite of what it appears to mean.”
So if they generally (not universally) use “eonian” as an adjective without a never-ending continuance meaning, which is certainly demonstrated by context (and a chief point to Dr. Ramelli’s tome), then that weight isn’t nothing.
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize the patristic usage this way (“an adjective without a never-ending continuance meaning”). For one, I’ve demonstrated in exhaustive detail that Ramelli (and Konstan) frequently misrepresents the patristic data, sometimes in a very egregious way. And this would be widely recognized if her studies were more well-known than they were.
There’s also something to be said about aionios being used “organically”—when early church writers use the word without self-consciously reflecting on what the word itself might signify, exegetically—versus when people are doing conscious, explicit analysis of the word (or using the word with an idiosyncratic meaning that they’re assigned to the word based on self-conscious analysis).
For example, when @Origen mentions how Chrysostom glosses aionios as something that implies “belonging to the present age” or whatever (Ὅτι καὶ αἰώνιος αὐτοῦ ἡ ἀρχὴ, τουτέστι, τῷ παρόντι αἰῶνι συγκαταλυομένη), he’s self-consciously reflecting on the components of the word here. In effect, he’s basically doing what we call “folk etymology.” (See his earlier comment ἡ ἀρχὴ ἐν τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ. In other words, Satan’s rule is called aionios because it’s “in this aion.”)
As another similar example, this is kind of like Philo of Alexandria’s interpretation of God’s ὄνομα αἰώνιον in LXX Exodus 3:15 (ὡς ἂν ἐν τῷ καθ᾿ ἡμᾶς αἰῶνι ἐξεταζόμενον, οὐκ ἐν τῷ πρὸ αἰῶνος)—where he understands this not in the sense of “everlasting name,” as is the true original meaning, but instead in the sense of God’s revealed name to the current “age.” Keizer translates Philo’s gloss here as “as it were in the aiōn related to us, not in that (which is) before aiōn.”
But again, this isn’t an actual “organic” use of the word, but a deliberately interpretive one. And for what it’s worth, elsewhere Chrysostom uses aionios in the true sense of “permanent, everlasting” any number of times.
