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Mateo 25:46: “And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
- Eternal punishment and eternal life (i.e. living forever – cf. John 6:54 & 6:58) are contrasted, indicating that the two fates are mutually exclusive; nobody receives both. That being the case, what must the word “punishment” here refer to or bring about? Death, the only fate that doesn’t involve living forever. Indeed, in Romanos 6:23, Paul explicitly contrasts eternal life with death. Likewise, in Juan 3:16, the Evangelist contrasts eternal life with perishing.
- Even Augustine, writing in the fourth century, being no friend of conditional immortality, recognizes that “laws reckon the punishment [of death] to consist [not] in the brief moment in which death is inflicted [but in] that the offender is eternally banished from the society of the living” (City of God 21.11.1). Death from which there is no return is, properly speaking, an eternal punishment.
- Some think that eternal punishment refers to, or implies, eternal punishing, meaning that they understand the punishing process to be eternal, which is incompatible with the death penalty since its punishing process is finite. While “eternal punishment” could—in a vacuum or in a different context—refer to, or imply, an eternal punishing process, this interpretation fails to hold up (1) because of the contrast with eternal life, and (2) because eternal fire kills those subjected to it (see cheat sheet on Matthew 25:41). Life or death is a true dichotomy, and it precludes this eternal punishing interpretation.
- More to the previous point, the word “punishment,” kolasis in Greek, is what linguists call a deverbal noun. Many deverbal nouns can refer either to the process or the result of their respective related verbs. For example, the deverbal noun “translation” can refer either to the process of translating (e.g. “Translation is tedious work”) or to the result of translating (e.g. “This translation is remarkably precise”). In the case of kolasis here, for the reasons listed in Point 3, the result reading must be correct (i.e. “punishment” refers to the result of punishing).
- This kind of relationship between a deverbal noun and the adjective aiōnios (eternal, everlasting) is something we can see, for example, in 2 Maccabees 7:9, where a Jewish martyr looks forward to an aiōnios anabiōsis, that is, an eternal revivification. Obviously, the process of reviving is finite, or else, by definition, the one being revived would never actually come back to life (once one is alive, the process of reviving is over). So, the only sense in which “revivification” here can be called “eternal” is if revivification refers to the result of reviving. Thus, there is strong linguistic precedent for taking a noun like “punishment” to refer to the result of punishing. See Hebrews 5:9, 6:2, and 9:12 for additional examples.
In short, Matthew 25:46 teaches, by virtue of contrasting eternal punishment with eternal life, that the unrighteous will not live forever but face a permanent death.
