Does Christ Offer “Eternal Life” or “Everlasting Life”?

This is an article I wrote many years ago in response to a student’s question about why some Bibles say “everlasting life” while others say “eternal life.”

I went to biblegateway.com and did some searches to see what I could see. Here's what I found:

           "eternal life"  "everlasting life"

Wycliffe          0            45
KJV              26            10
NKJV             32            12
KJV21            26            10
NIV              43             1
NASB             41             0
HCSB             43             0
ESV              44             0
ASV              37             0

I won't bore you with a bunch of gory details about text families and what-not, but I found it curious that those Bibles based upon the Traditional Text (e.g. Wycliffe, KJV and its variants) use the phrase "everlasting life" much more frequently than those Bibles based upon the Critical Text (NIV, NASB, et al.). What's even more curious is that the exact same Greek word is behind both "eternal" and "everlasting": aionios, which as it turns out, can be rightly translated either as "eternal," or as "everlasting." And even more curioser (sp) is why the NIV uses "everlasting life" exactly once--in John 6:47. *shrug*

So what to do? Ask someone who knows more than me.

I asked one of my pastors about this, but I wasn't satisfied with his answer, which was:

Bottom line, I don’ t know why the translation teams chose to go one way or another but I’m not certain their decision was based theologically (i.e., using one instead of the other doesn’t necessitate a particular philosophical bias in my opinion)

It just seemed to me that there had to be a good reason for modern translators to break from tradition and use "eternal" almost exclusively over "everlasting."

So I broke out the Big Guns™ and asked my senior pastor. He reminded me that when we are saved (per Romans 10:9, 10), that we inherit eternal life because we "move into" Christ:

And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus
— Ephesians 2:6 NIV

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
— Colossians 3:3 NIV

So if our life is hidden with Christ, who is eternal, then the life we have then also becomes eternal, even though we were initially "seated" with him at some point in time. I don't know about you, but trying to figure out how that works, gives me a headache.

So, the long and short of it is that: textually speaking, there's no difference, really, between "eternal" and "everlasting" because the same Greek word underlies them both. In plain English, however, there is a difference. So my guess is that modern translations use "eternal" almost exclusively to be more doctrinally consistent.

Dan KreftApril 25, 2019