John 10:28 Twisting Jesus's Words to Support Christian Dogma

The main purpose of these articles is to help people who do not know ancient Greek understand how wonderful Jesus’s words actually are. A secondary purpose is to expose poor translation of Jesus’s words in our English Bibles. An especially egregious case is the verse, John 10:28. Translators want this verse to support the promise of “eternal life” so badly that they are willing to intentionally twist Jesus’s words to get what they want.

I have already written about how the concept of “eternal life,” like a lot of other Christian dogma like “satan,” heaven,” and “hell,” are manufactured from the Greek. This is not to say that Jesus doesn’t argue against evil, support the idea of life after death, and against wasting our lives. The main point of his death and resurrection was to prove that life can go on. However, his concept of evil is tried strongly to the nature of lies, so my objection to dogmatic translation is that it isn’t honest. In this article, I am going to look at just one verse and the lengths that the translators go to in order to support dogma over truth.

The Translated Verse

The English versions of this verse couldn’t be a more ringing endorsement of eternal life.

“And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.” (KJV)

“I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.” (NIV)

The “them” here is his “sheep” from the previous verse, John 10:27, who hear his voice and follow him. These sheep are, of course, his followers who listen to him.

Except for the words, “eternal life,” there are no translation problems with the first phrase, “And I give unto them eternal life.” I have already covered the issues with that words “eternal life,” in detail in this article. These words are closer in meaning, at least historically, to “on-going life” or “life after death,” but to translate them as “eternal life,” if that is what you believe, is not necessarily dishonest.

The dishonesty starts in the following phrase, a phrase that undermines the concept of “eternal life” in the first sentence. The words “and they shall never perish” seem very consistent with the first, but they are not what Jesus actually said.

The Undistorted Greek

The Greek translated as “and they shall never perish”, in both the source used by the KJV translators and the better source we used today is:

καὶ οὐ μὴ ἀπόλωνται εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα,

You can see the complete analysis of all the Greek at my detailed article on this verse at ChristsWords.com, but a word-for-word literal translation of this verse is:

καὶ οὐ μὴ ἀπόλωνται εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα,
and never might they destroy themselves up to this era/lifetime

There are two serious distortions here.

The mistranslation of the verb as “perish” when the verb doesn’t mean that “perish,” at least not in this form. The word, apollymi (ἀπολέσει), means “destroy,” though Jesus also uses it to mean “lose” as in losing an object, like a lamb in the famous “lost lamb” parable. It can mean “perish” in its passive form, “be destroyed.” However, this is not a passive form here. It is a middle form, which means the subject acts on, for, or by themselves.

The “shall” here seems to make this a promise about the future. However, this is intentionally misleading. The verb, apollymi, is not the future tense, but in a form that indicates the action is a possibility, something which “should” or “might” happen. So the sense here is that Jesus’s followers “should never destroy themselves” or “might never lose themselves.” So the “life” Jesus gives is one that prevents his followers from harming themselves.

The second part of this phrase, however, is left out because it contradicts the idea of “eternal” life. This phrase means “up to this lifetime” or ”up to this era.” The prepositions, eis (εἰς) is most commonly used to me “into” but when referring to a time, it designates a limit, so “up to.” The word I translate as “lifetime” and “era” is aion (αἰῶνος). It means means "lifetime," "life," "a space of time," "an age," an epoch," and "the present world." This is the root word for the adjective mistranslated as “eternal.” If we want to be generous, we might expand this time limit to “an epoch.” This word is often translated as “world” in the Gospels because, like so many Greek words, the translators don’t always like how Jesus consistently uses it.

But what does this phrase mean? I am simply a translator and do not teach religion or philosophy, so you can draw your own conclusions, but I point you to another Matthew 10:28 that seems to be related. At the end of that verse, Jesus says, literally:

“Be frighted, however, more by the one having the power not only a self but also a body to slaughter in Gehenna.”

The “one” referred to here is usually assumed to be “satan,” and the word translated Gehenna, describing the burning trahs dump outside of Jerusalem, is usually translated as “hell.” However, Jesus seems more consistently to refer to this person as our own selves, which is the meaning of the Greek word used here, discussed in this article.

The final line is a play on earlier verse, about wolves snatching sheep. That sentence seems to belong more with the following verse, rather than this one.

Conclusions

To me, it often seems like the church wants to make bigger promises that Jesus did, rather than accurately teach what Jesus said. I think this loses them as much as it gains. Christian teaching makes this life a one-shot deal, the result being either eternal heavenly bliss or eternity of hellish torture. Is this really what people want a good God to offer?

To me, this Christian heaven seems boring, a waste of a body. I prefer the idea that Jesus taught to this heaven, “the skies,” a sky with higher skies to ascend to. In the Christian heaven, our actions no longer matter. It does not even seem like we can choose any actions other than adoration. If prefer what Jesus taught: a self that continues with a memory, but whose actions still matter. Of course, there are many Christians, let us call them Calvinists, who think that our actions in this lifetime don’t matter either. So there is always that.