Dr. Konstan,
Thanks for the exhausting and hard work. It’s truly a gift. I’ve yet to read through your posts, so my question may be answered. But let me quickly post a couple of thoughts that came up on another thread elsewhere on this site and then ask you to comment (on Jude 1.6).
Tom: I don’t see how June 1.6 doesn’t sink his thesis. It’s not a defeater for UR, but it doesn’t look good for his thesis about aidios (that it always means “eternal”). Regardless of how you construe ‘until’ (“eis” + the accusative as showing finality or purpose or direction, whatever), it seems to me that these “chains” cannot be “eternal” in the sense he David claims because these chains are not divine, they’re created (or they represent a created/finite state of affairs) which by definition makes them corruptible and finite.
Robin quoting Dr. Konstan on his (Robin’s) blog: We turn now to the two uses of the more strictly philosophical term aïdios in the New Testament. The first (Rom 1:20) refers unproblematically to the power and divinity of God. In the second occurrence, however (Jude 6), aïdios is employed of eternal punishment—not that of human beings, however, but of evil angels, who are imprisoned in darkness “with eternal chains” (desmois aïdiois). But there is a qualification: “until the judgment of the great day.” The angels, then, will remain chained up until Judgment Day; we are not informed of what will become of them afterwards. Why aïdios of the chains, instead of aiônios, used in the next verse of the fire of which the punishments of the Sodomites is an example? Perhaps because they continue from the moment of the angels’ incarceration, at the beginning of the world, until the judgment that signals the entry into the new aiôn: thus, the term indicates the uninterrupted continuity throughout all time in this world—this could not apply to human beings, who do not live through the entire duration of the present universe; to them applies rather the sequence of aiônes or generations.
To which I replied: I’m not sure. It seems that given Konstand’s thesis, I suspect just what he seems to have suspected, that aionios would be the appropriate term here (June 1.6), not aidios. To explain it by saying aidios is used “to indicate the uninterrupted continuity throughout all time in this world” is just to give aidios the sort of meaning one gives to aionios. Doesn’t that undermine his thesis?
I should probably say that I don’t find absolute timelessness/atemporality a helpful notion. I mean helpful in explaining God or God’s relations to a temporal world (least of all explaining supposed divine foreknowledge of all that occurs temporally along our timeline). I know the “eternal/timeless now” is a very popular argument, but I’m disinclined to adopt it. Not that rejecting divine atemporality doesn’t involve its own problems. It does. But in the end I think it’s less problematic than is divine timelessness.
Tom