ions, when found in the New Testament, were

13 Lessing, Ueber Leibnitz von den Ewigen Strafen.

employed by the Saviour and the evangelists in conformity with the
prevailing thought and customary phraseology of their time, as to
conclude that they were derived from an unerring inspiration. The
former is a natural and reasonable inference; the latter is a
gratuitous hypothesis for which we have never heard of any
evidence. If its advocates will honestly attempt really to prove
it, we are convinced they will be forced to renounce it. The only
way they continue to hold it is by taking it for granted. If,
therefore, the strict eternity of future woe be declared in the
New Testament, we regard it not as a part of the inspired
utterance of Jesus, but as an error which crept in among others
from the surrounding notions of a benighted pagan age.

But, in the next place, we do not admit by any means that the
literal eternity of future damnation is taught in the Scriptures.
On the contrary, we deny such an assertion, for several reasons.
First, we argue from the usage of language before the New
Testament was written. The Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks, often make
most emphatic use of phrases declaring the eternal sufferings of
the wicked in hell; but they must have meant by "eternal" only a
very long time, because a fundamental portion of the great system
of thought on which their religions rested was the idea of
recurring epochs, sundered by immense periods statedly arriving,
when all things were restored, the hells and heavens vanished
away, and God was all in all. If the representations of the
eternal punishment of the wicked, made before the New Testament
was written, were not significant, with metaphysical severity, of
an eternity of duration, but only, with popular looseness, of an
extremely long period, the same may be true of the similar
expressions found in that record.

Secondly, we argue from the usage of language in and after the New
Testament age. The critics have collected, as any one desirous may
easily find, and as every theological scholar well knows, scores
of instances from the writings of authors contemporary with Christ
and his apostles, and succeeding them, where the Greek word for
"eternal" is used popularly, not strictly, in a rhetorical, not in
a philosophical, sense, not denoting a duration literally endless,
but one very prolonged. In all Greek literature the word is
undoubtedly used in a careless a