punishment: the penalty imposed on a wrongdoer, and above all the sentence God hands down at judgment
This is the noun behind the verb κολάζω, "to punish." It names a penalty handed out to someone who has done wrong, and in both of its New Testament appearances the one handing it out is God. In older Greek writing the word had a narrower edge: Plato and Aristotle used it for punishment aimed at improving the person punished, and set it against a different word for repaying an offense on behalf of the injured party (τιμωρία). By the first century that tidy split had largely worn away, and Greek writers used this word for punishment of any kind, including the final and fatal kind.
The Greek Old Testament shows the drift plainly. There the word covers God's punishment of idolatry and of crime, often ending in death, with nothing corrective about it, and Jewish writers of the same period use it the same way for severe and lasting penalties. So when Matthew 25:46 speaks of people going away into "eternal punishment," the noun itself simply names the sentence God imposes. Whether that sentence never ends, ends in destruction, or finally heals the one who suffers it is argued from the adjective translated "eternal" and from the balance of the sentence, not from this word.
1 John 4:18 puts the word to a quieter use: "fear has punishment." The point is not that a frightened person will be punished later. It is that fear already carries the penalty inside it, so that dreading God's judgment is tasting the sentence in advance, which is why love grown to maturity throws that fear out.
Nuances
What the phrase "eternal punishment" in Matthew 25:46 describes. All sides agree that the noun kolasis names the penalty God imposes; they divide over its duration and its nature, an argument driven chiefly by the adjective aiōnios and by the parallel with "eternal life" in the same clause.
- majorityUnending conscious punishment. The one adjective governs both clauses in a single balanced sentence, so the punishment lasts exactly as long as the life set opposite it. This is the reading of the tradition from Augustine onward and of most critical commentary.; Augustine, De Civitate Dei 21.23; D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God (Zondervan, 1996); Robert A. Peterson, Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment (P and R, 1995)
- minorityPunishment whose outcome is irreversible destruction. On this reading aiōnios can qualify an act by its age-to-come character and by its unending consequences rather than by an unending process, so the parallel with eternal life holds without requiring conscious torment that never ends.; R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT (Eerdmans, 2007), 966-67; Edward W. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, 3rd ed. (Cascade, 2011)
- minorityCorrective punishment belonging to the age to come and therefore bounded. This reading takes kolasis as remedial and aiōnios as age-enduring rather than everlasting, appealing to the Greek Fathers who taught universal restoration.; Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Brill, 2013); David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Press, 2019); Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Cascade, 2014)
Disputed
Whether kolasis in first-century Greek still carried the classical sense of corrective punishment, aimed at reforming the offender, or had become a general word for punishment of any kind.
- majorityBy the Koine period the word was a general term for punishment, including divine and final punishment, with no built-in aim of reform. BDAG observes that Aristotle's limitation of the term to disciplinary action is not reflected in general usage, and the Septuagint, Philo, and Josephus apply the word group to lethal and retributive penalties.; BDAG, s.v. κολάζω; LSJ, s.v. κόλασις; J. Schneider, "κολάζω, κόλασις," TDNT 3:814-17; J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 38.2
- minorityThe word kept its classical orientation toward remedial punishment, standing over against timōria as retributive justice, and the Greek Fathers who taught universal restoration read it that way. Hart concedes that the term had perhaps become somewhat less specific in connotation.; David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (Yale University Press, 2017), 546-47; Ilaria L. E. Ramelli and David Konstan, Terms for Eternity: Aiônios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts (Gorgias, 2007); Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Brill, 2013)