how are you determining how the original language was meant to be used and understood?
By taking the whole Bible into consideration, we get “the big picture”....because it’s one story, with one author.....written over hundreds of years by many inspired secretaries. (2 Tim 3:16-17)
The big picture is like the one on a jig-saw puzzle box, that helps us put all the pieces where they belong....we would be lost without it. Sometimes we will have clusters of pieces in the vicinity of where they belong, but it’s not till you link those clusters that more of the big picture is revealed.
In the broad view, we see that what was lost in Genesis is restored in Revelation. Everything in between was an object lesson on the value of obedience and the serious consequences of disobeying the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe.
Through God’s chosen nation, we learn more by how he handled their disobedience and were punished, than the times when they repented and were blessed. Through their whole history, we see who Yahweh is and always has been in his expectations regarding his children, both human and angelic, now inextricably bound together we are all involved in one very valuable lesson......the outcome of which determines the eternal destiny of every one of us.
I don’t speak first century koine Greek, so I must rely on teams of scholars, linguists, etc… to translate the Bible into English. Even translators use lexicons, for example, the bdag lexicon was used by Vern Poythress when he worked on the ESV translation. (Bdag has genea in Matthew 24:34 as multitude living at the same time, and the esv translates genea to generation).
OK, so now we get to the human element used in translation.
What were the religious leanings of the translators....who actually taught them the doctrines of the early church?...and which came first? The doctrine or the translation that seemed to justify it?
If the translators already had a “picture” painted by the church to sway their translation to support “church” teachings, who was going to argue with them if the church itself was corrupted? Jesus and the apostles warned of this corruption.
In the early centuries when these doctrines were formulated, so much was adopted from paganism that swayed the translators to imply what the original Scriptures never did.
Three prime examples of this are...
1) The trinity. Not a single statement by either God or his son teach that they are one and the same God.
Triads of gods were common in pagan religions. Egypt for example had their triad long before Abraham’s time. The Greeks had hundreds of gods, often in triads......but right from Israel’s beginnings, their God was very different to those that the nations worshipped...he was only ever a singular entity. (Deut 6:4) Only the true faith was monotheistic.
2) Immortality of the soul. Again a pagan idea incorporated into Christian teachings by an apostate church.
There is not a single verse in the Bible where the words “immortal soul” appear side by side.
The ancient Jews did not believe in “life after death” because that was the lie satan told in the garden.....that they “surely will not die”.....the only way he got to promote that lie was to suggest that the humans go on living in another realm, and in a different form....but strangely that idea is absent from any Bible teaching. There is no “heaven or hell” as opposite destinations for the human race and never was.
Jews were taught about “resurrection”...which is a return to life, not a continuation of it somewhere else. They believed that the dead ‘slept’ unconscious in the grave until Messiah was to call them back to life as he demonstrated with his friend Lazarus. (Eccl 9:5, 10; John 11:11-14) Where was Lazarus before Jesus resurrected him?
3) Hellfire. The place where the wicked are burned in flames for all eternity.....you have to have an immortal soul that lives on after death to experience any kind of suffering. Since the Jews were never taught about such things, As a Jew, Jesus never taught about them.
His reference to “Gehenna” was well understood by his Jewish audience, but the doctrines of the church promoted a cruel and sadistic god, rather than the kind and loving one portrayed by his son.....the one who knew him best of all.
It’s no coincidence that all of Christendom, with few exceptions, adopted all of those teachings. None of them originate from Scripture, except by suggestion based on how the Bible is translated.....bias is very evident when you do your research.