And I will hold that view unless/until someone can show me something is in error by credible, verifiable, historical, grammatical, lexical evidence. And FYI that is not Tentmaker.
Say no more. Here's David Bentley Hart on the matter. As I know you're a great fan, I've left out his own thoughts to avoid any pro-DBH bias and just given what he says about the historical use of aionios:
"New Testament scholars as theologically diverse as Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright have suggested that translators might do well in many or most instances to render aiōnios as “of the age to come.”
If one consults the literary remains of Greek-speaking Jewish scholars of late antiquity one will find few instances of aiōn or aiōnios used to indicate eternal duration: for both Philo of Alexandria (an older contemporary of Jesus) and Josephus (born within a decade of the crucifixion), an “aeon” is still only a limited period of time, usually a single lifetime, but perhaps as much as three generations. And the same is true of Christian thinkers of the early centuries.
Late in the fourth century, John Chrysostom, in his commentary on Ephesians, even used the word aiōnios of the kingdom of the devil specifically to indicate that it is temporary (for it will last only till the end of the present age, he explains). Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea, reported that the vast majority of his fellow Christians (at least, in the Greek-speaking East with which he was familiar) assumed that “hell” is not an eternal condition, and that the “aiōnios punishment” of the age to come would end when the soul had been purified of its sins and thus prepared for union with God.
Well into the sixth century, the great Platonist philosopher Olympiodorus the Younger could state as rather obvious that the suffering of wicked souls in Tartarus is certainly not endless, atelevtos, but is merely aiōnios; and the squalidly brutal and witless Christian emperor Justinian, as part of his campaign to extinguish the universalism of the “Origenists,” found it necessary to substitute aiōnios with the word atelevtētos when describing the punishments of hell, since aiōnios was not decisive.
Early in the eighth century, John of Damascus delineated four meanings of aiōn, the last of which—“eternity”—is offered as not an intrinsic, but merely an imputed, connotation, presumed whenever the word is used of something (like the Age of God’s Kingdom) known to be endless; and even then, John affirms, the true eternity of God is beyond all ages.
As late as the thirteenth century, the East Syrian bishop Solomon of Bostra, in his authoritative compilation of the teachings of the “holy fathers” of Syrian Christian tradition, stated simply as a matter of fact that in the New Testament le-alam (the Syriac rendering of aiōnios) does not mean eternal, and that of course hell is not endless.
And the fourteenth-century East Syrian Patriarch Timotheus II thought it uncontroversial to assert that the aiōnios pains of hell will come to an end when the souls cleansed by them, through the prayers of the saints, enter paradise. Conscious of the problems the word aiōnios presents, some Anglophone translators have in the past chosen simply to use an Anglicized version of the Greek word, “aeonian,” and thereby avoid the issue of its precise meaning altogether."
