Jesus quoted that prophesy with regard to "Gehenna". It was not place of conscious punishment, but a rubbish dump outside of Jerusalem's walls where the city's refuse, the carcasses of dead animals and the corpses of executed criminals were cast for disposal. The fires of Gehenna never went out because rubbish and everything else thrown in there needed to be constantly consumed. What the flames missed, the maggots finished off.
I believe that eternal separation from God means eternal death, not a conscious existence of suffering in any way. No living thing was ever thrown into gehenna. Those not considered worthy of a decent burial were also thought not to be in line for a resurrection...hence eternal death.
No punishment under God's law involved tortured. The highest penalty paid for any crime was death. Israel did not even have prisons. It had no need to punish for punishment's sake. All punishments aside from the death penalty were concerned with recompense for the victim, making the perpetrators work to compensate for what was done to their victims.
By being made accountable, the criminals were also given the opportunity to mend their ways and "go and sin no more".
For a person to be punished after death, a person would have to be alive....to punish them forever, they would have to live forever.
Everlasting life is promised only to the righteous.
I agree that the literal gehenna did not have the resurrected dead in it, who will resurrect at the last judgment. But most of your argument above is from analogy and logic but not scripture.
The SAME Greek word is used for everlasting for the righteous and the unrighteous, so the righteous will be extinguished in the new age also if you're correct.
I never said people are eternally tortured. Per Luke 16, however, a conscious man is uncomfortable and asked Abraham (a real person, named) to witness to his brother, so that his brother would not be in that place until the judgment.
You sound as if gehenna is the sole word to discuss. What about hades, sheol, the grave, judgment, etc.?
You are also not dealing with the Isaiah passage as literal -
“And they shall go forth and look
Upon the corpses of the men
Who have transgressed against Me.
For their worm does not die,
And their fire is not quenched.
They shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”
...worm does NOT DIE
...fire NOT QUENCHED
they SHALL BE...
and the prior verses include "from new Moon to new Moon and Sabbath to Sabbath" so you'd have to make their extermination last for 30 days to consume the wicked. A body is utterly cremated in mere hours.
Eternal death is the compliment to eternal life. My position is in the source languages and is literal, clear, doctrinal.
Many thousands of Christian sects have read the Bible for themselves and trusted Jesus for salvation and understood eternal Hell from the Greek.