Rethinking Luke 23:43, Is “Today” When the Thief Enters Paradise—or When Jesus Speaks the Promise?

Is “Today” when the thief enters paradise—or when Jesus speaks the promise? Luke 23:43, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” However, the original Greek lacked punctuation, and the sentence can also be translated, “Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in Paradise.” This alternative, while not common in many translations, is grammatically legitimate. The Greek text reads: ἀμὴν σοι λέγω, σήμερον μετ᾽ ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ. Literally: “Truly to you I say today with me you will be in Paradise.”

Why does this matter? For one, it contradicts John 20:17. After His resurrection, Jesus tells Mary, “I have not yet ascended to the Father.” If Paradise is understood as Heaven or the Father’s presence, Jesus was not yet there on the Third Day, making it problematic to claim He was there with the thief on the day of the crucifixion.  

So, what did the early Church teach? As I covered in Chapter Six of Gehenna Revisited: Rebutting Francis Chan, scholars like Alister McGrath and early theologians such as Irenaeus, Methodius, and Tertullian, associated Paradise with our resurrected life in the Kingdom of God on a renewed earth. It was not a place entered immediately at death. The modern Platonic view of “heaven” differs significantly from the views of the early Church.

Jesus consistently used satire when dealing with the religious leaders. As I covered in Chapter Four of Gehenna Revisited, Jesus used the Pharisees’ own mythological teachings to rebuke their pride and hypocrisy—not to affirm Greek or Roman beliefs about the afterlife. If He did not endorse their Hades, it is unlikely that He endorsed their Greek “Paradise.”

There is also an important phrase to consider. The phrase “Amen I Say to You” in Greek is, ἀμὴν λέγω σοι (“Truly I say to you”). It is a recurring formula used by Jesus. However, nowhere else does He insert “today” into that phrase. That He does so here may emphasize the urgency of the moment—not the timing of Paradise.

The thief asked to be “remembered” when Jesus came into His Kingdom. That is an eschatological request. Jesus’s response, then, is better understood not as promising immediate entrance into Paradise, but as offering a certain promise of the thief's future presence in the coming Kingdom of God. The statement “I say to you today” mirrors Old Testament prophetic phrasing used to confirm the certainty of a future promise. (e.g., Deuteronomy 4:26, 5:1-3, 6:6, 30:15-18, Zechariah 9:12.)

    The traditional rendering of Luke 23:43 creates theological challenges. The alternate rendering, “Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in Paradise,” not only fits the Greek, it fits with the broader Biblical narrative of bodily resurrection, the restored creation, and the timing of God’s Kingdom. This reading allows us to affirm Jesus’s words without forcing Him into alignment with corrupted or mythological ideas about the afterlife—ideas He consistently opposed.