I don't find the 'New Translation's' transliteration approach very helpful. I don't know why the translator is resisting offering a translation.Doherty in his book, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man - The Case for a Mythical Jesus, makes the case that Paul’s epistles, unlike the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, portrays Jesus as a cosmic being who is crucified by another imperfect divine being, and that it is this cosmic event that was revealed to the apostles and prophets through spiritual insight using a pesher approach (i.e., allegorizing) of Jewish scriptures.
Most people do not know this because the epistles are commonly translated in a way to support a historical meaning to the Gospel stories, something Paul neither knows about nor writes about, because they were written after his death. But what Paul did actually write about when translated literally arguably references a cosmic event. In that case, the Gospels were written after Paul’s death to personify his conceptions of cosmic events into a mythical story for instruction. But when the mythical stories in the Gospels were later made historical by the Roman church then the true cosmic event perceived by Paul and the other apostles became subordinated to supernatural myths and superstitions through the process of translation, —hence, the point of the OP.
From Doherty, “All this [Paul’s conception of a cosmic event] fits into that most fundamental of ancient concepts outlined earlier: the idea that earth was the mirror image of heaven, the product of proceeding from the archetype, the visible material counterpart to the genuine spiritual reality above.” (Doherty, Kindle Locations 21392-21398)
All this should be relevant to a-theists because if there actually is an alternative meaning to Paul’s epistles that infers the existence of invisible universal principles affecting all life in this universe, wouldn’t you want to know? Presuming, of course, that it is better to consider invisible universal principles influencing all life in the universe (a real possibility) versus a superman flying through the air after reassembling his decomposing human body (an impossibility).
With that idea prefaced, then what did Paul actually write regarding the crucifixion of Jesus? Here it is from the new translation mentioned in the OP compared to the common translation. Clearly, the translators of the common translation want their readers to take a meaning of the "rulers of this age" to be Pontius Pilate and the Jewish Sanhedrin. But "Archons", what is that? What is the intended meaning of that?
1 Cor. 2:8, A New Translation 1 Cor 2:8 ESV “Which none of this age’s Archons knew; for had they known they would not have crucified the Lord of glory;” “None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory."
Per Doherty,
“There has not been a universal scholarly consensus on what Paul has in mind in 1 Corinthians 2:6 and 8, but many commentators (1) over the last century, some reluctantly, have decided that he is referring to the demon spirits. The term aion, age (or sometimes in the plural, “ages”), was in a religious and apocalyptic context a reference to the present age of the world, in the sense of all recorded history. The next or “coming” age was the one due to follow the awaited Day of the Lord, when God’s kingdom would be established. One of the governing ideas of the period was that the world [this age] to the present point had been under the the control of the evil angels and spirit powers, and that the coming of the new age would see their long awaited overthrow.
Humanity was engaged in a war against demons, and one of the strongest appeals of the Greek salvation cults was their promise of divine aid in this war, on a personal level. Thus “rulers of this age” [archons] should not be seen as referring to the current secular authorities who happen to be in power in present political circumstances…Rather, Paul envisions that those in the present age who have controlled the earth and separated it from heaven, the evil angelic powers, are approaching their time of “passing away” (1 Cor. 2:6) and that they did not understand God’s purposes, namely their own destruction, when they inadvertently crucified “the Lord of glory.”
(Please note that terminology by Doherty involving “demons”, and “angels”, used above carry a lot of baggage in large part due to the mythical Gospel stories (e.g. superman Jesus making legions of demons doing his bidding). I recommend jettisoning the baggage that comes with those terms from the Gospel stories and look beyond them in the sense of Paul’s conception, that is, of invisible, universal influences upon life in this universe.)
(Ephesians 6:12, A New Translation) “Because we are wrestling not against blood and flesh, but against the Archons, against the Powers, against the Cosmic Rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the celestial places.”
For the sake of brevity I am going to end here but Doherty goes on to extensively demonstrate that such a meaning of a cosmic event was accepted by some of the earliest church fathers, to include, Ignatius, and Origen, before Tertullian came along and dismissed it entirely. There is much more in the Nag Hammadi written by a diverse background of Christians and in the Dead Sea Scrolls written up to 200 years B.C. by a Jewish sect, namely, the Essenes. IOW, this conception of universal principles influencing life in our universe goes all the way back to second Temple Judaism before formal Christianity began.
Reference:
- Some of those who judge “rulers of this age” to be a reference to the demon spirits: S. G. F. Brandon ( History, Time and Deity , p.167), C. K. Barrett ( First Epistle to the Corinthians , p.72), Jean Héring ( The First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians , p.16-17), Paula Fredriksen ( From Jesus to Christ , p.56), S. D. F. Salmond ( Expositor’s Greek Testament: Ephesians , p.284). Delling, in the article on “ archōn ” in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (I, p.488-9) regards the phrase “ tou aiōnos toutou ” as an objective, not a temporal genitive, and thus the term is “not, then, referring to earthly rulers” (n.7). Paul Ellingworth ( A Translator’s Handbook for 1 Corinthians , p.46) says: “A majority of scholars think that supernatural powers are intended here.”
As for the remainder, I'm not sure that Doherty is a terribly credible source. But at 1 Corinthians 2:8 I would assume the reference is to mundane rulers, given Romans 13:3. and the reference to crucifixion.
Do you have any examples of ἄρχων being firmly used of 'spiritual' powers?