meirakion, pais, ephebos

Steven Craig Miller scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Sat Dec 4 09:30:12 EST 1999


To: Christopher Hutson,

CH: << I don't follow you. The narrator is certainly speaking about the 
same boy, isn't he? Why would it make any different that it is not his own 
son? >>

Sorry, I mistakenly took your reply (<< Well, the PAIS in Matt 17:18 
happens to be a hUIOS (17:15). >>) to be a reply against the assertion by 
Davies and Allison: << ... only once in the NT does PAIS clearly mean 'son' 
(Jn 4.51). >>

CH: << The point is that PAIS in Mt 17:15 does not mean DOULOS.  Matthew 
can use PAIS as a synonym of DOULOS, but he does not always, and here he 
clearly does not.  >>

That is true, but the assertion W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison was:

<< ... only once in the NT does PAIS clearly mean 'son' (Jn 4.51). For the 
rest it seems to mean 'servant' (cf. Mt 14.2; 12.18) or 'youngster' (cf. 
17.18). And in the LXX PAIS rarely translates ben: it is most commonly the 
equivalent of `ebed. So we prefer to translate 'servant.' One should think 
of a house slave >> (2:21).

Thus at Mt 17:18, the term PAIS is being used (according to Davies & 
Allison) to mean "youngster." For the term PAIS to mean "son" here, it 
would have to have something like the possessive pronoun "his" added. And I 
would add that it is probably more common for a parent to refer to his or 
her child by the terms "son" or "daughter," than it would be for a parent 
to refer to their child by the term "child." For example, at Mt 17:15 the 
father refers to his son as hUIOS and not PAIS. And so, at Mt 8:8, if the 
centurion was wanting to refer to his own son one might have expected hO 
UIOS MOU rather than hO PAIS MOU.

What do you think?

-Steven Craig Miller
Alton, Illinois (USA)
scmiller at www.plantnet.com

"Words are like people. To know them well one must meet them on their own 
level, in their own environment. In different circumstances they react 
differently. Like a face they take on varying expressions. Some of them 
move from place to place; some never return to their earlier familiar 
surroundings. But to know their past is to know a little better what makes 
them act as they do in the present" (Frederick W. Danker, "Multipurpose 
Tools for Bible Study," 1993:135).




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