John 8:3 & 9

Maurice A. O'Sullivan mauros at iol.ie
Sun Mar 5 13:33:12 EST 2000


At 08:38 05/03/00, Jason Hare wrote:
>Question: I know that EN MESWi means "in the midst,"
>but can it have a kind of "in his presence" meaning?
>It makes sense that they would have brought the women
>and stood her "in their midst," but it does not make
>must sense that the woman is left "in the midst" of
>Jesus.  Would it not be better "in his presence"?
Jason:
The Louw-Nida lexicon has two entries for MESOS:
[83.9]
 >>>>>>  a position  within an area determined by other objects and 
distributed among such objects - `among, with.'<<<

and [83.10]
 >>>>> a position in the middle of an area (either an object in the midst 
of other objects or an area in the middle of a larger area) - `in the 
middle, in the midst.'

and adds this note:
 >>>> In some contexts the meanings of  MESOS(83.9) and MESOS( (83.10) may 
be said to overlap, or the situation may be such as to provide two 
different interpretations. For example, in Mt 10.16 `sheep in the midst of 
wolves' may mean that the sheep are completely surrounded by wolves or that 
the wolves intermingle with the sheep.

BTW, to get best value from this lexicon I would recommend reading:

Nida, Eugen A., Louw, Johannes P. Lexical Semantics of the Greek New 
Testament. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992.

Regards
Maurice

Maurice A. O'Sullivan  [ Bray, Ireland ]
mauros at iol.ie

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