[B-Greek] PAROUSIA

Daniel Glick lists at danielglick.com
Wed Apr 9 19:07:44 EDT 2003


Clwinbery at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 4/4/03 11:43:17 PM, lgblmay at cox.net writes:
>  
>
>>2) the coming, arrival, advent
>>  2a) the future visible return from heaven of Jesus,
>>  to raise the dead, hold the last judgment, and set up
>>  formally and gloriously the kingdom of God
>>    
>>
>This certainly goes beyond anything Ican see in the word PAROUSIA. It 
>involves a hop-skip-jump trip through the NT i'm aftaid. I wonder if we could 
>stay with the lexical/contextual possibilities of the pres. fem. participle 
>of PAREIMI.
>
Would the list-members agree with this characterization by Barclay? "In 
the papyri and in Hellenistic Greek /parousia/ is the technical word for 
the arrival of an emperor, a king, a governor or famous person into a 
town or province." (New Testament Words, 223) This is a philological 
rather than theological argument, since Barclay is basing the claim on 
Hellenistic--not biblical--usage.

However (and I hope I'm not going too off-topic here), whether PAROUSIA 
is punctilliar or not is theologically irrelevant. A study of the 
contexts in which the word is used in the NT clearly indicates the 
meaning it had in common usage among first-century Christianity.

--Dan Glick


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