[B-Greek] Follow up to Mitch's AGAPAW and FILEW

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Aug 17 06:26:15 EDT 2003


At 3:19 PM -0700 8/16/03, waldo slusher wrote:
>I think this passage by Cassius, along with the
>Father's love (FILEW) for the Son, as well as other
>usages of these two verbs, should be given more
>consideration to the standard "growing consensus" (??)
>of their being no/little distinction. I doubt the
>interchange of these two verbs in John 21 had the same
>impact on first century readers as it seems to be
>having on modern scholars. I vote we continue to
>separate them rather than merge them.

It really isn't a matter of "separating" vs. "merging" distinctive senses
of AGAPAW and FILEW; rather it's a matter of discerning precisely WHERE a
distinctive sense of one or the other is actually in play in a particular
passage. What HAS been demonstrated is that there are (NT Biblical) texts
wherein either verb seems to be used in the same sense as the other. Nobody
is arguing that they are universally synonymous in all texts and I think it
is clear that there are NT Biblical texts where AGAPAW is the preferred
verb or AGAPH the preferred noun, as for instance in 1 Cor 13. The real
problem, I think, comes from the endeavor to base judgments about the
meaning of a word upon abstract notions of what the word means or upon an
etymology rather than upon careful examination of usage in a variety of
contexts.

Furthermore, when I spoke of a "growing consensus" regarding synonymous
usage of AGAPAW and FILEW, I pointedly referred to John 21, where there was
once a widespread view that the exchange between Peter and Jesus had
particularly profound dimensions determined by the alternation of these two
verbs there; the "growing consensus" to which I referred is that the
alternation in that passage does not have the profound dimensions that were
assumed and much sermonized about in the last century.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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