[B-Greek] What about Thayer's Lexicon?
Raymond Regalado
fwgk5942 at mb.infoweb.ne.jp
Sat Feb 28 20:03:58 EST 2004
On 2004.2.29, at 04:29 AM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
> Raymond, you may find a few matters upon which list-members hold some
> common standard view, but you won't find many. Indeed there are some
> matters about which I get the impression those who pose a question are
> looking for someone to agree with a perspective they've already
> adopted.
Haha. Well, finding someone who thinks the same way we do is one way
we try to keep our sanity, I guess, so it may not be entirely bad. ;-)
> With regard to Thayer, on looking at the archives, I find this citation
> from Paul Wendland in December of 2001 about as fine a statement on the
> question as could be made; it may be that you're actually citing from
> it
> yourself:
<snip>
Yes, I was quoting from that and I agree that it was perhaps the finest
post on the Thayer issue that I have read in the archives. I find the
following part especially intriguing:
>I don't think the problem is so much one of erroneous definitions. I
>think Thayer in many ways is a fine and useful dictionary. He did his
>work at a time before the results of the research in the papyri were
>widely accepted and thus at a time when many scholars were still
clinging
>to the belief there was something especially exalted about the
vocabulary
>and syntax of the New Testament. A kind of special Holy Ghost
language.
>So Thayer identified a number of words as being "unique" to Biblical
Greek
>which Diessman (Light from the Ancient East, chapter 2, p, 65ff )
>correctly points out as being used by very ordinary people writing on
>papyri. You still run across the same thing today at times when folks
>overstate the suppleness of the Greek language as if "only Greek" were
>capable of expressing such sublime thoughts.
I do hope the above doesn't mean that Thayer himself believed that
Greek was a "special Holy Ghost language". Anyway, sometime ago I was
discussing the idea of the relevant capabilities of various languages
for "expressing sublime thoughts". The people I was discussing this
with were kind of, well, "old-fashioned", so to speak (they use the
King James version, they speak longingly of the good old days when
"Western" society and culture were more "Christian", etc.). I was
debunking their claim that English and other Western languages were
"inherently superior" to, say, East Asian languages for the expression
of "Christian thought". I guess the idea that one language can be
"inherently superior" (not just relatively undeveloped) to another may
be a relic of the past indeed. At any rate, they were exalting
English, not Greek! ;-)
Kind Regards,
Raymond Regalado
Tokyo, Japan
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