[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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