[B-Greek] More on AIONIOS
Chesster67 at aol.com
Chesster67 at aol.com
Wed Oct 27 23:56:53 EDT 2004
Hi Carl, you wrote:
<<<One really ought to read carefully the BDAG (or BAGD, if that's all you have access to) article in its entirety with its listing of passages under the three headings with listings of passages and an attempt at careful differentiation:
1. pert. to a long period of time, long ago
2. pert. to a period of time without beginning or end, eternal
3. pert. to a period of unending duration, without end>>>
Could it be that definition #1 is the basic meaning of AIONIOS, and that the other two are glosses suited only to certain contexts?
Now, not to discredit the BDAG, but I must take issue with the seemingly equivocal usage of "period" in the three statements. to the best of my understanding, a period is an interval of time, finite by definition. Moreover, the idea that something can have a beginning yet no end is nonsensical to me. Perhaps too many years of philosophy have warped my thinking?
<<<<That is to say: one ought to avoid oversimplification, reductionism, and characaterization in terms of oversimplified antitheses, and it might be well to appreciate the fact that the adjective AIWNIOS/ON relates to the
noun AIWN which has its own range of ambivalence and which often relates to Hebrew OLAM. For AIWN, BDAG offers: hO AIWN MELLWN (ha Olam habba)>>>
Point well taken. Yet, how do we go about determining the relationship between the noun and the adjective in any given context?
<<I think that this range of actual usage of the noun AIWN goes far to clarify the range of observed NT usage of the adjective AIWNIOS; I think moreover that some painstaking care is called for in exploration of the evidence bearing on how the noun and adjective are used in particular texts--it's all too easy to speculate when talking about time and
timelessness or duration outside of a context of evidence of the cultural bases of actual usage in particular texts.>>
That makes fine sense, but what of the root fallacy? How far must one go interpretting the adjective in light on the noun before one is comitting this fallacy?
Thanks for the response.
-Gabe Chesster
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