[B-Greek] GENEA (Phil. 2:15): How Close to "Culture"?

Iver Larsen iver_larsen at sil.org
Sat Dec 9 02:49:41 EST 2006


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Webb" <webb at selftest.net>


> Thanks, that's interesting. I think Paul and John often use the word KOSMOS
> to refer to the entire human race (humanity at all times and at all places)
> as a kind of God-less culture. On the other hand, GENEA, in its often
> strongly negative connotation in the NT, definitely contains that God-less
> culture idea, but it narrows it both in place and in time. That's why it
> seems close to the expressions "our culture" and "this culture" to me. Both
> of those expressions are vaguely local and vaguely local in time too. When I
> think of "this culture" in America, for example, I'm not making a precise
> temporal reference, but I'm also not referring to a phenomenon that spans
> more than about twenty years or so. The English word "generation", as in
> "twisted and perverse generation", seems to me to focus too much on the
> temporal aspect, and to lose the cultural aspect that I think lies in the
> connotation of GENEA when it's used by Paul or Jesus with a negative
> connotation.
>
> Webb Mealy

In this particular context, I would say that both culture and world are possible translations, 
because the text further modifies the intended meaning with "twisted and perverse". In our Danish 
version we used "world", but "culture" would have been possible also. The translation "generation" 
is grossly misleading in Modern English, since there is no time element intended in GENEA hAUTH. The 
meaning is more like when the word is used in "a new generation of computers", that is, a new 
"breed" of computers that has something in common that sets them apart from other groups of 
computers.

GENEA (in singular) as used by Paul and Jesus (and Peter in Acts 2:40 as well as whoever in Heb 
3:10) refers to "a group of people with a certain characteristic in common", or in short "such 
people". In itself, the word does not seem to be either negative or positive, but it gets its 
negative sense in the NT from the words that modify it.
The only positive context is in Matt 24:34 and parallels (Mrk 13:30, Luk 21,32).

Iver Larsen 




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