[B-Greek] EUSEBEIA
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Sep 10 12:34:09 EDT 2006
On Sep 9, 2006, at 11:16 PM, shoes6 at juno.com wrote:
>
> Can someone please help me get a good understanding of EUSEBEIA ?
>
> Some lexicons give "piety", "reverence", "devoutness", etc, as glosses
> for the word EUSEBEIA. Various Bibles translate or paraphrase it as
> "godliness", "serving God", and more. Clearly there is some sense
> here
> which our modern English language doesn't contain conveniently. (I'm
> guessing that American culture tends to "slip my grip" on a concept
> like this, too.)
>
> When we dissect the word (which is always hazardous: don't try to
> dissect a pineapple or butterfly this way!), we get EU + SEBW.
> So, might the word mean "well-reverent"? Or perhaps if the similar
> word QEOSEBEIA might be translated "worship/fear of God" or
> "worship/fear of the gods", then might EUSEBEIA mean "respect for the
> good"?
>
> This one feels slippery to me.
>
> All replies will be appreciated.
Ted, you really ought to be content with what BDAG and L&N offer you.
I think that the problem with words like this is that they have a
certain degree
of relativity insofar as different individuals and especially
different groups
have different conceptions of what it means to be "godly" or "pious" or
"reverent." The Athenians put Socrates to death for want of EUSEBEIA,
although many, perhaps most, readers of Plato's Apology, may prefer to
think that Socrates practiced a higher form of EUSEBEIA than those who
voted to execute him.
The Intro to NT textook that I used to use when teaching an Intro to NT
course was originally done by Norman Perrin, then revised by Dennis
Duling (http://tinyurl.com/k54n7); one of the more intriguing appendices
in the later editions of that textbook was entitled "NT Ways of being
religious
in the world"; it was an attempt to catalogue nuanced differences
between
conceptions of faith and right practice implicit or explicit in
different
documents or groups of documents (e.g. Johannine lit, Pauline lit,
etc.).
It seems to me that if one understands EUSEBEIA as meaning "being
religious," one should appreciate that it is a term that points to a
notion
of acceptable behavior without spelling out precisely what acceptable
behavior is in every respect. Isn't that what you'd expect with
respect to
such words as "piety," "reverence," and "devoutness"?
I don't know if that helps or not, but I really don't think any single
one-word English equivalent is going to serve to convey what
EUSEBEIA is or means.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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