[B-Greek] Do You Love Me?

David McKay gontroppo at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 22 22:07:00 EDT 2007


> 
>   R.C. Trench, many years ago, wrote a book titled
> Synonyms of The New  Testament.  In his treatment of
AGAPAW and FILEW, he  argues for a 
> distinction of meanings,  FILEW referring to an
> affectionate love, while 
> AGAPAW denotes an action of the will.  He has
> several pages of material 
> making his case.
> 
Hi Gene
Trench was one of the Nineteenth Century writers who
introduced this largely new view that there was a
distinction in meaning between, not only AGAPAW and
FILEW, but also between many other biblical synonyms.

Writers such as D A Carson, Moises Silva, and
especially James Barr have shown clearly that many of
the distinctions that were seen by Trench and others,
which may have been inherent in the original words, 
had largely disappeared by the time of the LXX and NT.

CRONOS and KAIROS are another of these pairs, which
Barr dealt with in his book Biblical Words For Time.

Butit is easy to check this for yourself. Look up the
words FILEW and AGAPAW and the related nouns and you
will see that they are frequently interchangeably
used. In fact, the proposed differences are often
transposed, so that the word which was supposed to be
the colder one is by some said to be the deep,
affectionate one.

If we must see a difference between the two words in
John 21, it is a moot point whether the love we should
be striving for is AGAPAW or FILEW.

If there is intended to be a distinction in meaning
between the two words, what is the difference between
John being the disciple whom Jesus HGAPA in John 13:23
and EFILEI in John 20:2? Turning to John 21, he is
agaoin the disciple whom Jesus HGAPA.

David McKay
www.gontroppo.blogspot.com





 

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