[B-Greek] "A little Greek ... " (or "Ask a little question ...")
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Jul 18 06:45:01 EDT 2007
Today's tidbit from the blogs (fear not; I don't intend to do this
every day) is from Wayne Leman's "Better Bibles Blog," a regular
contributor to which has been Suzanne McCarthy, a keen explorer of
the curiously relevant odds and ends of Biblical Greek and Hebrew and
even of the beauties of Sappho's Lesbian verse in its original Aeolic
dialect. In one of her recent entries (which she terms "hen-
scratches") she cites from an article by F.F. Bruce entitled, "The
Greek Language and the Christian Ministry." For me the intriguing
tidbit concerns the difficulties of understanding the Greek word
πλήρωμα (PLHRWMA) in Col. 1:19; I did a second-take on this
because intrepid list-member Eddie Mishoe has been haranguing me off-
list about the verb PLHROW and the noun PLHRWMA and won't take as my
answer that i really don't understand what the verb and noun are
intended to mean in Ephesians (much less in Colossians). Here's part
of what Bruce says -- not about what PLHRWMA means but about the
process of attempting to understand it:
“Well, so be it. You wish to know Greek sufficiently well to follow
the account given of a word in a lexicon or the discussion of its
meaning given in Lightfoot or Westcott. You are studying the Epistle
to the Colossians and you come to verse 19 of chapter 1: “For it was
the good pleasure of the Father that in him should all the fulness
dwell “as the R.V. renders itÅ\with the marginal alternative:
“For the whole fulness of God was pleased to dwell in Him”. The
term “fulness” plainly has some special significance here, and you
wish to find out exactly what its meaning is.
“You have a lexicon within arm’s reachÅ\perhaps Grimm-ThayerÅ
\for you have been told by someone that Liddell and Scott, superb as
it is for the Classical tongue, is hardly adequate for New Testament
studyÅ\and Lightfoot’s commentary lies open on your desk. You know
that the Greek word which Paul uses for “fulness” is
“pleroma”, so you turn up “pleroma” in Grimm-Thayer.
“The first thing you are told is that the noun comes from the verb
“plero®≠”; next you are told that it is “Sept.”. (What does
that mean? Ah, Septuagint!) for something or other in Hebrew letters
(so it pays to know at least the Hebrew alphabet even when looking up
a Greek word in a lexicon of New Testament Greek). Then you have a
couple of quotations from a pagan Greek author to illustrate the
etymological force of the noun, and further down, the various shades
of New Testament usage are illustrated by reference to the
Septuagint, to pagan Greek authors and to a Jewish Greek author.
“How do you propose to make use of these references? Perhaps
Lightfoot will help you. You see in his footnote to the text that he
has a detached note on “pleroma”. You turn it up and find that it
runs to seventeen pages (pages 257-273) and reproduces far more
quotation from non-Biblical Greek than Grimm-Thayer’s entry did. In
fact, the more Greek you know, the more you will be able to profit by
Lightfoot’s note. And that means that the more Greek you know, the
more sensitive and accurate will be your appreciation of the meaning
of this word in the context here.
“You cannot, in fact, understand one small book in any language
without knowing more about the language than is contained in that
small book. One meets at times with laborious discussions of the
meaning of some word by a painstaking student who has followed the
“concordant” method. He has mechanically traced its usage through
the New Testament and perhaps through the Septuagint as well, and
cannot see that any more light could be thrown upon it.
“But it is all too evident to anyone who has something of a feeling
for the language, that much of this labour is wasted, because the man
knows individual vocables but does not know Greek. He tells us
confidently, for example, that the words at the end of II
Thessalonians 2. 7 (“until he be taken out of the way”, R.V.) do
not mean what the ordinary translations suggest, because he has
looked up each word in the clause and studied its usage, and knows
that they can only mean “until out of the midst he (or it) comes to
pass”. Yes, he knows Greek words, but he does not know Greek; ... “
The whole of Bruce's article can be read online or downloaded at
http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/greek_bruce.pdf
Thank you, Suzanne. One never can guess what your "hen-scratches"
might claw up!
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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