Wes Wood wrote:Whether you are aware of it or not, I have enjoyed most of your solo posts.
Well, it's not a lonely solo. The forum is a rather tightly-knit group, with more-or-less a single motivation. Even those who are not known to me are, by virtue of that not strangers to me in their purposes or intents. The silent interlocutors in the shadows beyond the soliloquy's well-lit circle.
Wes Wood wrote:What I actually had in mind when I made that comment was that you would be more likely to reap some benefit if someone else interacted with your thoughts. However, since it was I who responded, maybe I should say, "you were infinitesimally more likely to reap some benefit."
It is generally thought that higher order thinking and advancement of knowledge comes engagement with others, employing a conceptually rich and well-patterned metalanguage. An ever more finely variegated system of description is thought to allow for seeing things more clearly, but there is another side to that. By adding further definitional clarity to an existing system of classification we actually entrench and assume that the previous categorisations by using them as the basis for subclassification. That of course is not a novel observation of mine - in your field, species and genera are reclassified or differently arranged as the need arises or as different researchers determine. Analysis of large corpora of texts to determine meaning, more-or-less assumes that one or more meanings are there to be found. The meaning of ἐπικείμενος is only listed as "lie upon" "in contact with a surface", but I would need to have the hint that the meaning was possibly "be placed over" (as opposed to "in contact with". The other glosses given for the word are sort of worked out from this pseudo-etymological basis too. If we were looking for
the gap between the thing lain "upon" and the thing laid "upon", it is too difficult to find. It is not in the text - words, etc., it is in the nature of the things. Here is
flicker image of one possible cooking arrangement. The
LSJ entry gives an example of islands being not in contact. Storms (χειμών) are up in the air, and the attempts by Paul and the others to see the heavenly bodies suggest that the storm was "looming over" them, at least it was in the region of the atmosphere were storms have their natural place, blocking their view, not immanently down with them making them uncomfortable.
Acts 27:20 wrote:Μήτε δὲ ἡλίου μήτε ἄστρων ἐπιφαινόντων ἐπὶ πλείονας ἡμέρας, χειμῶνός τε οὐκ ὀλίγου ἐπικειμένου,
The same could be said of the "missing" third category of meaning in φιλέω, ie "to be in a relationship of mutual benefit or reciprocal advantage" could only be found in a search, if one was looking for it. With the current two meanings (one being the extension of the other), "like / love", and "express ones feelings of liking / loving by affection" that we read in BDAG, we are left thinking in the realm of personal emotions and affectations. Φιλέω is manifestly a social word in it's basic meaning - part of the interrelatedness of society. The compounds like φιλότεκνος etc. also appear to be emotional, affectionate or internal in the present glossing. "Loving" or "hugging and kissing" one's husband and children, is quite different from "putting their interests before or one an equal footing with her own". To explicate the socially defined expectations of φίλος / φιλέω, the meaning of a word like φιλοφρόνως could be scaffolded as "having in mind to put our interests before his own, as social mores dictate one should do for a φίλος."
The (physical) "gap" between the (bed of) coal(s) and the fish comes from a knowledge of how cooking is done, and how coals are extinguished by dropping a lump of bread drough onto them - experience with something, and the cause and effect reasoning are we might call "common sense". The "gap" of the assumed or unstated common knowledge of where a φίλος fits into one's life and what the social expectations of what the verb φιλέω involved, both form the "common sense" background to the word. We haven't undergone the socialisation processes to "instinctively" what should or shouldn't be done for a φίλος, but we could assume that what is described in the New Testament at least forms a subset of what constitutes φιλία.
Some of those reciprocal things in a φίλος - φίλος relationship evidenced in the New Testament are ξενίζειν "to show hospitality / to 'mi casa es su casa' somebody" (Acts 28:7), ἐπιμελείας τυχεῖν "to care for the needs of ones φίλος" (Acts 27:3), χρῆσόν τίνι τί "to do somebody a favour (cf. δανείζειν which takes place outside a φίλος - φίλος relationship) and lend him something" (Luke 11:5), παρατίθημι τίνι τί, "to set something before somebody as a meal" (Luke 11:6). In John 21:15-19 applying the concept of φιλία as socially structured reciprociety or mutual obligation, we might get a conversation that could be recomposed spelling out the relationship of mutual umposition, in terms that avoid imposing, something like:
- J: Hey Shimon, we're best mates, right?
- P: Yeah, you've seen for yourself that I've got your back.
- J: Ay. If you do one thing for me, do this, see that the lambs get enough to eat.
- J (after a time of silence): We are mates, right, aren't we?
- P: Yeah, just think about how many times I've stuck my neck out for you.
- J: Well, keep an eye on the sheep, if you could do that for me.
- J (after a while longer): You do look out for my interests, don't you?
- P: Quit bugging me with all these questions, you don't need to butter me up to get a favour out of me. Look, you're a thinking kind of guy, and you, you've even had first-hand experience of me looking after things for you.
- J: Right-o, then. Will you please make sure the sheep are well-fed.
Back to the point, evidently one φίλος could expect another φίλος to look after his livestock for him, when he was (going to be) absent - off on some other business or other. Those are just a few of what must have been many social obligations and reasonable (in terms of their culture) expectations. That all doesn't need to be stated because it is the backdrop for the action.
I'm not quite clear how narrator roles align with verb tenses, but it seems that if the narrator of the story was aware of us - who don't have the same sort of cultural background - as being the audience, then I guess the that the discursive explanations would be in relative phrases, "hey get this, if you can believe it" / "just what is that guy doing" (MAD comic / college humour) narrator voice that expects us to be shocked would be in the -θη verbs, and the brief one-to-ne correspondence things would be expressed participally. But in the absence of us from the immediately intended audience, leaves us and our reference works to make sense of a text that is anything but culturally and technologically neutral - especially so in cases like these.
Seriously though, Wes, now that John 21 can recite itself in my head, I am starting to get occasional bursts of image and concept thinking rather than words, translation and metalinguistic analytical thinking going on in my head. A bit like the charges for coffman engine starter going off inside my head but then splutter splutter and nothing coming of it. The (natural) image in this case, is the fish and bread on sticks "over", but not "on" the charcoal. I was wondering whether those, who learnt Greek through interactive methods, like RB or PN's students and others also have a gap when they process this conceptually and imaginatively.