Re: Sin and Language

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 04 1996 - 09:49:52 EST


At 6:06 AM 1/4/96, Stephen Carlson wrote:
>After consulting my lexicons on hAMARTANW (Middle Liddel & BAGD), it
>seems clear that the meaning of hAMARTANW has evolved from Homeric
>times with the meaning of "to miss the mark" or "to fail in one's
>purpose" to Plato and others to mean "to trangress a moral law" and
>finally to Septuagintal communities with the meaning "to trangress
>God's law." Thus, we may be engaging in an anarchonism if we blithely
>assume that whatever meaning a word had in the eighth century B.C.
>is still available in the first century A.D.
>
>Although it's possible that the meaning of "missing the mark" had
>survived over the course of time in everyday speech, I think we also
>need to consider the possibility that most educated Greeks studied the
>the Homeric texts and would therefore be familiar with such a usage
>even if it was a bit archaic. Therefore, the survival of that meaning,
>possibly seen in Rm3:23, could be in essence a Homeric allusion on the
>part of Paul. This fits in well Paul's exploiting Greek metaphors.

You make an interesting point, Stephen, regarding older traditional senses
of words used even in early epic being applied in the Koine and even in NT
writers. Although this might be a lesser influence in most NT authors, it
is a fact that Homer, lyric & elegiac poetry, and tragedy, were certainly
part of the educational system of Hellenistic cities. We don't really know
anything concrete about Paul's education in Tarsus, i.e. whether he had the
lower levels of Greek education, but it certainly is not unlikely. His
Areopagus speech in Acts cites the opening of the Phainomena of Aratus, and
even if that speech is Luke's composition rather than Paul's own, it
reveals the impact of traditional education, which involved memorization of
the major poets. The author of Hebrews clearly knows Plato, too. And
although some interpreters want to see the background of the Johannine
LOGOS primarily from the side of Hellenistic Judaism and the OT DBR-YHWH, I
think it is really unthinkable to suppose that the composer of that
prologue hymn is unaware of Heraclitus and the Stoic LOGOS doctrine.

Which brings me back again to my note of yesterday: the Palestine of Jesus
was anything BUT culturally homogeneous. While I am far from accepting
Mack's theory that Jesus was a kind of Cynic, I have no difficulty
supposing that he may have known and spoken some Greek and that he may have
at least been familiar with Cynic notions. Hengel has shown that even the
far-right-wing nationalist Essenes were profoundly influenced by
Hellenistic syncretism.

An awareness of this makes the interpretation of the Greek vocabulary of
the NT all the more challenging, doesn't it?

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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