[b-greek] Re: philadelphia revisited

From: Daniel L. Christiansen (dlc@multnomah.edu)
Date: Sat Apr 13 2002 - 18:29:21 EDT


Keith Saare wrote [snipped]:

> Honestly though, if I were a Greek back when Koine was spoken I would not
> be thinking of "philadelphia" to mean "brotherly love" when the term is in
> the feminine gender.

    On what do you base your statement? Do you have evidence that a native speaker
of Classical or Koine Greek would immediately relate grammatical gender to physical
gender? I have never seen such evidence; indeed, the customary use of the feminine
gender for abstractions would seem to be evidence to the contrary. You appear to be
confusing both your mindset with that of the ancients, and your English grammatical
sensibilities with that of Greek.

> Would it be more proper then to understand that this
> term does not have an exact English equivelant translation since the idea
> of "sisterly love" is foreign to the English language?

    Are you seriously arguing that the greek thought was "sisterly love"? This
makes no sense within the literary context of many of the term's uses. And it
would certainly be surprising if such a basic meaning were discovered, given the
androcentric focus of both the culture and its literary output.
    Consider another term, XENIA, which means "hospitality." This entertaining of a
stranger/outsider may be directed toward XENOS, XENH, or XENON, yet in each case,
the activity will be rendered by a feminine noun. In other words, the activity
should not be confused with the object, any more than grammatical gender should be
confused with physical gender.

Daniel
--
Daniel L. Christiansen
Professor, Bible & Theology, Biblical Languages
Multnomah Bible College and Biblical Seminary
(503) 445-5295



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