I’ve approved this initial post from you and want to welcome you to B-Greek online forum. It’s great to see that people are interested in the original languages of the biblical texts, and that’s something that keeps us going—we who have been involved in language study for years and just want to see knowledge of Greek and Hebrew become a passion for the next generation.
Now, it is common for those who have no access to the regular in-roads to language study to find Strong’s numbers and his dictionary as a first step. His numbers have been used in study Bibles, in the KJV-based Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, and in plenty of online tools aimed at giving access to the Greek (and Hebrew) to those who have not studied the languages formally. By “formal study” and “the regular in-roads to language study,” I mean in-class study of the language under the instruction and guidance of an experienced teacher. Nowadays, with the development of excellent software like biblingo, there are other in-roads to competency in the languages. We should hope that B-Greek would also be a source of solid learning of Greek from a social perspective.
That said, most people who have experience with the language kinda recoil when someone uses Strong’s numbers. I know it makes for easy reference because so many sites and software programs code to those numbers, but it is normally a signal that those who are using the numbers have little competence in the use of the language, or that they think of the languages as a code rather than as a real language.
We tend to use more academic or scholarly lexica for reference to the meaning of Greek and Hebrew words. Why? Meaning is determined by how a word is used in context rather than by a dictionary definition. Strong gave definitions based on how the word was translated in the King James Bible, not based on how the word was used in Greek literature generally or even how it might have been used in the Greek text of the New Testament. Generally, people use A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BAGD) by Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich and Danker (U of Chicago, 2000) or the new Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek (BrillDAG) by Montanari, Goh, Schroeder, Nagy, and Muellner (Brill, 2015). These offer definitions based on Greek usage, both in the NT and in classical texts, and they are much more respected among scholars than Strong’s dictionary.
Even Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB, which you referenced) is outdated for Hebrew by today’s standards. The common Hebrew dictionaries today are The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT) by Koehler, Baumgartner, Stamm, et al. (Brill, 1994–2000) and The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew by David Clines (Sheffield Academic Press, 1993–2011).
For those who do not have access to these lexica, there are great free online resources that are go beyond Strong’s glosses. For example, the Blue Letter Bible offers Thayer’s Greek lexicon for Greek terms (see τέλειος) and both BDB and Gesenius’s leixcon for Hebrew terms (see שָׁלֵם). It’s far better to go with what these lexica say than with what Strong had to say.
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I don’t know which Greek text you’re referring to that is translated from Greek into Hebrew. Rather, it is generally the opposite. The Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek sometime before the first Century of the common era. The various translations from Hebrew into Greek are generally referred as “the Septuagint” (that is, the Translation of the Seventy) based on the story of seventy translators who originally produced the translation of the Pentateuch. It was not uncommon to render the Hebrew word שָׁלֵם (not the Hebrew verb שִׁלַּם that is based on the root) to mean “complete” or “whole” (as an ajdective), which was sometimes τέλειος in Greek. It was not always translated this way in the Septuagint, though.
Are you asking if it means “muslim” or “submitted to God”? No, that is not the meaning of the word τέλειος.
It is an adjective. It does not mean “completeness” of anything, since that would be a noun. It could certainly mean “being in the state of completeness” in terms of Christian faith or character, depending on how it is used in a specific text—not as an abstract term on its own. Words take their meanings from the contexts in which they appear.
That said, if you would like to continue to participate on the forum, please add your real name to your signature or let us know what your real name is so that we can change it to reflect the policy of the group. It would also be helpful if you would create an introduction post to tell us about yourself and your experience in biblical languages.
Welcome to B-Greek!