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It resolves some questions but also creates others. In many ways, Greek is much more mundane than I had thought. Turns out that agape and philos aren’t really different kinds of love after all, and the gospel isn’t really the “dynamite” of God. The main thing I learned in the first couple of weeks of class was that most of what I thought I knew about Greek was malarky. I once thought this, and then I began studying Greek. When it comes to Bible study, many Christians seem to think that knowing Greek is like a magic bullet that will unlock all the secrets of biblical meaning. Scholars Are Necessary: Avoiding the Cult of the Amateur One of the best tools for the Bible student to have right now is William Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words. This volume also contains a helpful piece called “How to Do Word Studies,” which will warn you against some of the same pitfalls that I am telling you about.Ģ. That’s what an up-to-date dictionary will tell you. For Bible students, it’s also what a good lexicon will tell you. The reason no one today would take “nice” to mean “ignorant” is that no one today uses it that way. If you want to know what a word means today, you must find out how it’s used today. “No” means what your girlfriend (and everyone else) means by it, not what it might have meant 1,000 years ago in an ancestor language. If you proposed to your girlfriend and she said, “No,” but you could somehow prove that “No” came from a Greek word meaning “Yes,” it still wouldn’t do you any good. The question is not, “Where did this word originate?” but, “What did the writer/speaker mean by it?”
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But they don’t tell you the “real meaning” of a word, because a word’s meaning is not determined by its etymology, but by its usage. They can even help you win the national spelling bee. They can sometimes give you an interesting back story on why a particular word came to be used to describe a particular thing. This is what Carson calls the “root fallacy.”ĭon’t get me wrong: roots and etymology are good. They look up Greek words in their Strong’s Concordance, find the original Greek root, and conclude that they have found the word’s “real” meaning. No one does this in their native language, but many Christians do this very thing when studying the Bible. For example, the word nice comes from the Latin root nescius, meaning “ignorant.” But no one but a fool would respond to your calling them “nice” by saying, “Oh, I see what you really mean! You’re saying I’m ignorant! You and your veiled Latin insults!” We can see the fallacy of this notion clearly in our native English language. Nevertheless, a problem arises when people mistakenly think that a word’s etymology tells them “what it really means.” It’s a valuable area to study, and nothing I’m about to say in this article is meant to suggest otherwise. Etymology deals with the “roots” of words-where a word originally came from way back in the foggy mists of time. When I was a homeschooling high schooler, I took a course on etymology. Usage Trumps Etymology: Avoiding the Root Fallacy This brief article is my effort to condense a couple of Carson’s lessons, in order to help us learn how not to use Greek in Bible study.ġ.
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Carson has called “ exegetical fallacies” (a book I was assigned three times in school).