The Semantics of Biblical Language Redux (original) (raw)
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Since James Barr's programmatic study in 1961, the eld of biblical Greek linguistics has become a topic of steadily growing interest among New Testament scholars, investigating a range of topics from study of the verb system, to the case system, lexis, word order, and discourse analysis. The focus of most of this research is mainly synchronic. And this makes perfect sense, given not only the nature of Barr's contribution but the nature of what is often called "modern linguistics." At the time when Barr wrote, diachronic linguistic fallacies plagued much biblical language research, especially the analysis associated with the Biblical Theology movement. Barr took speci c aim at Kittel's oft-cited compendium of Greek words, which frequently indulged in, among several others, the root fallacy and what Barr labeled illegitimate totality transfer, involving the tendency of many contributors to Kittel's dictionary to transfer the entire lexical meaning of a term into a single usage. Barr's study was followed by a handful of assessments that asserted similar conclusions, and diachronic analysis, which had often been the norm rather than the exception, retreated into the background of New Testament research-at least in some of its better expressions-in favor of more synchronic-based analysis.
Theologization of Greek Terms and Concepts in the Septuagint and New Testament
Hellenistic literature, having great achievements in the fields of philosophy, drama, and poetry, did not know the theological concepts and issues which underlie the texts contained in the Hebrew Bible. So when the creators of the Septuagint, and then also the authors of the New Testament, used the Greek language to convey God's inspired truths to the world, they were forced to give secular terms a new theological meaning, frequently choosing neutral words for this purpose, not burdened with negative associations. With their translation work, they built a kind of bridge between Hellenic and Jewish cultures. On the one hand, the Septuagint allowed Jews reading the Bible in Greek to remain connected not only with the religious heritage of their fathers, but also with the cultural values that were closely related to that language and its world. In turn, for the Greeks, who after some time began to appreciate this work and gained knowledge of its content, it opened vast horizons of new religious and spiritual values, which until then were completely alien to them. The work of the authors of the Septuagint was continued and developed by the authors of the New Testament, which added to their theological output many new religious and moral values arising from the teaching of Jesus Christ. That way they contributed considerably to the development of the Koinē Greek and significantly transformed the spiritual life of the people speaking the language.
Review of James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language
2012
James Barr, with this amazing study of the semantics of biblical languages, challenged the accepted wisdom of his day regarding the ways in which words and discourse functioned. Besides, this book called into account the "biblical theology" movement, whose proponents treated words as vessels to be squeezed for every ounce of theological juice.
The Language of the New Testament: Context, History, and Development (TENTS; ECHC; Brill, 2012)
2013
Since James Barr's programmatic study in 1961, the eld of biblical Greek linguistics has become a topic of steadily growing interest among New Testament scholars, investigating a range of topics from study of the verb system, to the case system, lexis, word order, and discourse analysis. The focus of most of this research is mainly synchronic. And this makes perfect sense, given not only the nature of Barr's contribution but the nature of what is often called "modern linguistics." At the time when Barr wrote, diachronic linguistic fallacies plagued much biblical language research, especially the analysis associated with the Biblical Theology movement. Barr took speci c aim at Kittel's oft-cited compendium of Greek words, which frequently indulged in, among several others, the root fallacy and what Barr labeled illegitimate totality transfer, involving the tendency of many contributors to Kittel's dictionary to transfer the entire lexical meaning of a term into a single usage. Barr's study was followed by a handful of assessments that asserted similar conclusions, and diachronic analysis, which had often been the norm rather than the exception, retreated into the background of New Testament research-at least in some of its better expressions-in favor of more synchronic-based analysis.
this article examines developments in research on the linguistic and grammatical analysis of the language and literature of the new testament since the publication of James Barr's important work in 1961. while there have been a large number of important advances since this time, the present survey restricts its analysis to research that has been significantly informed by modern linguistics. It considers four areas, in particular: verb structure, case structure, syntax and discourse analysis. Verbal aspect theory has been treated in more detail than any other aspect of the Greek verb. Most investigation of case structure has been informed by case grammar, originating in Fillmore's work. Syntactic theories that have been applied to the language of the new testament draw mostly from the generative tradition of linguistics, but the opentext.org project has recently implemented a functional and relational dependency model. discourse analysis has typically been divided into four schools, but in recent research we see a fifth, eclectic approach, emerging.
It is true that one could hardly assert that in the Septuagint text there is a consistent use of the word ἐκκλησία in its classical meaning. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to support the fact that the word ἐκκλησία preserves its basic semantic load in the Septuagint usage, albeit in an attenuated form of its features as a technical political term. Since the word ἐκκλησία in the Septuagint text is not exclusively used for religious matters, but also for secular meetings , like the preparation of a war or plans to avoid a danger, since it was convened in regular intervals, it was assembled in an official manner, it served for the expression of political identity of the people of Israel, there is no strong rationale not to be designated as an institutional body, which could have been successfully aligned with the contemporary technical Greek term denoting the civic assembly.
Even if there are still some voices that consider principally and almost exclusively the lexical meaning as the main topic of semantics (Katz & Fodor 1963: 170-210)2, it is a fact that there is a relative scholarly consensus regarding the importance of contextual factor for explaining the production of diverse features of a given word. Thence, in our view, for a deeper comprehension of a lexeme it is necessary to observe it like a component of a given phrase, subject to changes caused by morphology, syntax, and extra-linguistic factors. However, although scholars of linguistics have paid a certain attention to this topic, a lack of scientific bibliography on this regard still exists nowadays. Therefore, the aim of the following pages is to determine how diverse types of contextual factors cause the change of meaning of a lexeme in New Testament corpus, according to the framework of the New Testament Greek-Spanish Dictionary (DGENT). Within this framework this article is divided into two parts. The first one approaches the matter from a theoretical point of view; the second part provides some examples taken from the published volumes of DGENT in order to illuminate the theory.