Thanks for the brief posting on ARXH! I am afraid of being lengthy in my
response. I respect that you've written the book and I am merely a
fledgling scholar, but...
What is NOT lacking in my approach is the two planes of interpretation. I
do want to understand the text both from the real reader's position today,
and the implied reader's position in the first/second century. However, I
am not as convinced as you are concerning the common presupposition pool
concept - certainly not if it is John and Revelation which you are
comparing. Sociolinguistics would argue, wouldn't it, that an author can
write for a fixed presupposition pool. He/she can then be fairly sure of
the implied and hence real contemporary reader's response because he/she is
working within the same presupposition pool. As soon as the real reader no
longer falls within the same presupposition pool, which must have happened
remarkably quickly with NT material, such a reliance could only be
determined by use of a much broader presupposition pool - in other words
the semantic domain approach rather than the common presupposition pool
approach.
Moreover, we don't know what the presupposition pool for the Johannine
material was in any case. Take two recent commentaries - Witherington says
it was none Jewish, Moloney says it was Jewish. Even if we did look
through the text mirror and find the Johannine community would we be any
closer to finding what their presupposition pool was?
Also your decision to bar, following Barr, classical Greek, patristics and
LXX from the argument about the meaning of ARXH in the NT simply does not
allow for those areas being semantic source material for the word. Many
would argue that EN ARXH is simply a translation of BRSHT in Gen. 1.1.
Finally, and I am so sorry to have gone on for so long, I promise to
curtail future postings, I don't have the tools necessary at hand to do the
TLG search to look into the occurrences of ARXH in 1st/2nd century Greek.
Even if I did, the common presupposition pool concept still does not work.
The pool is gone and can never be recovered.
Anyway, who said I wanted to translate ARXH as "origin/source", I just
don't want to have it ruled out as a possibility that's all.
Pete Phillips,
Cliff College, Sheffield, England
p.m.phillips@cliff.shef.ac.uk
http://champness.shef.ac.uk/