RE John and Polysemy

Clayton Bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Wed, 16 Jul 1997 17:56:23 +0000

Peter Phillips Wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>
Clearly 'irony' is part and parcel of Johannine
literary technique and depends to some extent upon the diverse semantic
fields of any particular word. It is my own feeling that John makes full
use of the diversity of semantic fields/domains.
>>>>>>>>>>>

I am not sure I follow you on this. Do you mean that in a single instance of a
single word, John made use of the full semantic domain of that word? If that
is what you mean then I would take issue with it. I am willing under duress to
discover a word or phrase here and there which seems to bear more than one
sense in a single instance in a single context. But I need to be driven to this
conclusion by other indicators in the text which make a single sense reading
problematic. I think we are throwing all caution to the wind if we think that
an author is carting around the entire semantic domain for a word every time
he uses it in the text. James Barr covered all of this thirty some years ago,
in The Semantics of Biblical Language. I can't reproduce his argument form
memory but it was forceful and convincing.

If on the other hand you are saying that John uses a single word in different
contexts with different meanings then I would say this is a well documented
phenomena of language and no one will argue with you about it.

Clay Bartholomew
Three Tree Point