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A question on 'diabolos' and my idea about NT-Greek



Dear Brothers in Christ,

  although I am not a scholar of Greek, I am very interested in the meaning
of the new Testament, both personally and for my 'non-professional' ministry 
of teaching biblical truth in a local church. For this reason I would be very
interested in a list that would focus on discovering the meaning of words and
phrases in the scriptures. For example, David's post on his understanding of
the word 'angelous' in that difficult passage in 1 Cor was very interesting to
me. I am interested in reading anything that will immediately increase my 
understanding of any statement of scripture. 
  On the other hand, discussions on topics like sanctification (_very_
important!), 'Right and wrong methods of exegesis' are in my opinion not so
suitable for discussion on a list like this because as soon as people of 
different denominational backgrounds are together, it is very hard to make 
yourself understood. It takes time to learn to understand each other's
language. By necessity, this must create a certain volume of traffic that
may be annoying for those not so interested in the discussion. Maybe having
two different lists, 'NT-Greek' and 'NT-Greek-discussions' would be a solution?

But now I would like to come to my Greek question: In the German Christian
literature, the meaning of the word 'diabolos' is sometimes given as
'Durcheinanderwerfer', which would be something like 'chaos-maker' in English.
The reasoning behind this is that 'dia' would mean 'though', 'ballw' means
throwing, so 'diabolos' must be somebody who throuws things through each other,
i.e. who makes chaos. However, I have never been happy with this way of
reasoning, and from what I know about Greek I'd rather say that correct
translations of 'diabolos' would be accuser and slanderer. When I first
expressed my doubts about the correctness of translating 'diabolos' with
'Durcheinanderwerfer', my opinion was not accepted because, the Greek
dictionary by Menge and Guethling lists 'Durcheinanderwerfer' as a possible
translation for 'diabolos'. From your knowledge of Greek and of the scriptures,
is the devil by nature a 'chaos-maker', or would it be in line with his nature
to have an evil but well-organized kingdom?

Yours in Christ,
	 	Norbert Bollow.