From: Stephen Carlson (scc@reston.icl.com)
Date: Thu Jan 04 1996 - 07:06:02 EST
Carl W. Conrad wrote:
[On hAMARTANW et al.]
> I am myself a nut regarding etymology and its bearing upon the meanings of
> words, but I've come to realize that root meanings can become wholly lost
> in later functions of compounds. And I'm not so sure that ideas can't be
> carried across from one linguistic milieu to another. Granted that there
> are great perils and problems, as may readily be seen in usage of words
> like KURIOS and MAR. And it seems to me that Paul is quite conscious of the
> need to defend an understanding of the gospel that is distinct from Greek
> mysticism (a chief concern, I think, in 1 Cor) and also from Judaism (a
> chief concern in Gal). At the same time, he exploits the metaphors of Greek
> athletic competition when he writes to a predominantly gentile community,
> as in Philippians, and Greco/Roman political language too in the same
> letter (I'm thinking of SWTHR and POLITEUMA).
After consulting my lexicons on hAMARTANW (Middle Liddel & BAGD), it
seems clear that the meaning of hAMARTANW has evolved from Homeric
times with the meaning of "to miss the mark" or "to fail in one's
purpose" to Plato and others to mean "to trangress a moral law" and
finally to Septuagintal communities with the meaning "to trangress
God's law." Thus, we may be engaging in an anarchonism if we blithely
assume that whatever meaning a word had in the eighth century B.C.
is still available in the first century A.D.
Although it's possible that the meaning of "missing the mark" had
survived over the course of time in everyday speech, I think we also
need to consider the possibility that most educated Greeks studied the
the Homeric texts and would therefore be familiar with such a usage
even if it was a bit archaic. Therefore, the survival of that meaning,
possibly seen in Rm3:23, could be in essence a Homeric allusion on the
part of Paul. This fits in well Paul's exploiting Greek metaphors.
Stephen Carlson
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