From: Phillip J. Long (plong@e2.empirenet.com)
Date: Mon Mar 02 1998 - 00:39:33 EST
> (If not, I will have to contact quite a number of people
>and explain that I have misled them. Not that it matters too much, since
>I haven't noticed my friends and acquaintances changing their habits
>appreciably as the result of my "instruction.")
This is an exegetical error, and you are right that it is pretty
common. A more disturbing error is to take a real Greek lexicon and
do the same thing. Pastor's do this all the time, usually preceeded
by the words "the literal Greek here is...."
If you have never rad D. A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies, run out and
buy a copy right now....it is well worth the small amount of money it
costs. On page 54 he calls this sort of thing a "selective and
prejudical use of evidence." How do you avoid this error? Careful
examination of the immediate context of the occurance, a carfeful
examination of the use of the word in the book, in the author, and
then in the whole Bible.
While it is not impossible to have a word that means something totally
different in one occurance, it is less likely than the idea that a
writer uses language pretty consistently.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:39:08 EDT