From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Jan 07 2001 - 11:33:06 EST
At 4:03 PM +0000 1/7/01, Mark Wilson wrote:
>AGAPAW
>PHILEW
>
>This argument is from an analogy in English, but it is how I tend
>to think of "synonyms."
>
>First, an example without a context:
>
>I hate baseball.
>
>Or, notice this statement without a context:
>
>I despise baseball.
>
>In English, these could be thought of as synonymous statements if
>they were both used in isolation from each other.
>
>
>But, everything changes when I put them together:
>
>I hate baseball, and I despise football.
>
>Here, I have a stronger dislike for football than baseball. But the only
>way to understand that is if they are used in the same context.
>
>To me, there needs to be a distinction between synonyms
>IN THE SAME CONTEXT and synonyms in DIFFERENT,
>UNRELATED CONTEXTS, as the above English examples suggest.
>
>
>I would therefore pose that Greek is the same way.
>
>"I AGAPAW my job" might NOT be distinguished from "I PHILEW my job"
>if used in different contexts. But once they are used in the same context,
>it seems to me that this in itself eliminates the idea of "synonymous."
>
>Now to John 21: Applying this overly simplistic "linguistic" approach, I
>would think that the idea
>of AGAPAW and PHILEW being synonymous would be eliminated since the
>main topic is "love," in fact, more than that, it is about "degrees of
>love."
This may well be, but the difference between AGAPAW and FILEW may in fact
not be so much between higher and lower degrees of affection but in how one
thinks of one's affection; traditionally FILEW means to feel the sort of
affection one feels for a member of one's own family while AGAPAW tends to
mean "show a preferential feeling for" without reference to how one feels
about one's family. I don't mean to argue the case one way or the other in
John 21; I mean rather simply to show that Peter may well have felt that he
was making a more appropriate statement with FILEW: that's the love one has
for a brother or for an intimate friend; whereas AGAPAW might be used for
"have a preference for seafood over beef and pork." This is to say: yes, I
too think that there must be some element of difference really between
FILEW and AGAPAW in John 21; I'm just not so SURE that John intended AGAPAW
to mean a distinctly Christian kind of love preferable to initimate
affection of a close friend. Peter may have misunderstood the question. If
the question was, "do you have a care for me transcending the care that
these others have?" Peter may have thought that saying he thought of Jesus
as an intimate friend was the right way to respond.
I'm trying out alternatives here without making up my mind. I really do
think that the major element in the story is Peter's rehabilitation as the
shepherd of Christ's flock after the threefold denial on the night of the
arrest. I do think, as I said previously, that Steve (Godfrey) is right in
asserting that this is essentially a literary composition and that in using
the different verbs the author is well aware of what he's doing rather than
simply trying to translate into Greek an Aramaic conversation. And
therefore I do think that these "slightly distinguished" synonyms are used
deliberately, but I am not quite so very confident that the standard
reading of an earlier generation--namely, that Peter deliberately uses the
watered-down word FILEW instead of the word Jesus might have preferrred
AGAPAW--is the right way to understand the nuance of difference here (do I
dare to say 'the very SLIGHT nuance of difference'?).
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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