From: Steven R. Lo Vullo (doulos@chorus.net)
Date: Sun Jan 07 2001 - 15:00:26 EST
On 1/7/01 10:33 AM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
> 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'?).
I think the above comments make good sense. What I have been opposing is not
that there is or can be no semantic variation at all between these words in
this context, but the idea that one word denotes a love "inferior" to the
other. Since this is the B-Greek list, I'm not going to make any arguments
from logic, but I invite all to follow to its logical conclusion the idea
that FILEW is inferior to AGAPAW in this passage.
Steve Lo Vullo,
Madison, WI
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