From: Steve Godfrey (sgodfrey@irk.ru)
Date: Mon Jan 08 2001 - 11:54:22 EST
Dear Carl,
I appreciate very much your reaction to my proposal.
You 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.
Louw & Nida distinguish the two terms this way: AGAPAW tends to refer to
love based on
unconditional high regard. FILEW tends to refer to love based on
association. This, rather
than a distinction between high love and lower love, is what I would like to
serve as the basis
for my supposition of Peter's shame. It's not that Peter was falling short
of Christian
love, so much as he was painfully aware that he had fallen short of
unconditional high
regard of his Lord in the great betrayal.
>
>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'?).
Thanks much for summarizing my basic approach so well. I appreciate the
encouragement to
continue thinking about John along these lines. I ran across one reference
recently to John
as the Dr. Seuss of the New Testament... hardly... more like Dostoyevsky.
As for the precise meaning of these synonyms in this passage, it is indeed
difficult to pin down. I hold my own view as a current opinion, subject to
change by
subsequent insights. This entire discussion has been helpful to me in
understanding just
how pliable language can be, and the extent to which context influences
connotation.
In studying John's gospel, it has been fascinating to dip into Temple's
older work, and then to
interact with Morris and Carson as contemporary scholars. There is much to
appreciate in both generations.
However, in our generation's quest to probe vertically through stratas of
linguistic usage we may have lost
some ability to read horizontally through the testimony of the Bible itself.
Finally, my deepest appreciation to you for the skill and attention with
which you moderate this forum.
Sincerely,
Steve Godfrey
Irkutsk, Russia
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