Mark

Sue,

I admire your honestly regarding your bias. I think that is helpful for all to understand, so that when comments are made rejecting the BDAG for example because of bias, one can see that such an argument is not really an argument at all. But let me ask you this, how do you know you are correct? You told us your motivation- you “want to live”. Are you therefore manipulating the text to suit your agenda? How can you know? And what if your wrong- what then?

The problem i have with Liddell, is that it is much more of a broad survey dealing with an enormous amount of greek literature, most of which is irrelevant to the Koine Greek period. However, to deduce therefore that such a lexicon is more accurate i think is flawed. It is much more accurate to look at the period in question rather than such a broad expanse. It’s like trying to understand what the term ‘awesome’ means from a linguistic period covering an enormous amount of years. Considering it probably is used in different ways every 10 years or so, it would be hard to have an accurate picture from the broad analysis.

Indeed many people are biased, but what makes you think the majority of Greek scholars would be pushing for a comp position? You would have to be assuming that all these publishers and editors are patriarchal advocates…but of course that is just an assumption based on your own bias. Sure someone like Grudem is of course doing that, but the BDAG lexicon was in print before this dabate even began.

Where do we draw the line as to which lexicon to trust? Are all BDAG entries wrong and therefore anything we need to know about Koine Greek and the Bible ought to come from secular sources? To me, it seems like you and many others would be more than happy to take 99.99% BDAG entries seriously, excluding the ones that clash with egal theology. So it’s no so much that they are wrong, but probably more so, that our contemporary readings of passages are wrong.

TL,

My statement was not wrong at all, because i qualified it by saying what i have read. Yesterday i had a look through our college library at all the greek sources availiable. All bar one confirmed what i said- the one exception was Liddell (which to re-enforce again is a lexicon that covers an enormous time period which would be hard to give definitions accurately). Now i also looked at theological word books etc and not just lexicons. They all came to the same conclusion. So either they are all wrong, and the church has been wrong for 2000 years (which of course could be possible since the church is fallible), or our modern debate is an attempt to read back into the text what we want it to say. We see this all the time when ‘new’ theologies pop there head up.

Let me finish with this at least. Reject kephale as authority all you want- i won’t agree but that is ok. But at least give a decent alternative. ‘Source’ is not a good alternative. Source is used in plural forms not singular, and as Sue herself told us, she does not accept that translation. ‘Source’ not only is an impossible alternative, it doesn’t make sense either. I am not the source of my wife because 1. it is singular and 2. she wasn’t created out of me, the same way the church was created out of Christ.