Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!mips!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: jclark@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (John Clark) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Trinity Heresies Message-ID: Date: 10 May 91 07:29:21 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of California, San Diego Lines: 42 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article davidbu@loowit.wr.tek.com (David E. Buxton) writes: +Biblical Greek. We need to be cautious that so much of modern semantics are +better translations of "Pagan Greek" than "Biblical Greek". It is our +desire to understand what God says about Himself and the nature of man and +not what Aristotle or Plato philosophised about man and the gods of the +Greeks. These philosophers can only turn to the philosophy of the pagan You are sreaching for 'koine', the Greek idiom of the first few centuries of Christianity. It is well know to have significant differences in word use from the 'Classical'(your phrase Pagan) Greek. But then many of the New Testement text were written in Aramaic(sp) which had in all likelyhood a completely different world view that either Greek or Latin. But for the first few centuries most texts by Christians were written in Greek or Latin so our modern day interpretations are essentially based on those writers. The heresies you mention could stem from the difference of the Aramaic and the contemorary translations. However, others of the New Testement were written in Greek and used the 'in vogue' Greek vocabulary of philosophy which was drawn from the 'pagan' philosophers of that era. The Gospel of John can not be extracted from the 'Neo-Platonic' environment without serious damage to what the writer is trying to say. Or if you don't understand the significance of 'Ho Logos' in terms of the 'Pagan' philosophy, the book will just be a sequence of anacdotes, interspersed with meaningless phrases. I don't think you can 'extract' the vocabulary from the mileux in a precise fashion. -- John Clark jclark@ucsd.edu [The NT texts that we have are all in Greek. There are some plausible theories that Aramaic sources underlie some of the Gospels. John's terminology actually has Jewish precedent, though the Jewish tradition involved may well have been influenced by Platonizing thought. --clh]