Words and their background

Christians are bound to take words quite seriously and biblical words in particular. This is in particular once we realise that words have peculiar histories. The analysis of words is inevitably a historical exercise - it is diachronic, we might say, as well as synchronic. It is important not only to establish what a particular word means in general usage at a particular time and locale but also to reckon with the way in which a word may be quickly - in a matter of weeks even - be adapted to a new usage and take on new connotations. Some of this can be deliberate, but most of this evolution in words takes place without individuals ever deciding for it to be the case.

A particular term may have an 'ordinary', 'literal' or direct and non-technical sense, but find itself adapted to a technical usage in not very much time at all.

This takes careful observation and delineation in the contemporary world, but it is even more difficult to manage with ancient words. On the one hand, it appears to be a quite easy matter because we can count the number of times a particular Greek word is used in the extent literature, and it is frequently only a matter of, say, fifty instances. When we narrow it down to the period we are looking at to within a century, we may find only a handful. It is then a simple matter, is it not, to decide what the word most often meant, and so what it must mean in the New Testament setting.

Not so fast. One of the obvious difficulties here is that we have no record of oral usage. Furthermore, we can surmise that a great deal of written examples have simply passed from view. So, it seems that the proposed method of totting up the known references to a word in the extant literature is more guesswork than it appears. Now, granted, the evidence available is not nothing or irrelevant; but it is certainly not nearly complete. And when theological edifices are built upon these linguistic foundations, they are liable to fall down at the next puff of wind. Context is always king. Example: I don't happen to think that 'kephale' means 'source' in 1 Cor 11, but it seems to me that it would take an overwhelming mass of counter-examples to overturn the simple pressure of context, if the context was telling us that 'kephale' means 'source'.

In any case, a word can fairly quickly take on a quite specific 'technical' sense in a small group - especially a small group who are making a new identity for themselves out of what they perceive to be the wreckage of the old. We can observe this process in the way that our modern urban tribes quickly adapt old terms and invent new ones to create a special 'in' language that does a job peculiar to their own needs, and establishes and strengthens their identity. And this local and particular setting trumps all when it comes to the meanings of words. It beats the dictionary every time.

How does this relate to the New Testament? One of the exegetical strategies I see employed a great deal is a kind of linguistic primitivism which assumes that any 'technical' senses for words in the NT are actually most likely not there but the effects of us reading through the lens of later Church history. This has especially to do with words that are employed in the institutional life of later Christianity. So, for example, ekklesia originally had the ordinary sense of 'gathering', not Church in the technical sense. So we should not read the word when it appears on the page in its 'special, religious' (=bad and corrupt) sense but in its 'ordinary' sense (such as can be determined of course).

The fallacy here is this (quite apart from the Harnackian negativity towards the notion of an institutional or formally structured church): the texts of the New Testament are written AFTER the application of the particular vocabulary in question and not before it. The notion that baptism was connected to a ritual involving water which symbolised spiritual baptism, for example, PREDATES the composition of Matthew's gospel. It would be impossible to imagine Matthew using the word or his intended audience reading it without the technical inference, since his gospel is not written till a number of decades after the church has got going and has been splashing quite a bit of water about. It is impossible to conceive of a pre-technical, so-called 'ordinary' usage of the word ekklesia. We neglect to our peril the indisputable fact that much of the New Testament postdates the very early church and so more likely reflects its specific, new, even tribalised use of words - which in turn was shaped by the apostolic preaching (which when you think about it is a conceptual revolution of the highest order: sacrifice, victory, temple, redemption - all become completely transformed as concepts under the press of the gospel).

We can also see in the New Testament itself the trajectories along which words are beginning to travel - and we shouldn't assume that where the individual words end up is therefore not sanctioned by the NT. The word 'martyrion' for example (a favourite of mine) is not quite in the NT yet the specific and technical word for 'a person who dies for their Christian belief'. It still has the 'ordinary' sense of 'witness'. But you can see it gathering steam - when Jesus talks to the disciples in John 15, the appearances of the disciples in the law courts as suffering witnesses are clearly on view. Likewise, the blood of the martyrion which cries out from under the altar in Revelation is very close to something like what the word will become later on. The point is this: the job of this observation of words is not scrape away the later accretions as if they are almost always distortions of the true primitive meaning of the word. On the contrary: the later meaning of the word may be a very good clue as to what the earlier meaning was. Or, in fact, the later more technical/official/institutional sense may already be well in view in the NT usage.