Random Thoughts: Semantics

Ugh, I should be writing my paper on the Israel-Palestine conflict (will post a condensed version of it on here later) but instead am posting these very random thoughts that came to my head in class the other day.

Most of the people who were able to write on parchment or scrolls back in the day were wealthy (the money to buy parchment!) or had some sort of privileged access to write. The fact that they could read was already remarkable, but writing is another level.

Anyway, I was looking through BDAG (a sort of dictionary for the words used in the New Testament) and how it lists the range of a word used in antecedent and contemporary literature. What's interesting is how most of these writers are very educated. I think about the phenomena today across all cultures: words are not used the same way in every level of society. There's the unconscious meaning imported by specific subcultures to certain words and thus a different meaning, there's slang, etc. So depending on who's writing, there's a different flavor given to a certain word which is especially compounded when there is a large gap in the amount of education received.

So looking at the use of certain words only in the extant writings of ancient authors does not prove that we must limit the connotation of that word to those uses. The poor or middle class could have used and probably did use the word in a different way; a phenomenon that can still be seen in the world today. And this has a lot to do with those authors of the New Testament who came from a background of poverty. This doesn't make much of a difference in anything but are just random thoughts.

My main point though, is important: we see that in any case, context is the key to the translation of a word and has primacy over and above the connotation of any word by the external evidence of contemporary witnesses and any lexicon. We can point to BDAG and say, "hey it's usually used this way", and that's good evidence but not the final say. CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT. This applies to determining the meaning of the flow of argumentation as well as to the meaning of a specific word.