Justin Dillehay is a member of Grace Baptist Church in Hartsville, Tennessee, where he resides with his wife, Tilly. They blog at While We Wait. He is a graduate of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He writes:
Bible students love to talk about “the original Greek.” Preachers, too. Some preachers seem to want to work Greek into their sermons as often as they can.
And of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to know something about the language that God gave us for the New Testament. But there are also dangers involved, since most Christians either don’t know Greek at all, or (which is almost the same thing) know only enough to look up individual Greek words. Just imagine how badly a foreign speaker could butcher English if all he could do was look up individual English words.
The path is littered with what D. A. Carson has called “exegetical fallacies” (a book I was assigned three times in school). This brief article is my effort to condense a couple of Carson’s lessons, in order to help us learn how not to use Greek in Bible study.
1. Usage Trumps Etymology: Avoiding the Root Fallacy
When I was a homeschooling high schooler, I took a course on etymology. Etymology deals with the “roots” of words—where a word originally came from way back in the foggy mists of time. It’s a valuable area to study, and nothing I’m about to say in this article is meant to suggest otherwise.
Nevertheless, a problem arises when people mistakenly think that a word’s etymology tells them “what it really means.”
We can see the fallacy of this notion clearly in our native English language. For example, the word nice comes from the Latin root nescius, meaning “ignorant.” But no one but a fool would respond to your calling them “nice” by saying, “Oh, I see what you really mean! You’re saying I’m ignorant! You and your veiled Latin insults!”
No one does this in their native language, but many Christians do this very thing when studying the Bible. They look up Greek words in their Strong’s Concordance, find the original Greek root, and conclude that they have found the word’s “real” meaning. This is what Carson calls the “root fallacy.”
Don’t get me wrong: roots and etymology are good. They can sometimes give you an interesting back story on why a particular word came to be used to describe a particular thing. They can even help you win the national spelling bee. But they don’t tell you the “real meaning” of a word, because a word’s meaning is not determined by its etymology, but by its usage. The question is not, “Where did this word originate?” but, “What did the writer/speaker mean by it?”
If you proposed to your girlfriend and she said, “No,” but you could somehow prove that “No” came from a Greek word meaning “Yes,” it still wouldn’t do you any good. “No” means what your girlfriend (and everyone else) means by it, not what it might have meant 1,000 years ago in an ancestor language. The reason no one today would take “nice” to mean “ignorant” is that no one today uses it that way. If you want to know what a word means today, you must find out how it’s used today. That’s what an up-to-date dictionary will tell you. For Bible students, it’s also what a good lexicon will tell you. One of the best tools for the Bible student to have right now is William Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words. This volume also contains a helpful piece called “How to Do Word Studies,” which will warn you against some of the same pitfalls that I am telling you about. Continue reading →
