Comments on: Clayboy and the preacher’s fallacy http://betterbibles.com/2010/02/08/clayboy-and-the-preachers-fallacy/ ideas for improving Bible translations Sat, 26 May 2012 05:25:37 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Dru http://betterbibles.com/2010/02/08/clayboy-and-the-preachers-fallacy/#comment-16577 Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:21:34 +0000 http://betterbibles.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/clayboy-and-the-preachers-fallacy/#comment-16577 I think that’s a very important point. English too is full of words and expressions which have at their roots long and very dead metaphors, so dead that we aren’t aware of them. ‘He’s got guts’ does not refer to a person’s stomach.

What though is also worth considering, and is a different question altogether, is what a firs century first or second language speaker actually did understand προσκυνἐω to mean. It might not have been all that like how we usually worship.

Was ‘prostration’ at that date an inherent part of the word’s meaning, or was that by then also a dead derivation?

I have very little doubt that the reformers saw the life and practice of the primitive church through the spectacles of their own time and assumptions, what they’d have liked the church in Rome or Corinth to have looked like rather than how it was. We can now see that, but have we the historical imagination to see through the preconceptions that we ourselves suffer from.

It’s odd also that as far as I can see, it does not seem to exist in scripture as an an abstract noun. It seems to be something one does, rather than talks about or thinks about.

]]> By: Mike Sangrey http://betterbibles.com/2010/02/08/clayboy-and-the-preachers-fallacy/#comment-16551 Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:21:36 +0000 http://betterbibles.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/clayboy-and-the-preachers-fallacy/#comment-16551 “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
– Alexander Pope in 1711 in his “Essay on Criticism.”

]]> By: Wayne Leman http://betterbibles.com/2010/02/08/clayboy-and-the-preachers-fallacy/#comment-16546 Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:39:59 +0000 http://betterbibles.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/clayboy-and-the-preachers-fallacy/#comment-16546 Good post, David, and good link, WoundedEgo. I followed the link and thanked Bill Mounce also. This problem of the etymological fallacy is quite widespread, especially among those who have just enough exposure to the biblical languages to be inoculated but not to get the full disease :-)

]]> By: WoundedEgo http://betterbibles.com/2010/02/08/clayboy-and-the-preachers-fallacy/#comment-16541 Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:17:33 +0000 http://betterbibles.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/clayboy-and-the-preachers-fallacy/#comment-16541 Mounce just posted another example:

http://www.koinoniablog.net/2010/02/are-we-gods-poem-eph-210.html

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