[B-Greek] Caragounis and vine/vineyard and branches/vines - AMPELOS and KLHMA
James Ernest
j.d.ernest at bc.edu
Mon Mar 19 13:14:30 EST 2007
Eric,
You wrote:
> My question is: If AMPELOS and KLHMA had indeed shifted their meanings
> by NT times (I think Caragounis even uses the word "seismological" to describe
> it - my book is at home), would the Early Church Fathers who spoke and wrote
> Koinê/Byzantine Greek not have been aware of this? I.e., unless AMPELOS and
> KLHMA had anachronistically reverted back to their earlier meanings of "vine" and
> "branch," why would the ECFs have imposed a pre-1st century meaning on those
> words if they themselves didn't use the terms that way?
You're referring to pages 247-261, which contain section 3 of chapter
5. Caragounis refers to a "semasiological" (= semantic) shift.
I don't know the answer to your question, except to note that the
writings of at least some of the authors Caragounis mentions (p. 255,
n. 73) as following the vine/branches interpretation are indeed of
such a literary character (as C says, Atticizing) that we should not
be surprised to catch them using words according to classical rather
than current/popular meanings. (I'm not sure about the Didachist and
Ignatius.) Apparently opponents of Athanasius and Basil argued that
the farmer-vine-branches language of John 15 for Father-Son-Christians
showed Jesus to share in human nature, not the divine nature; so we
might think that if they could have, Athanasius and Basil would have
retorted that it's actually farmer-vineyard-vine, with no shared
nature in either direction in that text. But in analogous cases it was
not their practice to dispute the meaning of the text on that level.
It apparently never occurs to Athanasius, for example, to deny that
the identification with Christ of the Wisdom who says "God created me"
in Prov. 7:22. In the case of John 15, Athanasius et al. were not
interested in denying the homoousion of the incarnate Christ with
humanity. Athanasius teaches a two-fold scope of Scripture: some
things are said about Christ as eternally preexistent, and other
things are said about Christ as incarnate. He wants to keep them
sorted out appropriately, not deny the latter. So if the exegetical
tradition that he inherited (through writings that he studied and oral
teaching that he received at Alexandria) accepted ampelos-klema as
vine-branches, he had no reason to rock the boat by appealing to a
different popular usage, even if he knew of it.
James
j.d.ernest at bc.edu
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