Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jerry Shepherd <jshepherd53 AT gmail.com>]

Hi Karl,

 

You said: "She didn’t disagree with it during the discussion, thereby made a tacit agreement."

 

No, you assume too much with this.  Again, action and function does not constitute a meaningful linguistic opposition.

 

You said: "Irrelevant to whether or not such a distinction is valid. Hence appeal to popularity."

 

Again, this was not an appeal to popularity.  Rather it was an appeal to the expertise of trained linguists versus the non-expertise of a non-linguist.

 

You said: "Taken out of the context that the “calling aside” is not only physical, but also metaphorically understood, hence a straw man argument on your part. A second reason a straw man argument is because I make a distinction between action and function, and you ignore it."

 

It does not make any difference, in the context of this discussion, whether the "calling aside" is literal or metaphorical.  Your point is that one way or the other, the thought, or what you call the "action" of calling aside is present in all the occurrences of parakaleo, and that the meaning of the verb in all its occurrences is calling aside rather than to encourage, plead, exhort, etc.  Again, this is a perfect example of the etymological or root fallacy.  If you think I have minsterpreted you, I think you'll need to explain better what you mean.  Here are your paragraphs again:

 

"The action in παρακαλειν is to call aside. The function is why there is a calling aside, and we find that it is used for instruction, scolding, encouragement, upbraiding, and it’s the context that indicates for which reason the person was called aside. The translator that translates παρακαλειν into English has a problem—English doesn’t have the concept of calling aside for all those purposes. If the translator merely translates the action, that makes no sense in English. So he ends up translating the function, the why the action was taken.

 

"If, on the other hand, the intent of handling the text is merely to read the text with the intent as far as possible “to get inside the head” of an ancient Greek, the reader will recognize that παρακαλειν does NOT mean to instruct, to scold, to encourage, to upbraid, rather it’s an action that is used to facilitate all these contexts and listing the action is often the shorthand of referring to the reason for the action.

 

How is this not the etymological fallacy?

 

Blessings,

 

Jerry

Jerry Shepherd

Taylor Seminary

Edmonton, Alberta

jshepherd53 AT gmail.com