Lesson 6 | Vocab
What Is a Butterfly?
Learning Greek vocab helps protect you from what D.A. Carson calls “the root fallacy.”¹
That fallacy assumes that you can determine the meaning of a word based on its parts—its etymology.² This does work sometimes, like with the verb εἰσέρχομαι, which you learned in Lesson 4: ἔρχομαι means to “come” or “go,” εἰς means “into”; therefore, εἰσέρχομαι means “go into.”
But often, doing this would plunge you into confusion! Take ἀποκρίνομαι, for example, which you also learned in Lesson 4. Does it mean “to judge away from”? After all, ἀπό means “away from,” and κρίνω means to “judge” (as you'll learn in the vocab from this lesson). No: it simply means to “reply” or to “answer.”
The same truth holds in English! Just because “there” is an adverb describing place and “fore” means to be at the front, you don't think that “therefore” means “to be in front,” do you? And a “butterfly” isn't an annoying insect made out of churned cream!
If you know many words where etymology is useless for determining meaning, you will be armed against the root fallacy when you encounter it in the wild, especially in older commentaries.
For example, the noun ἐκκλησία simply means “church” or “assembly.” It doesn’t mean “called-out assembly,” even though that is what the individual pieces of the word mean separately. John Peter Lange, in the volume of his well-known commentary series on Ephesians, states this when commenting on Ephesians 1:22:
“[T]he ἐκκλησία has two main features in it, one the ordained unity and the other the calling, which includes in itself a separating out (ἐκλέγεσθαι) from the world not yet called or rejecting the call.” —John Peter Lange et al., A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2008), 63.
See what he did there? He talks about “calling” and “separating out” when that information can't be found in the actual usage of ἐκκλησία anywhere in the New Testament! Instead, as the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis points out, “[t]he contexts where ἐκκλησία occurs do not allude to the action of people being ‘called out’; the term appears to mean simply ‘(duly constituted) assembly.’”³
So learn your vocab well, and remember this: the meaning of a word is determined by its context, not by its etymology.