A Greek-English Lexicon to the New Testament
The hidden depths both of the wisdom and knowledge of God were manifest, not only in the revelation of his will contained in the Scriptures of truth, but in the very language in which that revelation was given. William Greenfield's lexicon opens with a sweeping meditation on language itself—contrasting the lost hieroglyphics of Egypt, the buried cuneiform of Assyria and Babylon, and the unwieldy thousands of Chinese characters with the enduring simplicity of Hebrew and Greek. From there it furnishes the student with the practical instrument promised in its title: a careful guide to the original Greek words of the New Testament.
At its heart lies the conviction that no translation can perfectly capture the delicate shades of meaning uttered by inspired men, and that those who love God's word will wish to recover the precise sense of the original tongue. It matters because it places serious study of Scripture within reach of the diligent reader, treating the labor of learning Greek not as the work of a lifetime but as an attainable and agreeable pursuit.
How it begins
The hidden depths both of the wisdom and knowledge of God were manifest, not only in the revelation of his will contained in the Scriptures of truth, but in the manner of giving that revelation, and in the language in which is was given. Egypt had wisdom, but it was enshrined in hieroglyphics so obscure that their meaning faded centuries ago from the memory of mankind, and for many successive ages no man on earth could penetrate their mysteries. Assyria and Babylon had literature, art, and science; but with a language written in seven or eight hundred cuneiform signs, some of them having fifty different meanings, what wonder is it that for more than two thousand years the language and literature of these nations was lost, buried, and forgotten? The vast literature of China has survived the changes of centuries, but the list of different characters, which in a dictionary of the second century numbered 9353, and in the latest imperial Chinese Dictionary numbers 43,960,—some of them requiring fifty strokes of the pencil to produce them, —shows how unfit such a language must be for a channel to convey the glad tidings of God's salvation to the poor, the weak, the sorrowful, and to people who cannot spend ten or twenty years in learning to comprehend the mysteries of the Chinese tongue.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.