This is one of the basic points we try to make in first year Greek, but in the rush to simplify the language sufficiently for a first year student, sometimes the subtly of this point is missed.
Colossians 2:8 is often misunderstood to say that all philosophy is bad and Christians should not engage in the discipline. It is a little thing in translation, but one word can carry a lot of meaning. The Greek is a tad difficult, so let me start with a slightly more wooden translation.
I received a somewhat distressing Facebook post the other day. On the one hand, you don’t know what a person’s motivations are. I hardly know my own. And you don’t know how a person uses words. But based on the words used, it was distressing to me.
As we know, Greek sentences can go on and on and on and …. Today’s English requires the sentences to be shorter, and so periodically translators put a period where there is none in Greek (so to speak), and supply a subject for the second part of the sentence.
One of the problems of memorizing word glosses in first year Greek is that it is possible to miss the richness of a word’s meaning, especially its breadth of meaning (“semantic range”).
