Paidion wrote:
Until you mentioned it, I had never heard of "thesaurus graecae linguae". You got me interested, and so I did a search for it. I was unable to figure out how to do a search in Greek. Perhaps you can enlighten me.
It lists where a word is used in virtually all Greek literature.
I believe your statement to be erroneous. Although "anemos" is used more frequently, "pneuma" is often used as well. I still think it is accidental that "pneuma" is used only once in the New Testament for "wind".
I think we are talking past each other. We both agree that the word anemos is used more. You infer that pneuma must be used nearly as often as the LXX uses both, and that the NT - in which the word wind occurs forty times - is anomalous.But in my opinion, that is too wide a sample to be mere accident, and the LXX can be explained by it being a translation.
I wanted to check out whether the use of "pneuma" for wind in other Greek literature is absent or rare as you seem to assume. So I found a site which has Greek literature from many sources. I looked up all instances of "pneuma". In the first four I happened to examine, the word was used for "wind" in two of them! I know that's a pretty small sample, but it is still an indicator that this use of the word in other Greek literature is not as rare as you suppose. Here are the quotes. I will not give the references yet. Since you are widely read in Greek literature, I want you to translate them for me, who, according to your understanding, is a beginner who has not read Greek literature outside of the Bible. After you have done that, I'll give you references.
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Paidion, i was a PhD classicist; if you don't believe me, that's fine. But I do think that this tendency of yours to make dogmatic statements about things you are not informed on is not a positive one - the statement you threw out about Pentecostal history is an example. It's simply not fair to those reading your posts. You said that what I said about anemos being used more in wider Greek literature was true, but then you admitted this was just an inference on your part. If you want to be an expert on Greek, take some classes in the wider literature - I can guarantee you that it will be so difficult, stressful, and challenging, that you will be cured from every offering facile generalizations again! You'll be expected to read it - pages of it, chapters of it, books of it.
I looked at your quote, and got stuck on a number of words which simply weren't in the dictionary, and the syntax didn't seem to make much sense either, though if I knew the words perhaps it would make sense. It also contained letter clusters which don't exist in Greek as far as I'm aware - this made me wonder if you had edited the quotes, or if they are in modern Greek.
