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James Spinti's avatar

Actually, even in Greek, νόμος's first meaning in the Classical lexica is "use, usage, custom, tradition" (Brill's Dictionary of Ancient Greek, p. 1406); LSJ has " that which is in habitual practice, use or possession" (p. 1180) as its base meaning. And BDAG starts out his entry saying "A special semantic problem for modern readers encountering the term ν. is the general tendency to confine the usage of the term ‘law’ to codified statutes. Such limitation has led to much fruitless debate in the history of NT interpretation" (677). The real problem starts with the Latin, with the heavy codification and punishment aspects of lex, which then leads into the penance aspects.

James

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