Do you really need to go to so much trouble? The word παρουσία means “presence” in the sense “the act of being there”. The other meanings for “presence” in English - vague ghost, military force or charisma - are not in the Greek word. Even more precisely, παρουσία is only the act of being present, and does not even mean the space in which one is present. If you want to express the meaning of the English word “presence” in the sense of “immediate vicinity”, the word πρόσωπον “face” or a one of a number of prepositions could be used.
by ἑκηβόλος » Thu Aug 02, 2018 5:30 pm
Do you really need to go to so much trouble? The word παρουσία means “presence” in the sense “the act of being there”. The other meanings for “presence” in English - vague ghost, military force or charisma - are not in the Greek word. Even more precisely, παρουσία is only the act of being present, and does not even mean the space in which one is present. If you want to express the meaning of the English word “presence” in the sense of “immediate vicinity”, the word πρόσωπον “face” or a one of a number of prepositions could be used.
I understand that the word παρουσία can mean only the state of presence and does not refer to the place and time of that state. But to show that the word refers to a coming and not presence in some contexts, it is useful to give examples from Greek writings where it is used in this way.
Since the word primarily means “presence,” does anyone know why, from the perspective of the morphology of the word, people began to use it with the meaning “coming” in some contexts? TDNT gives the history of the usage of the word but does not clearly explain why it began to be used with this sense despite having “presence” as the primary meaning.
It appears that you might be in over your head on this project. Perhaps you should read something on lexical semantics. The standard textbook by Moises Silva is now very old. Ernst R. Wendland reviews more recent work in semantic analysis. However Wendland will not be comprehensible to bible students who are not linguists.
Moises Silva, Biblical Words and their Meaning: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics, Zondervan 1983, revised ed. 1994.
J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Lexical Semantics of New Testament Greek, Scholars Press, 1992.
Framing the Frames: A Theoretical Framework for the Cognitive Notion of “Frames of Reference”
Ernst R. Wendland 2010
http://www-01.sil.org/siljot/2010/1/928474542779/siljot2010-1-03.pdf
Stirling is right.
For starters, you should distinguish between meaning and reference, as I indicated in my previous post.
You might also bear in mind that if someone comes, he is present.
There is nothing in the morphology (the meaning of the individual constituent parts taken severally) of this word itself suggesting why its meaning would be extended to mean “coming”. The morphology is παρα - in the company of somebody else, εσ - be, ο - no meaning, ντ - participle marker “-ing”, σι - abstract noun, α - an alpha stem number case ending typical of some abstract nouns. As Stirling and Michael just intimated by not directly answering this question, the answer to it lies outside the question’s terms of reference. The only thing morphology may add to our understanding, besides the narrow sense of " presence" that I described in my previous post, is perhaps that one can not be “present” alone.
To go beyond the word itself, it is possible that there may have been a popular confusion between εἰμὶ “be” and ἵημι “go”. In some of their forms they are similar. It may have been construed by some that παρουσία was derived from παρίημι. I think that this explanation has challenges though.
Thank you for the explanations. Apparently some words can be used apart from their literal meaning to refer to something partly synonymous or even different. I had previously inquired of Daniel Wallace about why the word παρουσία began to be used with the meaning “coming” despite having “presence” as the primary meaning, and he said that usage and etymology are not the same thing.
Another way to look at παρεῖναι “to be present” / “to arrive” and παραγιγνεσθαι “to become present” is to see those rather non-descript verbs as part of the grammaticisation process required by the language. That us to suggest that the meaning comes from the preposition, and the because in most situations, Greek can’t just add grammar to a preposition, it must first be made into a noun or verb, before it is incorporated into a sentence.
The level of Greek in this passage you are looking at should be noted. It appears to be a Modern Greek speaker, attempting to write in an older form of the language. The lack of the dative is one sign of that. In as far as the content of thevtext us concerned, it may be interesting, but it probably serves as an exemplar of deviation from a standard form of the language, rather than of the standard form of a language.