Posted by J.H. on March 16, 1999 at 11:01:55 {MWKQmDRkic4cM}:
In Reply to: *A Tale of Three ENDS posted by tobor on March 16, 1999 at 10:25:48:
: Still, what do you do with Paul's use of parousia in Phillipians where he contrasts it with the word "absence"?
I don't do anything with it. Have you ever studied a foreign language?
Well, I have. It's called English. And I know the following: A word can often have several meanings, and the meaning is determined by context and custom.
Consider these examples:
The word "apparent" above has two different, and actually opposite, meanings in the two sentences.
Would it be meaningful to ask me why words can mean different things in different contexts?
Parousia means presence, and it also happens to be the word of choice to describe the visitation of a king or an official to a province etc. It was issued coins and written inscriptions when Roman emperors visited cities. In Greek the word used was parousia, in Latin it was adventus. And adventus means coming. When the this fact was discovered in the last century, it settled the question about the use of parousia once and for all in the academic world. JWs, of course, have too much invested in their mistranslation to be influenced by such facts.
The WTS makes so much fuss about this word it is easy to forget that the distinction between coming and presence is clear, but small. Once you have come, you are present. So what word is used in common expressions for a visitation in different languages can be pretty arbitrary.
But the WTS doctrine requires that the term emphasizes presence, and even then, it lends no direct support to the invisible presence doctrine. And we see that
nobody in the hellenistic world ever understood the expression to refer to any presence, and even less an invisible presence. No early Bible translator (remember that nobody today really knows Koine Greek like one who used it as his own in
the 1st few centuries AD!) chose that rendering. And currently this idea has no support among Greek scholars.