A

MANUAL

GREEK LEXICON

OF THE

NEW TESTAMENT

BY

G. ABBOTT-SMITH, D.D., D.C.L.

professor of new testament literature in the montreal diocesan

theological college and assistant professor in the

oriental department in mcgill university

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1922

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

The need of a new Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament will hardly be questioned. Thayer’s monumental work, deservedly the standard for more than thirty years past, and, supplemented by later literature, still likely to remain a standard of reference for some time to come, was rather too bulky to serve as a table companion to the New Testament for the average man. A smaller book, which would lend itself more readily to constant reference, has been a real and growing want for the student.

This want has been enhanced by the progress of lexical study during the last quarter century. The study of vernacular texts, which in recent years received a new impetus through the discovery of vast numbers of non-literary papyri, chiefly in Egypt, has removed all doubt as to the category to which the language of the New Testament belongs. It is now abundantly clear that the diction of the apostolic writers is not a peculiar isolated idiom, characteristic of Jewish Hellenists, but simply the common speech of the Greek-speaking world at the time when the New Testament books were written.

While the statement just made has come to be a commonplace, it has not been so for long. There has arisen, therefore, the need not only of the collection and arrangement in convenient form (a need which is now being supplied for the advanced scholar in Moulton and Milligan’s Vocabulary of the Greek Testament) of the results of pioneer study in the papyri, but also of a systematic revision, in the light of recent research, of many of the views regarding the diction and vocabulary of the New Testament which were commonly accepted thirty or even twenty years ago.

The considerations therefore—so well set forth by Dr. Moulton in his Prolegomena—which call for an entirely new grammar of the New Testament, apply also to the work of the Lexicographer. And the materials for his work—still steadily accumulating—have been liberally furnished by the special studies of Deissmann and Thumb in Germany and Moulton and Milligan in Great Britain and have also found their way into the more recent commentaries.

The new impulse given to the study of the Septuagint by the publication of the Oxford Concordance by Hatch and Redpath, the Cambridge Manual Edition of the Septuagint and its accompanying Introduction by Dr. Swete, together with the Grammar of Mr. Thackeray, has also had its influence on New Testament studies. While Dr. Abbott’s caution1 as to the possibility of exaggerating the influence of the Septuagint still holds good, the evidence of the papyri has brought about a growing sense of its value to the student of the New Testament. More reference therefore has been made, it is believed, in this Lexicon ...