Do you study the New Testament in Greek? Are lexicons your best friends? Well, they sure are important.

What do you do when you come across, say, φλόξ, and you don’t know what it means and you can’t deduce its meaning simply from the context? You probably have some lexicon ready at hand, whether it be BDAG, LSJ, LN, or something else.

John Lee has written some important work on lexicography including a monograph on the history of New Testament lexicography, published in 2003, and an essay in a 2004 festschrift for Danker on the present state of lexicography.

In the essay he speaks about the importance of the lexicon and says:

Not only will lexicography be in demand, but it will continue to carry a weighty responsibility. This is because of the special character of lexicons. Lexicons are regarded as by their users as authoritative, and they put their trust in them. Lexicons are reference books presenting a compressed, seemingly final statement of fact, with an almost legal weight. The mere fact that something is printed in a book gives it authority, as far as most people are concerned. And understandably: if one does not know the meaning of a word, one is predisposed to trust the only means of rescue from ignorance.

But are lexicons infallible? His next words poignantly capture it:

Yet this trust is misplaced. The concise, seemingly authoritative statement of meaning can, and often does, conceal many sins – indecision, compromise, imperfect knowledge, guesswork, and, above all, dependence on predecessors. Lexicographers have to make a decision and put down a definite statement, and they are fallible like everyone else. But the ordinary user has no means of knowing where the mistakes have been made, where the ignorance has been covered up, what has been lifted from somewhere else without checking, and so on.

These are dirty truths that I fear schools who only provide a year of Greek study and maybe an exegetical methods course rarely disclose, if they are aware of it themselves. And I often wonder if some of the lexicons Greek students are raised on, along with a lack of linguistic understanding of how words work, lead them to think of glosses as the “literal translation” which leads to all sorts of messy stuff.

So, where does that leave the student who isn’t going to go far enough in their Greek studies to critically engage with the lexicons?

Well, among many things that might be said, I don’t think we can cite lexicons as the final word on any matter. Critical discussion should always be at hand. So, statements such as: “BDAG says…, therefore…” shouldn’t be found on our lips. Better would be: “BDAG says…. Does that make the most sense of the evidence…? Let’s look up every occurrence of the word in all extant Greek literature and decide for ourselves!” -> said no pastor ever. Or have you?