The range of interpretation, and inferred belief in the meaning, as a function of religious belief and action is a classic example of how fraught "the word of gXd" is, subject to translation/transcription error.
If a word only exists once in the source text, and in the corpus of contemporary(*) documents, inferred meaning has to be highly conjectural.
[*] contemporary being also subject to some discussion given the highly approximate nature of document ageing. If the other uses are as little as 50 years after, how strongly would you agree with the meaning, as opposed to documents 50 years prior?
Imagine you're in the future, and discover terms of art in contemporary computing like "bus" and then your point of reference is henceforth set by ICT, and not by mechanised transport, or even electrical engineer because you don't find the dual-meaning of bus-bars, and bus (vehicle) which informed this choice.
> If a word only exists once in the source text, and in the corpus of contemporary(*) documents, inferred meaning has to be highly conjectural.
Maybe, but you've got a body of tradition to lean on. You cannot interpret text, perhaps especially Christian texts, without drawing on tradition. This is a major flaw in sola scriptura and hence the reason why over forty thousand Protestant sects exist in the US alone. Without that continuous tradition, you have to reach for some other hermeneutic, some other interpretive lens, likely you're own undisciplined and unacknowledged implicit one of the day.
Right. But, this is the world we live in: people who insist on literal meaning of text, often inferred from an english gloss of a greek gloss, back to documents where (as in this case) the word is not able to be defined, because it's the only instance of the word in the corpus at this time.
If you put the faith "to the test" of reasoned meaning, you're a long way off a sola scriptura reservation.
If a word only exists once in the source text, and in the corpus of contemporary(*) documents, inferred meaning has to be highly conjectural.
[*] contemporary being also subject to some discussion given the highly approximate nature of document ageing. If the other uses are as little as 50 years after, how strongly would you agree with the meaning, as opposed to documents 50 years prior?
Imagine you're in the future, and discover terms of art in contemporary computing like "bus" and then your point of reference is henceforth set by ICT, and not by mechanised transport, or even electrical engineer because you don't find the dual-meaning of bus-bars, and bus (vehicle) which informed this choice.