English therefore and Greek therefore

[tonychanyt]

Oxford dictionary on therefore:

adverb
used to introduce the logical result of something that has just been mentioned
He's only 17 and therefore not eligible to vote.

Syntactically, the English word therefore is an adverb. Semantically, it carries a sense of first-order logical consequence. A happens; therefore B happens as a result.

Let's look at Romans 1:

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

Paul was talking about they and how bad they were. Then on the next breadth, Paul targeted you, Romans 2:

1 Therefore [G1352] you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.

The they's and the you's are connected by the Greek conjunction διό. It is a connection, not an adverb.

G1352 διό (dio) occurs 53 times.

HELPS Word-studies:

1352 dió (a conjunction, derived from 1223 /diá, "across to the other side," and the relative pronoun 3739 /hós, "which") – because-therefore; on account of which therefore. Two "directions" are expressed by 1352 (dió) – looking backward ("because") to properly look forward ("therefore").

The conjunction looks backward and forward.

Thayer's Greek Lexicon:

wherefore, on which account

I would not attribute too much first-order logical sense to the Greek διό.

Another similar Greek word is οὖν.

 

[Mark Quayle]

Oxford dictionary on therefore:

Syntactically, the English word therefore is an adverb. Semantically, it carries a sense of first-order logical consequence. A happens; therefore B happens as a result.

Let's look at Romans 1:


Paul was talking about they and how bad they were. Then on the next breadth, Paul targeted you, Romans 2:

The they's and the you's are connected by the Greek conjunction διό. It is a connection, not an adverb.

G1352 διό (dio) occurs 53 times.

HELPS Word-studies:

The conjunction looks backward and forward.

Thayer's Greek Lexicon:


I would not attribute too much first-order logical sense to the Greek διό.

Another similar Greek word is οὖν.

One thing that single-language speakers often miss is the fact that not only are the words different in their use, and so, their meanings, but the whole mindset of the other-language speakers is different, with a whole different set of concepts and presuppositions inherent in what they are saying.

I was just talking with somebody today, about the difference in the English (or at least, American) words, "someone" and "somebody". Nobody that hasn't used our language for a reasonably long time will pick up on us saying, "Now he is somebody!" in which we mean to imply that he is of some more-than-average importance to the context. Yet, when we say, "I was just talking to somebody," it means nobody of any particular importance to the context of my current discussion. When we mention 'somebody', we often follow with "that" —"somebody that...". But when we talk about 'someone', we follow it with "who" —"someone who....", which means they are now of some import to the context; somebody that I spoke with is not as important to my current discussion as someone with whom I was talking.

Whether my description in the paragraph above is accurate or not, I only mean it to show that one who is not a native speaker, and, as we so often do in our analysis of the Koiné Greek, cannot assume that all these words operate the way their mind takes the English to operate. It's bad enough that one person speaking English never quite knows where someone else is coming from, nevermind to assess what someone 500 years ago wrote, but when it is a whole different language, from 2000 years ago (or more), we need to give ourselves a little healthy self-doubt, instead of being confident in our unbiased knowledge of the Scriptures.