The preposition eis in the new testament greek. A semantic analysis test

Abstract

The preposition εἰς is, for grammarians of Classical and New Tesament Greek language, an interesting and challenging category of study, both syntactically and semantically. It is due, on the one hand, to its complexity, ambiguity and polysemy and, on the other, to what constitutes a field of study that is in between the grammatical and lexical system, because its system supplements that of the cases. However, the study of the prepositions by the main dictionaries dedicated to classical and New Testament Greek, are not very useful from the semantic point of view, since most of them are traditional bilingual lexicons that follow criteria of morphological and syntactic use. Consequently, to analyze the values of this kind of morpholexemes thoroughly, it is necessary, from our point of view, to start from a mainly semantic-structural methodological orientation (without forgetting the morphosyntactic aspect). Our work focuses, therefore, on the semantic analysis of εἰς in the NT according to the methodology of the Greek-Spanish Dictionary of the New Testament (DGENT), whose theoretical model we will follow in these pages. This dictionary applies a thorough method of semantic analysis for the drafting of lemmas, whose use constitutes a progress in the analysis and systematization of the values of the preposition εἰς, reducing, consequently, the limitations of other dictionaries and enlightening some New Testament passages whose meaning has been, for a long time, a matter of controversy among researchers.