Aaarrrggh!
I do NOT want to come across as a Tony-ragger, but this is another problematic op among many. First, the Greek for "fall" is "
pipto" (see Matthew 10:29 or 15:14) and the Greek word for "
away" is "
apostrepho" (see Matthew 1:19 or 5:42). To literally fall away would be
apostrepho pipto in Greek. Then there is the problem of evidencing a CCAM post with a self-promoting Reddit Post
. The "
falling away" of Luke 18:13's
aphistanti and Acts 21:21's
apostasia is completely different than
apostrepho pipto. Neither rebellion, taking a stand
against (
aphistanti) and apostacy are NOT mere falling away! Mark 14:27's "skandalizo" is to be ensnared or to stumble over, NOT
apostrepho pipto. To treat those words as synonymous with falling and falling away borders on abuse of scripture, especially by someone who has claimed to have studied Greek and presumes to teach others based on their (mis-)understanding of Greek. The minute the word "
aphistanti" was looked up in Strongs and seen that it did not mean "
to fall away," the Greek for "
to fall away" should have been looked up! I timed it; it took me 57.64
seconds to do so. In one minute the op could have been improved upon enormously. The "ekpipto" should have been the center of the op because in Greek the prefix "ek-" means "
out of," or "
out from." There are 10 uses of "
ekpipto" in the NT, as the op observed, but there is only one occurrence of the conjugation found in Galatians 5:4. That particular conjugation is one commonly used in sailing and other navigation when either someone strays off course or falls out a boat. It's also used in agriculture to describe a tree that drops its fruit or doesn't bear any. Given the frequent use of agricultural analogies in the NT (trees, vines, seeds growing into productive plants, etc.) this latter motif definitely should not be ignored.
Think of an apple falling away from a tree.
Ekpipto
As someone who grows apples, pears, and peaches, I can tell you fruit falls from the tree when it is ripe, or past its ripeness. The former is a good thing, the latter not so good because it is a consequence of the orchardist's neglect. Fruit also falls from a tree when either the tree or the fruit are diseased. These are all things the people living in the first century agrarian societies would have understood instantly. They also would have understood the difference between
ekpipto and
aphistemi, skandilizo, and
apostasia.
Lastly, there is the problem of using multiple translations and the difference between the much more nuanced Greek and the blunt often not-nuanced English. In the last example, the Reddit article cited the BLB but the BLB does not use the word "
away," "
fall away." in
Acts 21:21. Only two English translations do so and one of them isn't correctly a "
translation," and the other is a dynamic translation that stands alone in the way it translated "
apostasy". A similar condition exists in the use of Galatians 5:4, with many of the translations correctly leaving the word "
away" out entirely. In total, it took me about 15 minutes to look all this up and type this post. Isn't fifteen minutes of our time worth not making these mistakes and worth posting correct facts and truth for the edification of others (and maybe return edification from their feedback).
@TonyChanYT, I encourage and exhort you to do better. Most of us here are not new or immature. We are not learning from these posts and many of them are wrong. Tony, let me also encourage you to specify a point of discussion or commentary so readers can have at least some understanding of the opening post's purpose and the desired direction conversation should take. To everyone else, I encourage you all to help Tony do better and exhort you to take care and be discerning when reading his posts because he posts a lot but discusses little and while some of his ops are good and commendable most are flawed in some serious way and a small percentage are just wrong; so bad they never should have been posted. I'll give this one a C-. If this op was intended to promote a conversation about believers falling away from Christ, faith, the Church (?) then this op has couched the matter in terms of the kind of falling away a piece of fruit does from the tree, rebellion, apostasy, and getting ensnared
. That's a big op. Those terms are not identical or synonymous.
