Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
John 9:22
Put out of the synagogue. A compound word that appears nowhere before John.
John 9:22, in every translation this tool compares.
A word that appears nowhere earlier can mean the writer coined it, or that the thing it names was new, or simply that nothing else survives. Those are three different conclusions from one fact.
Because the term has been used to argue that this Gospel was written late, after a formal expulsion policy existed, and the whole argument rests on one rare adjective.
Versions read put out of the synagogue, or excommunicated.
ἀποσυνάγωγος aposunagogos · G656
Aposunagogos occurs three times, all in John, and nowhere else in Greek literature before him. Whether it reflects a formal first-century policy or an informal local exclusion is argued at length, and the dating of the Gospel is often attached to the answer.
No single English word covers it, so every version uses a phrase, and the fact that the Greek is one coined word disappears.
When a word occurs only in one author, the absence of other witnesses is a fact about what survives as much as about what existed.
Put out of the synagogue is the majority rendering.
- All three occurrences: John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2
- No attestation before John
- The Birkat ha-Minim debate in the dating literature
