I've mentioned Hermann Cremer (1834-1903) before. The reason I mentioned Cremer is because of my interest in his book on the Pauline doctrine of justification titled Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre im Zusammenhange ihrer geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen (1899). (Google Books has scanned it! Cool.) Roughly translated this means, "The Pauline Doctrine of Justification in Connection with its Historical Presuppositions." In this volume, Cremer argued that "righteousness" in the Hebrew Bible is a "relational concept" (Verhältnisbegriff) and that this influenced Paul's Greek usage. According to Cremer, "righteousness" is not conformity to a norm, but the fulfillment of the demands that are inherent to a given relationship or covenant. This faulty notion then prepared the way for NPP scholars like Dunn and Wright who argue that Paul's phrase "the righteousness of God" is a lexical cipher meaning "the covenant faithfulness of God." This is the view that I am currently trying to critique in my dissertation.
However, that said, I don't want to give the impression that Cremer was a bad guy. He was actually one of the strongest advocates of orthodoxy during a time when the classical liberalism of Ritschl and Harnack had become the reigning theology in German universities and theological faculties. He was an orthodox theologian with an evangelical piety and churchly commitment that properly influenced his scholarship.
Cremer is probably best known as the author of a lexicon of New Testament Greek titled Biblisch-theologisches Wörterbuch der neutestamentlichen Gräcität (1866). It was published in several editions, then edited by Julius Kögel after his death, so that its final 11th German edition (1923) was referred to as "Cremer-Kögel." The pre-Kögel editions were translated into English and published as Biblico-theological Lexicon of New Testament Greek in four editions (1872-95). (Google Books strikes again.) The theological approach to lexicography taken by Cremer was picked up and expanded by Gerhard Kittel (1888–1948), founding editor of the highly regarded 10-volume Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (translated into English by Geoffrey W. Bromiley). In fact TWNT/TDNT was intended to be the successor to Cremer-Kögel.
Now the Cremer-Kögel-Kittel approach to lexicography was famously criticized by James Barr in 1961 in The Semantics of Biblical Language. He pointed out that Cremer and Kittel sometimes engaged in discussion of larger theological concepts and themes under the guise of lexical study, thus giving the misleading impression (at times) that the Greek words themselves are vessels bearing all the theological freight of the contexts in which they are used. This error is what Barr called "illegitimate totality transfer." Barr explained this error in these terms:
The attempt to relate the individual word directly to the theological thought leads to the distortion of the semantic contribution made by words in contexts; the value of the context comes to be seen as something contributed by the word, and then it is read into the word as its contribution where the context is in fact different (p. 233).
Other scholars speak of the need to distinguish more carefully between "lexical concepts" and "discourse concepts" (Cotterell and Turner, Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation, 41ff). For example, the verb agapao just means "to love" and does not necessarily denote some sort of divine super-spiritual love as exemplified in God's sacrificial love for sinners. It can be used in this way, but such connotations come from the context more than from the semantic content of the word itself. In the LXX it is used in reference to Amnon's lustful and violent "love" for Tamar (2 Sam 13:1, 4, 15)! Clearly, there is no hint here of self-giving love. Exalted connotations of divine sacrifice and grace come from the "discourse concept" found in the context of passages like John 3:16 and are not inherent to the "lexical concept" per se.
Although Barr's criticisms were on target and widely accepted, they should not deter students of the New Testament from using Cremer's Biblico-theological Lexicon (or Kittel's TDNT for that matter). There is a wealth of scholarship and insight in Cremer's volume that is still useful today. The basic thrust of Cremer's lexical work was his presupposition that the theologically significant vocabulary of the Greek New Testament must not be interpreted solely or primarily with reference to extra-biblical Greek usage but primarily in the Hebraic context and worldview of the Old Testament. A word like doxa (glory), for example, cannot be understood if one merely consults the classical references in Liddell and Scott's Greek lexicon. The Septuagint and the Hebrew word kabod that lies behind the Septuagint rendering must also be taken into account in formulating a clear idea of what this word would have signified to Greek-speaking Jews like Paul and the other NT authors. This is why Cremer does not have an entry for every Greek word in the New Testament but focuses on the theologically important words. For the majority of the vocabulary of the New Testament, that is, for the non-theological words like erchomai ("to come"), NT usage does not differ much from classical and (extra-biblical) Koine usage.
William Urwick, one of the translators, writes in his preface to the 1872 English edition:
As is clear from the Author's Preface, the student must not exepct to find in it every word which the New Testament contains. For words whose ordinary meaning in the Classics is retained unmodified and unchanged in Scripture he must resort still to the Classical Lexicons. But for words whose meaning is thus modified, words which have become the bases and watchwords of Christian Theology, he will find this Lexicon most valuable and suggestive, tracing as it does their history in their transference from the Classics into the Septuagint, and from the Septuagint into the New Testament, and the gradual deepening and elevation of their meaning till they reach the fulness of New Testament thought.
There is a great deal of truth to this description of how words changed meaning as they were transferred from the Classical usage to the Septuagint and from the Septuagint to the New Testament. In fact, this is basically the structure of Cremer's articles for each word. He first surveys the usage of the word in Classical Greek. Then he shows how the meaning shifted in the Septuagint under the influence of the Hebrew religion. And then he brings you to the New Testament, where the Septuagint meaning is sometimes repeated and sometimes subjected to yet further amplification or modification. (A similar outline is used by Kittel, although sometimes with added sections on Qumran and rabbinic literature.)
Now Cremer probably went a little too far when, in his Preface, he quoted Richard Rothe to the effect that New Testament Greek is so unique that "we may appropriately speak of a language of the Holy Spirit." Prior to the discovery of the papyri, it may have been possible to think of the Greek of the New Testament as a specialized "Holy Ghost" language. But thanks to Adolf Deissmann's efforts, it is now universally acknowledged that this is not at all the case and that the essential linguistic structure of New Testament Greek is no different from ordinary Koine Greek.
However, I believe there has been a general tendency to over-react against Cremer and to belittle his insistence that the theological vocabulary of the Greek New Testament must be evaluated and studied primarily in terms of the Greek Old Testament and other Jewish Greek literature. This is all that Cremer intended to say and I don't see how it can be gainsaid. He did not argue that the syntactical structure of New Testament Greek was fundamentally different from extra-biblical Koine. Cremer can agree with Deissmann on this point and still rightly call our attention to his legitimate biblical theological concerns in the field of New Testament lexicography. As much as I admire, love, and use the indispensible BDAG (it is, unquestionably, the best lexicon of New Testament Greek available), I believe this may be its biggest flaw. That is, it relies too much on extra-biblical Koine as the standard of meaning and downplays the role of the Septuagint in mediating the overtones, allusions, and connotations of the Hebrew biblical revelation.
For these reasons, then, Cremer's old work, as outdated as it may be at points, is still worth consulting. Perhaps someone will attempt to update it in order to provide a counterbalance to the Deissmannian approach that views everything through the lens of Greco-Roman parallels and which neglects the biblical theological aspect of lexicography. Cremer may have gotten some of the details wrong (e.g., his interpretation of "righteousness" as a Hebraic/relational concept), but his instincts were right.
