The purpose of this paper is to bring together somewhat more fully than can be easily found in one place elsewhere, the material for forming a judgment as to the sense borne by the term [τὰ] λόγια, as it appears in the pages of the New Testament. This term occurs only four times in the New Testament. The passages, as translated by the English revisers of 1881, are as follows: “Moses … who received living oracles to give unto us” (Acts 7:38); “They [the Jews] were intrusted with the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2); “When by reason of the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need again that some one teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God” (Heb. 5:12); “If any man speaketh let him speak as it were oracles of God” (1 Peter 4:11). The general sense of the term is obvious on the face of things: and the commentators certainly do not go wholly wrong in explaining it. But the minor differences that emerge in their explanations are numerous, and seem frequently to evince an insufficient examination of the usage of the word: and the references by which they support their several views are not always accessible to readers who would fain test them, so that the varying explanations stand, in the eyes of many, as only so many obiter dicta between which choice must be made, if choice is made at all, purely arbitrarily. It has seemed, therefore, as if it would not be without its value if the usage of the word were exhibited in sufficient fullness to serve as some sort of a touchstone of the explanations that have been offered of it. We are sure, at any rate, that students of the New Testament remote from libraries will not be sorry to have at hand a tolerably full account of the usage of the word: and we are not without hope that a comprehensive view of it may help to correct some long-standing errors concerning its exact meaning, and may, indeed, point not obscurely to its true connotation—which is not without interesting implications. Upheld by this hope we shall essay to pass in rapid review the usage of the term in Classic, Hellenistic and Patristic Greek, and then to ask what, in the light of this usage, the word is likely to have meant to the writers of the New Testament.
I. It may be just as well at the outset to disabuse our minds of any presumption that a diminutive sense is inherent in the term λόγιον, as a result of its very form. 1 Whether we explain it with Meyer-Weiss 2 as the neuter of λόγιος and point to λογίδιον 3 as the proper diminutive of this stem; or look upon it with Sanday-Headlam 4 as originally the diminutive of λόγος, whose place as such was subsequently, viz., when it acquired the special sense of “oracle,” taken by the strengthened diminutive λογίδιον—it remains true that no trace of a diminutive sense attaches to it as we meet it on the pages of Greek literature. 5
We are pointed, to be sure, to a scholium on the “Frogs” of Aristophanes (line 942) as indicating the contrary. The passage is the well-known one in which Euripides is made to respond to Æschylus’ inquiry as to what things he manufactured. “Not winged horses,” is the reply (as Wheelwright translates it), “By Jupiter, nor goat-stags, such as thou, Like paintings on the Median tapestry, But as from thee I first received the art, Swelling with boastful pomp and heavy words, I paréd it straight and took away its substance, With little words, and walking dialogues, 6 And white beet mingled, straining from the books A juice of pleasant sayings,—then I fed him With monodies, mixing Ctesiphon.” It is upon the word here translated “with little words,” but really meaning “verselets” (Blaydes: versiculis)—ἐπυλλίοις—that the scholium occurs. It runs: Ἀντὶ τοῦ λογίοις μικροῖς· ὡς δὲ βρέφος βρεφύλλιον, καὶ εἶδος εἰδύλλιον· οὕτω καὶ ἔπος ἐπύλλιον. 7 That is to say, ἐπύλλιον is a diminutive of the same class as βρεφύλλιον and εἰδύλλιον, 8 and means λόγιον μικρόν. Since the idea of smallness is explicit in the adjective attached to λόγιον here, surely it is not necessary to discover it also in the noun, 9 especially when what the scholiast is obviously striving to say is not that ἐπυλλίοις means “little wordlets,” but “little verses.” The presence of μικροῖς here, rather is conclusive evidence that λογίοις by itself did not convey a diminutive meaning to the scholiast. If we are to give λόγιον an unexampled sense here, we might be tempted to take it, therefore, as intended to express the idea “verses” rather than the tautological one of “little words” or even “little maxims” or “little sayings.” And it might fairly be pleaded in favor of so doing that λόγιον in its current sense of “oracle” not only lies close to one of the ordinary meanings of ἔπος (“Od.,” 12, 266; Herod., 1, 13, and often in the Tragedians), but also, because oracles were commonly couched in verse, might easily come to suggest in popular speech the idea of “verse,” so that a λόγιον μικρόν would easily obtrude itself as the exact synonym of ἐπύλλιον, in Euripides’ sense, i. e., in the sense of short broken verses. There is no reason apparent on the other hand why we should find a diminutive implication in the word as here used, and in any case, if this is intended, it is a sense unillustrated by a single instance of usage.