medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear Dr. Woolf,
I think it may help you to begin looking at "ecclesia" at an
earlier stage in the growth of the term.
I'd recommend the word study on the Greek "ekklesia" found in
the Theologisches Wðrterbuch zum Neue Testament edited by Gerhard Kittel.
For those few on the list who have even less Greek than I,
"ek" = out of and "klesia" = a group responding to a call or summons. Thus
the original Greek ekklesia was a group who responded to a specific summons for
a specific purpose. An example of such a group might be the town council
of Corinth or the volunteer fire department (if they had one) of Athens.
The article in Kittel goes into some detail concerning how this word came to be
the word used for "church", both in the sense of a local congregation and in the
sense of the church catholic.
I wish I could be more specific, but the eight volume
dictionary was but one of many items that had to be given away when we moved to
our retirement apartment in ville de Québec; it should be available in any
standard reference library.
Kindest regards to all,
Frank
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