A. The Rejection of Data Closest to the New Testament Writings

1. Rejection of New Testament Examples

One of the most surprising aspects of Dr. Cervin's article is that he dismisses all the New Testament examples of kephale without examining one of them. Yet he concludes his article by telling us what Paul did and did not mean by kephale (p. 112).

With regard to the 12 New Testament passages in which I claimed that the context indicated that the meaning "authority over" was appropriate for kephale , Cervin says,

First of all, 12 of these passages (nos. 38-49) are from the NT, and are therefore illegitimate as evidence, since they are disputed texts. In citing these NT passages, Grudem commits the logical fallacy of assuming what he sets out to prove. The whole purpose of Grudem's study is to determine whether or not kephale can denote "authority over" or "leader" in Paul's epistles. He cannot therefore cite Paul as supporting evidence. (p. 94)

But Cervin here fails to distinguish "assuming what one sets out to prove" from arguing for a meaning from context, which is what I did in my article in each case (pp. 56-58) (4). If Cervin disagrees with my arguments from the context of these New Testament examples, then it would be appropriate to give reasons why he disagrees. But it is hardly legitimate linguistic analysis to dismiss them out of hand.

This is especially significant when we realize that a number of the New Testament examples of head have nothing to do with husband-wife relationships in marriage but speak of Christ's universal rule. For example, "he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church" (Ephesians 1:22). Here head is clearly a metaphor, and it occurs in a context dealing with Christ's authority "over all things" and the fact that God the Father "has put all things under his feet." It is hard to avoid the sense of "authority over" or "ruler" in this case, since the fact of Christ's universal authority is so clearly mentioned in the very sentence in which the word occurs (5).

Similarly, Colossians 2:10 says that Christ is "the head of all rule and authority"---clearly implying that Christ is the greater leader or authority over all other authorities in the universe.

Moreover, in a context in which Paul says that "the church is subject to Christ," he says that "Christ is the head of the church" (Ephesians 5:23-24). Once again the idea of Christ's authority over the church seems so relevant to Paul's statements in the immediate context that it is surprising that Cervin thinks such texts can be dismissed without any discussion at all.

Other New Testament texts could be mentioned, but at least it should be clear that it is highly unusual to conclude an article with a statement about what Paul could have meant by the word kephale when one has not examined Paul's own uses of kephale at any point in the article. I do not recall ever before reading an article that concluded with a pronouncement about what a certain author meant by the use of a word but did not examine any of the uses of the word by that author himself. Would Cervin do this for Plato or Aristotle? If the meaning of a certain term as used by Aristotle was "under dispute" because some author had recently challenged the traditional understanding of Aristotle's use of that word, I imagine Dr. Cervin would use the following procedure:

1. He would first look carefully at the uses of that term in Aristotle and try to decide from the context what meaning the word had in each case.

2. Next he would look at the uses of that word in literature closest to Aristotle in time (what linguists call "synchronic analysis" of a term).

3. Then he would look at uses further away in time, subject matter, and culture---writers who shared less of a common linguistic stock with Aristotle because of the possible changes in language over time. ("Diachronic analysis" refers to such tracing of the different uses of a word over time.)

Such a procedure would be characteristic of sound linguistic analysis.

But this is just the opposite of what Cervin does, for he dismisses the New Testament texts without examining even one verse. Then by other means he dismisses examples from other literature closest to the New Testament.

2. Rejection of Septuagint Examples

The Septuagint (LXX) was the everyday Bible used most commonly by the New Testament authors and by Greek-speaking Christians throughout the New Testament world. Yet Cervin dismisses the value of its evidence because it is a translation: "As a translation, the LXX is valuable as a secondary source, not as a primary one (pp. 95-96) (6) At the end of the article he says,

Of the four clear examples, three are from the LXX and one is from the Shepherd of Hermas, and it is very likely that all four of these are imported, not native, metaphors.... Does kephale denote "authority over" or "leader"? No. The only clear and unambiguous examples of such a meaning stem from the Septuagint and The Shepherd of Hermas, and the metaphor may well have been influenced from Hebrew in the Septuagint. The metaphor "leader" for head is alien to the Greek language until the Byzantine or Medieval period. (pp. 111-112)

But if the Septuagint was indeed the Bible used by the New Testament authors and Christians throughout the New Testament world (as it was), then the fact that it was a translation made two centuries earlier does not mean that its examples of the use of kephale are irrelevant as evidence. To dismiss these as irrelevant would be similar to someone trying to find out what American evangelical Christians in 1990 meant by the use of a word and then saying that the use of that word in the NASB or NIV Bibles could not count as evidence because those Bibles were "translations" and therefore may not reflect native English uses of the word.

In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Though the Septuagint is not perfect as a translation, it was certainly adequate to be used throughout the Greek-speaking world for several hundred years. To some extent it reflected the use of Greek common at the time it was translated, and to some extent (as all widely accepted Bible translations do) it influenced the language of the people who used it. Because of both of these facts, the usage of a word in the Septuagint is extremely important for determining the meaning of a word in the New Testament. The standard Greek lexicon for the New Testament and other early Christian literature (by Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, and Danker) quotes the Septuagint more frequently than any other corpus of literature outside the New Testament for that very reason. In fact, in his "Introduction" to this lexicon Walter Bauer says, "As for the influence of the LXX, every page of this lexicon shows that it outweighs all other influences on our literature." (7)

Sound linguistic analysis would recognize this and would pay closest attention to the literature most closely related to the corpus of literature in question. But Cervin fails to admit such evidence as relevant, and this must be counted as a major methodological flaw in his argument.

3. Rejection of the Apostolic Fathers

The other corpus of literature most closely related to the New Testament is commonly referred to as "the Apostolic Fathers" (the name originally was intended to signify authors who knew the apostles personally). These writings are also extremely valuable for understanding New Testament usage, because the proximity in time, culture, and subject matter means that these writers shared a linguistic stock that was almost exactly the same as that of the New Testament writers. Yet again with regard to a citation from the Shepherd of Hermas (Similitudes 7:3, where a husband is referred to as "the head of your household"), Cervin admits that the sense "leader" attaches to the word head, but he rejects this as valid evidence for the use of a word in the New Testament because he says that the author was unknown: "We do not know who wrote the Shepherd…. If the author were a foreigner, it is entirely possible that this metaphor could have been calqued from his own native language. If this were the case, then this would be another example of an imported, not a native metaphor" (p. 105).

But this is hardly a sufficient basis on which to reject the evidence of this quotation. The Shepherd of Hermas was so widely known in the early Christian world that for at least two centuries many thought that it should be included as part of the New Testament canon (in 325 Eusebius still classified it among the "disputed books"; see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.3.6).

4. Rejection of Examples from Plutarch

Plutarch (ca. 50-ca. 120 A.D.) was a secular Greek historian and philosopher. Because he lived so close to the time of the New Testament, his writings are another useful source for understanding the meanings of Greek words around the time of the New Testament. But Cervin rejects three examples of kephale meaning "authority over" in Plutarch because he says they may have been a translation from Latin.

Regarding two examples in Plutarch, Cicero 14.4, where head is used as a metaphor for the Roman emperor, Cervin admits that they refer to a "leader," but objects that the examples are illegitimate primarily because (8) "Cataline was speaking in Latin, not Greek... and it is equally possible that Plutarch translated the Latin rather literally for the sake of the 'riddle.' If this were so, then this use of head for 'leader' is really a Latin metaphor, and not a Greek one…. These examples are therefore illegitimate" (p. 102).

Then regarding Plutarch, Galba, 4.3, he says, "Galba was a Roman, not a Greek, and that this passage, like the preceding, may have been influenced by Latin. Ziegler provides no known source material for this passage in Plutarch. This example is therefore dubious" (p. 103).

But in response we must remember that Plutarch wrote not in Latin but in Greek, and that Plutarch certainly thought himself to be writing Greek that was understandable to his readers. Whether or not the text was based on some Latin source material does not provide legitimate grounds for rejecting these examples.

5. Rejection of Patristic Evidence

Cervin then rejects any instances of head meaning "authority" from the period immediately after that of the Apostolic Fathers, the period of the Patristic writings. He admits that in Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon there are many citations referring to Christ as the "head of the church," and a few citations where kephale refers to "religious superiors or bishops" (p. 107). These references would seem to be strong evidence that kephale could mean "authority over" or "leader." But Cervin dismisses these examples with the following sentence: "It appears that the use of head in Patristic Greek is a technical term referring primarily to Christ, and occasionally to members of the ecclesiastical order" (p. 107).

But what kind of linguistic analysis is Cervin doing here? If the examples of kephale meaning "authority over" are few, he calls them "rare." If the examples are many (as in the Patristic literature), he says it is a "technical term." One wonders what kind of evidence would satisfy him so that kephale does mean "authority over"? He concludes, "Grudem's citation of Lampe is misleading" (p. 107), but by what kind of logic do examples that support a case become "misleading"? It is not clear to me how he can reason that instances of kephale where it refers to Christ or to church officers in authority over the church do not show that kephale can mean "leader" or "authority over."

6. Rejection of New Testament Lexicons

In addition to dismissing without examination, or explaining away, the instances of kephale meaning "authority over" from the New Testament, the Septuagint, the Apostolic Fathers, Plutarch, and the Patristic writers, Cervin also dismisses evidence from all the lexicons that specialize in the New Testament period and impugns the competence of their authors. He asks,

If "leader" is a common understanding of kephale, as Grudem claims, then why is it apparently never so listed in any Greek lexicon outside the purview of the NT? I offer several possible reasons, not the least of which is tradition and a male-dominant world view.

As Cervin continues his explanation, he for some reason repeatedly refers to those who write lexicons specializing in the New Testament period as theologians:

The expertise of theologians (9) is the NT, not Classical, or even Hellenistic Greek, per se. While it may be true that some theologians have had a grounding in Classical Greek (especially those of the 19th century), they spend their time pondering the NT, not Plato, Herodotus, or Plutarch.… Another reason stems from Latin…. The Latin word for "head," caput, does have the metaphorical meaning of "leader."… Thus, for English speaking theologians, at least, English, Hebrew, and Latin all share "leader" as a common metaphor for head. Thus, the forces of tradition, a male-dominant culture, the identical metaphor in three languages, and a less-than-familiar understanding of the Greek language as a whole, could, in my mind, very easily lead theologians to assume that the metaphor of "leader" for head must be appropriate for Greek as well. (p. 87)

The result of this analysis is that Cervin rejects the judgment of the editors of those lexicons that specialize in the very period of the Greek language for which his article intends to give us a meaning for kephale.

But several objections must be raised against Cervin's evaluation of the value of these lexicons:

(a) The assertion that the authors of New Testament lexicons do not read "Plato, Herodotus, or Plutarch" simply indicates a lack of familiarity with the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker lexicon, whose pages are peppered with thousands of references to extra-Biblical authors, frequently including Plato, Herodotus, and Plutarch, as well as many, many others. The primary author of this lexicon, Professor Walter Bauer of Guttingen University, worked for more than thirty years at this task (see BAGD, pp. v-vi), during which time he "undertook a systematic search in Greek literature" for "parallels to the language of the New Testament" (ibid.). Moises Silva says,

Bauer was fully sensitive to the need not to isolate the New Testament language from the contemporary speech and thus his work abounds with thousands of invaluable references to secular literature where parallel constructions occur---these references alone make Bauer's Lexicon a veritable treasure (10).

While Cervin cites with approval many specialized lexicons for authors such as Xenophon, Plato, Sophocles, etc. (pp. 86-87), he makes the serious mistake of rejecting the value of Bauer's lexicon. By contrast, Moises Silva says of Bauer's lexicon, "It may be stated categorically that this is the best specialized dictionary available for any ancient literature." (11)

(b) One may wonder if Cervin would follow a similar procedure when attempting to determine the meaning of a Greek word in some other specialized corpus of literature. Would he reject the use of a specialized lexicon for Aristotle, for example, when attempting to determine the meaning of a word in Aristotle, simply because the authors of the lexicon spent more of their time looking at Aristotle's words? And would he call the authors of an Aristotle lexicon "philosophers" (rather than "linguists") because the subject matter about which Aristotle wrote was philosophy? Similarly, would he insist on calling the linguists who wrote a specialty lexicon for Herodotus "historians" (rather than "linguists") because Herodotus wrote about history? The editors of New Testament Greek lexicons (such as BAGD) should not be dismissed so easily.

(c) It is not immediately apparent why "tradition and a male-dominant world view" would have any effect on a scholar trying to determine what the New Testament means when it says that God made Christ "the head over all things for the church" (Ephesians 1:22), or says that Christ is the "head of all rule and authority" (Colossians 2:10). Rather than a male-dominant worldview, the only thing required for someone to see "authority over" in these passages would be an ability to recognize that the first-century authors had a "Christ-dominant" worldview and expressed that in their writings.

(d) The fact that head can mean "leader" in English, Hebrew, and Latin should not influence a competent team of editors to see that meaning in Greek unless the context required it in various places. The argument must simply be decided on the basis of the actual Greek texts in which such a meaning is claimed to be found---but Cervin does not provide us with any such analysis for the important New Testament texts.

7. Acceptance of Specialized Lexicons Distant from the New Testament Period

It is surprising that Cervin gives extensive weight to lexicons specializing in authors far distant from the New Testament period. Thus, he gives a long list of lexicons that he examined and in which he did not find the meaning "authority over, leader" for kephale. What he does not tell the reader, and what certainly would not be evident to the non-technically trained reader of Trinity Journal who sees this long list of titles of Greek lexicons (many with Latin titles), is the dates of the authors for whom these specialty lexicons give definitions. But the authors covered by the lexicons (with dates) are as follows (following the order in Cervin's list, pp. 86-87):