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RE: One Yeti's Perspective #32: Love?!
I have written a book on 1 Corinthians 13 I gave the title, "What's Love Got to Do With It?" International Standard Bible Encyclopedia claims that the word translated love in this chapter is not found in ancient literature until the book of First Corinthians (chapter 8 verse 1 is the first occurrence). It suggests that the word is coined by Paul to describe the unique love Christians have for their church.
I love it. So the term Paul used was coined for a representation the way believers love each other. 🙃 I do believe that there is a closeness that comes through a common belief.
This is the exact language from the ISBE,
"1. A New Word
The substantive agapē is mainly, if not exclusively, a Biblical and ecclesiastical word (see Deissmann, Bible Studies, 198ff), not found in profane writings, although the verb agapā́n, from which it is derived, is used in classical Greek in the sense of “love, founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Latin diligere” (Grimm-Thayer), rather than natural emotion (Latin, amare).
A New Ideal
It is a significant evidence of the sense of a new ideal and principle of life that permeated the Christian consciousness of the earliest communities, that they should have made current a new word to express it, and that they should derive that word, not from the current or philosophical language of Greek morality, but from the Septuagint.
An Apostolic Term
In the New Testament the word is apostolic, and appears first and predominantly in the Pauline writings. It is found only twice in the Synoptics (Mat 24:12; Luk 11:42), and although it is in both places put in the mouth of the Saviour, it can easily be understood how the language of a later time may have been used by the narrator, when it is considered that these gospels were compiled and reduced to writing many years after the spread of the Pauline epistles."
Have a great day.