Tonight in the Bible doctrines class Mr. Dearth asked about the relationship between the use of the word salvation in the New Testament and its use in the Old Testament, specifically how the concept of salvation seems to be affected by progressive revelation. This paper doesn’t answer that question directly, but it does relate to the use of the word salvation in Acts and the Septuagint (a translation of the Old Testament into Greek).

The paper was written for a Greek class at BJU. It is not intended to examine the theological meaning of salvation; its purpose is to understand the lexical meaning of salvation in preparation for better understanding its theological meaning. (As a technical paper for a technical class, the paper may be . . . um, a bit technical.) In the paper I have attempted to define provisionally the different uses of the word. All of the uses of both the noun and the verb forms of salvation are then categorized. After examining how different lexica define the word, I revise my provisional definition of the word. I hope that perhaps the paper may be of some help in understand the use of the word salvation.

Note: The following terms appear in the paper: ΣΩΖΩ and σωζω (transliterated as sozo) are the verb “I save.” ΣΩΤΗΡΙΑ and ΣΩΤΗΡΙΑ (transliterated as soteria) are the noun “salvation.” BDAG is A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Louw and Nida is the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains.

“Word Study of ΣΩΖΩ and ΣΩΤΗΡΙΑ in Acts and the Pentateuch”