@Dɑvïd I see, thank you for clarifying.

@Dɑvïd Not sure how it's possible that "neither Jerome nor Augustine [gave] any thought to the possibility of multiple Hebrew textual forms", but OK.

I love this:

> [Augustine] represents himself as generally quite happy with obscurity in the text because he sees it as the Holy Spirit's cure for boredome.

^^ was flagged as "too broad" but it's not possible to cast a vote accordingly due to the bounty (which would have to be revoked by a mod prior to any closure). Any opinions?

@Susan Wow, +4 and -7 for that question... there must be some heavy opinions on that one! Given the bounty and the amount of discussion it's generating, I wouldn't personally want to vote to close it. After all, if 'Simply A Christian' is right in his assertion that a copy-paste from a lexicon is enough to answer it, then it seems rather odd for others to suggest it's got too many possible answers, or that they would necessarily be too long.

Theologically this is one of the big hot topics of our day, too - so it would be a shame to close it on a technicality simply because the OP's Greek isn't up to the standard needed to check some of the key sources. Yes we're a community that aspires to handle things at the scholarly level where possible, but this is exactly the sort of issue where we can be most useful to real world applications by breaking down technical arguments into practical, useful, every-day terms.

Sorry, I've obviously started to conflate the reasons for the downvotes with the reasons for closing, which are two different things. Yes, there are many possible answers to what χάρις means at different times to different people, but I'd hold that the question of "did NT authors add any meaning which wasn't there previously" is sufficiently narrow that it can't have too many possible answers. At the end of the day it's more of a Yes-or-No-and-Justify sort of thing.

I think the issue has really come down to @brilliant 's grammar, which made the question look bigger and more complex than it really was. I've compacted his four question marks down to two - hopefully people will find the logic of them all a bit easier to grasp on first read.