SKANDALON 1(c) in the NT

In the New Testament these two meanings of ‘skandalon’ continue to co-exist. Furthermore, the noun has now spawned a verb, ‘skandalizo’, whose uses outnumber those of the noun by 30 to 15. It is interesting (I hope) to notice that the American tendency, much decried by purists this side of the Atlantic, to turn all kinds of nouns into verbs simply by adding the suffix ‘-ise’ (‘hospitalise’, burglarise’, ‘winterise’) actually has good classical precedent. (According to a letter to the Times [5.3.08], one American neatly claimed that “any noun can be verbed”.) But it does seem to me to be helpful to spell Greek-derived words of this kind with a ‘z’ (‘scandalize’, ‘baptize’, ‘evangelize’) to distinguish them from more modern coinages. The verb ‘skandalizo’, then, reflecting the two senses of the noun from which it is derived, can mean either to ‘entice into sin’ or to ‘cause someone to stumble’. Now that we have the verb available, we can most conveniently label these two usages as to ‘trap’ and to ‘trip’.