[Parakletos] EXCURSUS: 'elencho'. (a) positive or negative?

This word is common in classical Greek, together with its related noun ‘elenchos’. It means to ‘prove by reasoned argument’, and the noun is most notably associated with Socrates. It describes the relentless cross-questioning by which he shows that various experts of his day in theology and philosophy were not expert at all, and knew nothing – hence the famous ‘Socratic paradox’ that he was, indeed, the wisest man in Athens (as the Delphic Oracle had, with uncharacteristic unambiguity, declared), because he knew one thing at least, that he knew nothing. In the NT, the verb is used 18 times (20, maybe, if some MSS are credible), but the noun only once, in that great definition of faith at the beginning of Hebrews 11: “faith is the ‘elenchos’ of what we cannot see”, that is, faith convinces us of the truth of that which reason and observation on their own cannot prove to us. Here, clearly, ‘elenchos’ means ‘proof positive’, rather than the Socratic ‘disproof’, but it is a helpful guide to the meaning of our verse, since it refers to an inward conviction of the heart, just as it is the ministry of the ‘parakletos’ to bring about an inward ‘conviction’ of sin in the conscience. It is a convenient quirk of English that ‘conviction’ is the abstract noun of both the verbs ‘convince’ and ‘convict’. By contrast with this single use of the noun, almost all the uses of the verb mean to ‘prove wrong’ – though, of course, if you prove people wrong, you ‘put them right’. It has another double reference, either to wrong belief or to sinful behaviour – the error of one’s thinking, or the error of one’s ways; but, again, since the one so often leads to the other, this distinction is sometimes blurred.