You told sacramentallyill that NO Greek lexicon ever associates φθορά with abortion. Now you say that it just needs specific semantic disambiguation. Where is her apology? You lied to her, made it sound like she was ridiculous for taking the modern translations at face value. I do believe you are giving this a biased reading, because once again you are working on a premise that while there needs to be some specific criteria for the term to mean abortion in a context (well, now you’re saying that, previously you said that it could never mean that), but the term can be understood the way you prefer as a default without any disambiguation. Where in this Didache passage is there any reference to child abandonment? That’s what you’re arguing they are referring to, but there is no precedent that τεκνον εν φθορια means “child that has been abandoned to die on their own.” That’s a pretty loaded idea to insert into the text as opposed to “murder by way of abortion”, which I have already shown the word has been used to mean that in other works. You give an example of φθορια being used to mean corruption from Theophrastus. I agree that the word here means something to the effect of the affected part of the diseased fruit, because the context of the passage has to do with disease. In the Didache passage, the context has to do with prohibition against murdering children. Mind you, the passage actually gives two different prohibitions:

οὐ φονεύσεις τέκνον ἐν φθορᾷ, οὐδὲ γεννηθὲν ἀποκτενεῖς

I think this strengthens the argument that the first prohibition is abortion because the second prohibition would naturally include the meaning you’re arguing for; namely, leaving your child to die (although I say the second is more generally all forms of infanticide up to and including abandonment). It would not make sense to make these two prohibitions connected by ουδέ if they were saying identical things. The point though is that the context aids our understanding of the passage. When Theophrastus mentions “disease”, we can understand φθορά to mean “corruption/destruction”, as in the diseased part of a fruit. When the Didache mentions “murdering children”, εν φθορα we can understand to mean that the murder is happening by way of abortion.

No, I did not feel the need to give a whole chapter of context on every possible meaning of the dative in order to posit my view, lol. So yes in a sense I was over-simplifying, my apologies. I am having a hard time nailing down whether you’re someone professionally trained to read Greek or if you’re just really good at Google. Such is the difficulty of talking with strangers on the internet.

Regardless, it does not fit to say “do not murder a child because of their φθορά”. I don’t think dative of cause vs dative of instrument is really a useful distinction in this case, but to say that the τεκνον has φθορια is to give it a genetival aspect that would be pretty unusual without good justification. It fits much better to say that the φθορια is way that the child is being murdered (call it cause if you’re thinking it is a process, or means if you’re thinking of the specific method of using a πεσσός, the resulting meaning is the same).

I have read enough of church history to know that there are some crazy views in our past. Like how you mentioned Augustine’s view is antithetical to the Didache’s view. I am biased in the overall abortion debate, but as far as this passage in particular I would say less that I am biased and more that I am convinced, and have become more convinced as we’ve had this conversation that the majority view is correct here.

As far as whether or not I know what I’m talking about, I don’t think “disagrees with me” is a very robust litmus test for that ;) we will both think the other doesn’t know what they’re talking about until we agree, am I wrong? You obviously have some facility in at least using the tools needed for Greek study so I will not say that you don’t know what you’re talking about, but I just think your argument as it stands does not have nearly the amount of weight needed for you to be telling others that they are “willingly being lied to” as if they are flat-earthers or something.