EIPE LOGWi Matt. and Luke

Brian E. Wilson (brian@twonh.demon.co.uk)
Wed, 26 Nov 1997 13:18:48 +0000

> At 02:53 PM 11/22/97 +0000, John M. Moe wrote:
>
> >In the account of the healing of the centurion's servant, the centurion
> >requests "EIPE LOGWi" (Mat. 8:8, Luke 7:7). Mary Grosvenor calls this
> >a "cognate dative" and directs the reader to Max Zerwick's grammar where
> >he says. "This <<internal>> or <<cognate>> dative (so called because the
> >noun has the same root as the verb), although it is not entirely foreign
> >to classical usage, e.g. FUGH FEUGEIN, GAMWi GAMEIN, nevertheless
> >clearly rests in the NT on a Semitic basis." (Zerwick, p. 21)"

Mt 8:5-10 is back-translated into Hebrew by M. Lowe and David Flusser
of the Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research in ** ew Testament Studies
29.1, January.1983 **, page 29. Lowe and Flusser comment that the
whole passage is ** translatable almost word for word into typical
Hebrew of the period **. They back-translate EIPE LOGWi as as ** 'mor
dabhar ** . Unfortunately this may not help us very much here, since **
'mor dabhar ** could also translate EIPE LOGON, and therefore throws no
light on what sort of dative LOGWi is.

If the official was a centurion, however, should we not also be
considering whether the phrase might be a Latinism? The Vulgate
rendering of EIPE LOGWi in both Mt 8:8 and Lk 7:7 is DIC VERBO.

Now DIC VERBO can be literally translated - ** make a pronouncement by
means of a spoken word ** .

Equally, EIPE LOGWi can be literally translated -** make a pronouncement
by means of a spoken word ** .

It would seem, therefore, that in Mt 8:8 and Lk 7:7, LOGWi could be an
instrumental dative in Greek reflecting an instrumental ablative in
Latin. EIPE LOGWi may be Greek which has been given a deliberate Latin
turn of phrase to befit a centurion.
BRIAN WILSON