Re: Examples of the Granville Sharp rule outside the NT
Posted: July 28th, 2011, 7:35 pm
On the contrary, I would suggest the exact opposite. To quote Wallace:Vasileios Tsialas wrote:It is a logical tendency in the Greek language, not an absolute rule. It cannot be an absolute rule when it has exceptions, when it is so complicated in order to avoid (unsuccessfully) exceptions; it cannot be an absolute rule in a developing lingua franca spoken mostly by multinational groups, and when it overlooks overwhelming historical data in the case of theology.
I would encourage you to read Wallace. It's supposed complications are *naturally* derived from the nature of semantics and the nature of language. Wallace also demonstrates quite clearly that the distractions of theology have tended to arise more from those who reject it than those who accept it (e.g. Georg Benedik Winer).Wallace, page 58f. wrote:"The first really substantial response to Sharp's work was by Christopher Wordsworth, at the time a Fellow of Trinity College in Cambridge, who wrote Six Letters to Granville Sharp, Esq.,, published anonymously in 1802. His interest was piqued by Sharp's canon, though he admitted at the outset of his investigation a great deal of skepticism, even incredulity, over its validity.
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To test Sharp's principle, Wordsworth went to patristic literature. He felt that if the principle were valid, then certainly the Greek fathers would have understood the christologically significant texts in the same way that Sharp had. Further, he believed that the Latin fathers, on the assumption of the rules validity, would not have uniformly understood the same texts as referring to one person since there is no definite article in Latin, rendering their translations more obscure. On the other hand, if Sharp's rule were a figment of his own imagination, then the Greek fathers, as well as Latin, would not be uniform in their understanding.
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[T]he Greek patristic writers not only implicitly knew of the requirements of Sharp's canon, but understoodood them better than Sharp did himself!
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What caused Wordsworth to alter his course, to so unswervingly embrace Sharp's principle? In a word, evidence. After an exhaustive investigation, from Greek Christian literature covering a span of over 1000 years Wordsworth was able to make the astounding comment,
"...I have observed more (I am persuaded) than a thousand instances of the form ὁ Χριστος και Θεος (Ephes, v. 5)[,] some hundreds of instances of the ὁ μεγας θεος και σωτηρ (Tit. ii. 13); and not fewer than several thousand of the form ὁ θεος και σωτηρ (2 Pet. i. 1.)[,] while in no single case, have I seen (where the sense could be determined) any of them used, but only of one person.