Rules

clayton stirling bartholomew c.s.bartholomew at worldnet.att.net
Wed Dec 9 17:13:01 EST 1998


My original problem was an attempt to find a rule which would determine the
subject and the predicate in Acts 17:3b. I looked at the rules as they are
explained in Richard Young (pages 64-65) and Porter's Idioms (page 109) and
tried to fit the rules to Meyer's analysis of the passage:

Subject: IHSOUS  
Predicate:  hOUTOS hO CRISTOS 

The more I looked at the rules and the more I tried to fit them to Meyer's
analysis the more I concluded that either Meyer or the Rules had to be wrong.
I then posted my first comment on this which was just a sigh of despair, not
really a question. 

Not wanting to throw in the towel I reviewed the question again and discovered
that in the Analytical NT (Friberg, 1981) the punctuation of this passage was
different than in my working copy. I discovered that this punctuation
discrepancy was the difference between the 1975 and the 1983 edition of UBS3. 


Acts 17:3b

...KAI hOTI hOUTOS ESTIN hO CRISTOS [hO] IHSOUS hON . . .  
(UBS3 1983 corrected, NA26/27)

...KAI hOTI hOUTOS ESTIN hO CRISTOS, [hO] IHSOUS, hON . . . 

(UBS3 1975) 

...KAI hOTI hOUTOS ESTIN  hO CRISTOS, IHSOUS, hON . . . 

(Hodges/Farstad) 


Clearly there is some disagreement about how to place the commas in the
vicinity of IHSOUS.  

The second item I noticed in Analytical NT was that the Friberg's tagged the
demonstrative  hOUTOS as <APDNMZS>. The key issue here is the P which using
the Friberg scheme means that the demonstrative is substantial and not
attributive. Those of you who are familiar with the Friberg tags can correct
me on this if I got it wrong. 

Anyway, the combination of the the Friberg tag and the commas suggested a
scanning of this passage which is simple and accords with the "Rules" for
determining the subject and predicate with an equative verb.

Subject: hOUTOS
Predicate: hO CRISTOS

where:  IHSOUS, hON . . . , limits or further defines  hOUTOS. 

I am not going to spend a lot of time trying to defend this analysis. But it
does solve the problem of making sense out of the Rules. 

-- 
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062



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