John 1:1 EN ARCH

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Jul 1 07:03:10 EDT 1998


At 8:46 PM -0400 1/24/19, presept (James Stewart) wrote:
>Hello, I am brand new to b-greek.  Before I joined, I went through your
>archives and read a lot of the posts.  I really enjoyed it and it was very
>humbling.  I will learn much!  This is my first contribution.  In one of
>the threads on John 1:1, the discussion was on the object (ARCH) of the
>preposition EN.  The question was: because ARCH is anarthrous, should it be
>translated 'a beginning' or 'the beginning?'  IMHO it should be 'in the
>beginning.'  A.T. Robertson in his large grammer on page 791 states that
>prepositional phrases are often definite without the article.  Blass,
>Debrunner, and Funk on page 133 states, "The article can be omitted in
>prepositional phrases..."  M. Zerwick on page 58 states, "...in Hellenistic
>Greek, there is an even stronger tendency to omit the article in
>prepositioal phrases."  You may also check R.A.Young's grammer on page 67,
>Nigel Turner's grammer on page 179, Moule's Idioms on page 114, Porter's
>Idioms on page 113, and D.B.Wallace's grammer on page 247.
>
>-James Stewart

It also seems quite probable that EN ARCHi deliberately imitates the LXX
opening of Genesis 1:1 as well as the Hebrew text, B'RESHITH.

What also interests me about this post is the date: as you may note above,
it would appear to have been written January 24, 1919; on the other hand,
in my original incoming version as shown in Eudora Pro 4.0 (Mac): that date
shows up as "Sun, 29 Jun 2098 17:46:57 -0700"--it looks like we are running
into the year MM problem a bit early here! Now, I'm not quite sure what the
original Greek of this might be ;-)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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