The fronting of TOUTOU, James 1:26

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Jul 11 07:27:07 EDT 1998


At 4:47 PM +0800 7/11/98, Paul R. Zellmer wrote:
>The word order for the independent clause TOUTOU MATAIOS hH QRHSKEIA in
>James 1:26 seems unusual to me.  The referent for the pronoun seems to be
>TIS, found at the beginning of the verse, and it is in the genitive.  I
>guess I must be confused as to what type of genitive it is.  From the
>translations, I would have expected hH QRHSKEIA TOUTOU MATAIOS ESTIN or,
>for emphasis, MATAIOS hH QRHSKEIA TOUTOU.  What's going on with what we
>actually find here?
>

In my view this word-order--with TOUTOU thus highlighted in initial
position in its clause--makes TOUTOU quite emphatic; I don't think there's
anything unusual about this in the Greek, but English will probably use
less emphasis and say, "his ... is futile." I'd say that the effect of the
Greek word-order is about what the effect of putting "his" in Italics would
be in ordinary English.

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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