Rom. 1:4 EN DUNAMEI adverbial or adjectival

dalmatia at eburg.com dalmatia at eburg.com
Wed Jul 15 12:09:09 EDT 1998


Carl W. Conrad wrote:

> >I'm saying that the literal translation ~ "But the righteous out
> >of faith shall be living," is pretty good.
> 
> Except that by ordinary rules of syntax that translation isn't allowable:
> it should be "The righteous (one) will live out of (as a result of) faith."
> 
> >The reason is because it does not attach EK PISTEWS to either term,
> >but allows it to modify hO DE DIKAIOS ZHSETAI as a whole unit of
> >discourse. [And not to each term separately, as your query
> >indicates.]  It seems that we have been wanting to pigeon hole it to
> >either hO DIKAIOS or to ZHSETAI only, and I believe by so doing we err
> >~ But I am certainly open to being wrong...
> 
> As I've said previously, unless EK PISTEWS is specifically attached to hO
> DIKAIOS by a repeated article, so that it reads hO DIKAIOS hO EK PISTEWS,
> then EK PISTEWS ought to construe ONLY with ZHSETAI.

Well, a repeated article such as you suggest would most certainly nail
it to hO DIKAIOS.  And the absence ot that article gives us the
adverb-adjective controversy.  If we understand hO DE DIKAIOS ZESETAI
as a 'unit of discourse' which EK PISTEWS modifies, then the
difficulty vanishes.

The idea of distribution of a qualifier [modifier] to both its
antecedent and its subsequent was given very early on in my Greek
classes so many years ago ~ I have simply taken it generally as a
given ~ Could I have either misunderstood or been mis-taught?

George
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George Blaisdell        dalmatia at eburg.com

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