PRWTH in Luke 2:2

James P. Ware jw44 at evansville.edu
Tue Sep 29 12:52:18 EDT 1998



Carl
 
 
On Tue, 29 Sep 1998, Carl W. Conrad wrote:

> Now you've got me confused and wondering, Jim. My understanding is that 
> demonstratives, whether they function adjectivally or as pronouns, are 
> ALWAYS predicative.

Sorry, I WAS confusing.  For some reason, I said that demonstratives when
fucntioning as adjectives are always in explicit attributive position.
What I meant to say was explicit PREDICATE position (where the article is
used with the noun and the demonstrative falls outside the article-noun
grouping).  

> hAUTH hH APOGRAFH or hAUTH APOGRAFH are, so far as I 
> know, equivalent formulations; the impossible formulation is hH hAUTH 
> APOGRAFH. 

I agree that formulation #3 is impossible; and that formulation #1 is what
one would use when a demonstrative is being used as an adjective.  The
question I am raising involves formulation #2 (the one used in Lk 2:2 , at
least in what appears to be the best text).  Again, I am going on gut
feeling, but my impression is that, at least in Biblical Greek,
formulations #1 and #2 are not equivalent, and that formulation #2 is not
possible when using the demonstrative as an
adjective.  The formulation would demand that the demonstrative be
understood as a pronoun.  Perhaps I am way off base here.  

Jim 


Whenever I've pondered the logic of this, it has seemed to me 
> that the demonstrative as predicative is always making a predication about 
> the noun, e.g. "the census is HERE, not THERE." I don't know whether that's 
> valid or not, but of course, the article itself was originally a 
> demonstrative.
> 
> 		Would the sense of Luke 2:2 then not have to be something
> >like, "This was the first census"--with HAUTH being the deictic pronominal
> >subject, APOGRAPHH the predicate, and PRWTH the attributive complement of
> >APOGRAPHH?
> 
> Again, I may be wrong, but I rather think that to get that sense you'd have 
> to have hAUTH (HN/EGENETO) hH PRWTH APOGRAFH. That's not what we have; 
> rather we have: hAUTH APOGRAFH PRWTH EGENETO followed immediately by the 
> genitive absolute construction hHGEMONEUONTS THS SURIAS KURHNIOU.
> 
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics/Washington University
> One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
> Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
> cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad at yancey.main.nc.us
> WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
> 




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