Regarding Gal 2:20 reply to Carlton Winbery

George Blaisdell maqhth at hotmail.com
Sat Apr 10 11:39:16 EDT 1999


Jim Denley Writes:

>My original post began:

>>Regarding the use of THi in "EN PISTEI ZW THi                       
>>TOU hUIOU TOU QEOU.  


>>Greek articles are not simply definite articles.  
>They have demonstrative use as well, often                           
>pressing us in English to use a 
>relative pronoun...

>The question I'm asking is whether an article used 
>in this fashion on occasion is "relative pronoun-like"               
>in its rules. If there are occasions where this is                   
>true, then it only requires gender and 
>number from its antecedent and its case describes                    
>its syntactical place in the sentence.  

>I hope this clears up, if nothing else,                              
>the line of reasoning behind my 
>original comments.
                                                                    
>We got a lot of gum for a quarter.

We sure did!  And your post clearly shows that you asked a better 
question than any of us [leastwise moi] tried to answer!!  :-)

I am now wondering if the fact that the prep phrase EN PISTEI has an 
anarthrous noun might grammatically lead to the use of the article 
following the action verb ZW, instead of what we in English might 
expect to he a relative pronoun.  

If we were to rearrange the same Greek words to our English 'comfort 
zone', we would then have:

ZW EN TWi PISTEI TOU hUIOU TOU QEOU.

And perhaps it COULD have been written in the Greek this way, but was 
instead written differently for a reason that involves Greek word 
order and its purpose here, which in turn may have syntactical 
significance.

Might the construction used, centering as it does the article TWi, 
thereby 'showcase' it with emphasis, and thus PISTEI, as the central 
idea of this word sequence?

And I have no idea how or if its case might be altered according to 
syntactical purpose or placement.

GeorgeGeorge Blaisdell 
Roslyn, WA 


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