Ephesians ~ Generic Dative ~ Chiasmus

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Apr 27 15:06:29 EDT 1999


At 8:21 AM -0700 4/27/99, George Blaisdell wrote:
>>From: "Carl W. Conrad"
>
>>I respond to this only as an unregenerate orthodox believer in
>traditional
>>Greek grammar; while I am dubious occasionally about some particular
>>interpretation of traditional grammatical categories, I am not yet
>quite
>>ready to abandon them in favor of attacking a text armed with nothing
>more
>>than intuition and imagination.
>
>Dear Carl ~
>
>I am not asking anyone to abandon anything, and especially not for the
>sake of 'attacking' a text...  Irreligious of armament!!  :-)
>
>There is nothing wrong at all, imho, in understanding this passage in
>English as "By Grace you are saved through faith."  It clearly says
>that.  The compound verb [periphrastic] of EINAI plus the perfect
>really should be taken as you say.
>
>Yet we would translate it the same if it were not periphrastic, but
>simply 2nd indicative.

I have no idea what second indicative means here,unless perhaps you mean
the fully-conjugated form SESWiSQE. But this does give me an opportunity to
get at what I really think underlies all this business about wanting to
translate the ESTE by itself and SESWiSMENOI as a separate element. And
that is that this is a PRESENT PERFECT tense form; in an earlier era it
might have been written SESWiSQE just as he writes the 2 plural perfect in
a non-periphrastic form in MEMNHSQE in 1 Cor 11:2. But if we bear fully in
mind what this PRESENT PERFECT tense form actually means--that its aspect
is stative and that the form is talking about the condition that now holds
because the action of the verb has been completed, then we realize that
ESTE SESWiSMENOI means that those being addressed are at the very moment in
which they are addressed asserted to be fully in possession of salvation.
So yes, it would have this same meaning were it written SESWiSQE as if it
were written ESTE SESWiSMENOI--but it would NOT have that meaning without
the two parts of the periphrastic perfect being understood as a unit.
That's my point: you cannot isolate the ESTE from SESWiSMENOI and deem it
to have a meaning in the Greek here all by itself. It just doesn't have
that meaning by itself; it has it only in conjunction with the participle.


>My only lens here is the question: "Why periphrastic?"  Hence the
>focus on the centered ESTE, which *can* stand alone, yet here is
>obviously not standing alone, and the conclusion that "you are
>existing" is a strong part of the meaning of this passage.

ESTE can stand alone only when it does mean "you exist"--and saying that it
DOES have that meaning here won't make it so.

>>Granted, ESTE is here centered between CARITI and SESWiSMENOI; why
>that
>>should mean that ESTE is a 'stand-alone' verb is not so easy to say.
>
>I hope that I have answered this above...  The reason is simply that
>the periphrastic form emphasizes ESTE in a way that the indic 2nd pl
>perf passive does not.

And I say that this is simply not true. There is not an iota of difference
in meaning between the three forms of the second person plural perfect
passive: ESTE SESWiSMENOI, SESWiSMENOI ESTE, and SESWiSQE. It doesn't
matter whether the ESTE precedes or follows the participle. The meaning is
identical for any one of these three formulations.

>>Suppose we had an English sentence, "Truly you have sinned," would we
>be
>>entitled to say, by the same logic, "you have" is a 'stand-alone'
>verb?
>>Certainly not; "you have sinned" is a verb compounded of the
>auxiliary
>>"have" and the participle "sinned," even as ESTE SESWiSMENOI is a
>verb
>>compounded (the usual term is "periphrastic") of the auxiliary ESTE
>and the
>>participle SESWiSMENOI.
>
>And again, the Greek uses the periphrastic form for a reason here...
>At least that is my assumption...

On this point you are quite right, but (so I think) you are mistaken about
what that reason is: you seem to think it's because ESTE SESWiSMENOI means
something ever so slightly different from what SESWiSQE would mean. But it
doesn't mean anything different. The reason why the periphrastic form is
preferred for a verb like SWiZW is that, however easy it is to add the 2nd
plural MP ending -SQE to a perfect passive stem ending in a vowel
(LELU-SQE, MEMNH-SQE), it is awkward to add that ending to a consonantal
stem, which in this case would be SESWiD-; when you join these elements,
you get SESWiD-SQE, which must undergo some phonological manipulation
(specifically: {1} assimilation of D to S, yielding SESWiS-SQE; {2}
simplification of the double SS to single S, yielding SESWiSQE) to become
the appropriate fully-conjugated form. It is the phonological awkwardness
of the combination of perfect passive stem ending in consonants with the
regular MP endings that accounts for the emergence of these periphrastic
forms. But the emergence of the periphrastic forms is NOT to be explained
by some difference of meaning that the periphrastic forms have from the
full-conjugated forms.

>>>The generic dative locates what it modifies in the most general way
>>>possible, if I am understanding this right.
>>
>>It appears that we have here isolated a new strain of the virus--er,
>the
>>grammatical case traditionally called 'Dative'--this one now to be
>called
>>"Generic Dative"--I only hope it isn't 'catching.'
>
>I do not wish to be anyone's virus, Carl.  And I wish you continued
>good health!  :-)

Thank you very much, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished!

>I simply do not have a good grammatical vocabulary.  Perhaps I should
>have said 'plain dative', or 'unmodified dative'.  I intended it to
>mean the same as in 'generic medication'.  It is just a noun in the
>dative case, so that we do not have an English equivalent, for our
>dative is determined by a preposition.  Without any preposition in the
>Greek, it must either be understood by its context of usage, or
>comprehensively if not so limited.  And I understand the dative to be
>in the widest sense locative, which includes, but is not limited to,
>instrumental.

A parallel for what you're trying to say about the dative might be found in
the English preposition-noun combination (OF + {noun}); this is capable of
taking any number of different nuances of meaning: if the noun is "books,"
then "of books" means one thing in the combination "a pile of books" but
something quite different in the combination "my love of books" and
something still quite different from that in the combination "the purpose
of books." I think we would want to say that this phrase formula is a
structural one--and in that sense one might call it generic: its meaning
has to be determined for each concrete usage differently. But that phrase
formula doesn't have a semantic function.

On the other hand, the Greek dative is not structural but semantic; here we
have a single case-ending that is used in several distinct ways: to
indicate location in space or time, to indicate means, to indicate manner,
to indicate a person involved in an action or event or even to indicate
possession, when used with a form of EINAI. CARITI ESTE (if that's what we
had) might mean "you belong to CARIS" (assuming that CARIS is a person who
can own you), or it can mean "you are currently at CARIS (assuming that
CARIS is the name of a community at which you have arrived). I rather doubt
that this phrase could mean anything else by itself. But the possible
meanings of the dative form CARITI are limited to those that are rather
clearly laid out in the categories of dative to be found in the grammar
reference works. What these different datives have in common is nothing
more than a case-ending; they do NOT have a simple shared semantic
significance.

Let me take this opportunity to respond to one other matter related to this
whole discussion: the supposed central placement of ESTE between CARITI and
SESWiSMENOI. I think a distinction ought to be made between chiasmus, where
a series of items in a definitive sequence (A B C D E) is repeated in
reverse order:(E' D' C' B' A'). Of course it doesn't need to be that many
elements. I had a splendid example in a passage of Homer's Odyssey I was
reading with a couple students today:

	hH MEN AR' hWS EIPOUS' APEBH GLAUKWPIS AQHNH
	OULUMPOND'
		(description of Olympus follows over five lines), then:)
	ENQ' APEBH GLAUKWPIS, EPEI DIEPEFRADE KOURHi.

Here we have elements, in order: (a) "thus having spoken she", (b) "away
went Athena to Olympus", and then, on the other side of the description of
Olympus, (b') "thither went Athena", and (a') "when she had spoken to the
girl."

This is what's called "ring composition" as an epic device, and chiasmus is
a term used for the prose equivalent. BUT one should not confound Chiasmus
with a notion of central placement of the most important idea in a Greek
phrase; central position has no particular importance in Greek word-order
as such; more important are initial and final positions, and initial
position is rhetorically more important than final position. All of which
is a circuitous way of saying that the supposed central position of ESTE in
Eph 2:5 has in itself no meaning whatsoever. The meaning of CARITI ESTE
SESWiSMENOI has nothing whatsover to do with word-order and everthing to do
with grammar and syntax.




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
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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