Romans 8:16

Carlton Winbery winberyc at popalex1.linknet.net
Fri Sep 10 19:33:35 EDT 1999


Carl Conrad answered;

>At 12:30 AM -0500 9/10/99, Mitchell Gray wrote:
>>Dear list-members,
>>How should Romans 8:16 be rendered: "The spirit *itself* bears witness with
>>our spirit that we are God's children."  Or, "The spirit *himself* bears
>>witness with our spirit that we are God's children."
>
>Text: AUTO TO PNEUMA SUMMARTUREI ...
>
>The gender of AUTO is neuter because PNEUMA, the noun it accords with, is
>neuter. You can translate it according to your own bias regarding the
>gender of the Spirit, if you have one, but the Greek doesn't support the
>notion of any particular sexual gender for the Spirit in this phrase--it's
>strictly a grammatical agreement. One could avoid any implication of gender
>by translating this phrase: "The VERY spirit bears witness together with
>... "
>
To illustrate further, if you saw a reference to a stone, LIQOS,  and then
had a pronoun used with stone as its antecedent, would you translate that
"he threw him?" You translate so as to make sense in the receptor language
and in some cases to reflect theology held on the basis of other
considerations.


Dr. Carlton L. Winbery
Foggleman Professor of Religion
Louisiana College
winbery at andria.lacollege.edu
winberyc at popalex1.linknet.net
Ph. 1 318 448 6103 hm
Ph. 1 318 487 7241 off





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