Is TEMPUS A Part of Greek Grammar?
Jonathan Robie
jwrobie at mindspring.com
Sun Sep 26 23:07:25 EDT 1999
At 04:35 PM 9/26/99 -0400, Cwinbery at aol.com wrote:
>In Rev. 5:10 there is a textual problem in that Ms Alexandrinus and some
>others have the present (omit the S). Alexandrinus is considered to be a very
>good ms in Rev. (better than Sinaiticus by some scholars). Even Westcott and
>Hort agreed with Alex. here.
The UBS 3rd has the future (with the S), and only a "C" confidence rating.
In Metzger's Textual Commentary, he upgrades this to a "A" confidence
rating, arguing that Alexandrinus "mistakenly" reads BASILEUOUSIN in Rev
20:6 - I assume this means that it is alone or almost alone in reading
BASILEUOUSIN rather than BASILEUSOUSIN in that case, and this gives an
example where the future is mistakenly changed to a present with future
meaning, so if it happened once, maybe this is likely to happen again.
At any rate, I don't see any real difference between BASILEUSOUSIN
and BASILEUOUSIN with future meaning. Both means of expressing the future
seem fairly common in Koine (as is MELLW + infinitive), and I could easily
imagine people changing in either direction. Since the change does not
affect meaning, it doesn't seem particularly important for interpreting the
verse.
Jonathan
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Jonathan
Robie
jwrobie at mindspring.com
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