Jo 4:54 PALIN

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Feb 3 12:48:31 EST 2000


At 12:28 PM -0500 2/3/00, Mike Sangrey wrote:
>willker at chemie.uni-bremen.de said:
>> Jo 4:54: TOUTO DE PALIN DEUTERON SHMEION EPOIHSEN O IHSOUS ELQWN EK
>> THS IOUDAIAS EIS THN GALILAIAN
>
>> What is the meaning of PALIN here? "this again a second sign did
>> Jesus" sounds a bit strange to me.
>
>Could this be "this again a sign, the second one, Jesus did..."?

I think that's the force of it, in fact. Curiously this redundancy in
expression of recurrence seems to be as old in Greek as Homer (from whom,
of course, Yogi Berra got "Déjà vu all over again"). But certainly the
TOUTO here is an emphatic demonstrative stuck way out in front so as almost
to be conveyable into English with an adverb: "and here/on this occasion
again (was) a second sign (that) Jesus performed after he came from Judea
into Galilee." This should be understood not as a "literal" translation but
as an attempt to convey what seems to me to be the effect of the word-order
of the Greek into idiomatic English.


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 



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