1 Peter 3:20: APEIQHSASIN
Harold R. Holmyard III
hholmyard at ont.com
Mon May 1 21:59:18 EDT 2000
Dear John,
You cite 1 Pet 3:19 and part of 3:20:
>EN hWi KAI TOIS EN FULAKHi PNEUMASIN POREUQEIS EKHRUXEN, APEIQHSASIN POTE
>hOTE APEXEDECETO hH TOU QEUO MAKROQUMIA EN hHMERAIS NWE KATASKEUAZOMENHS
>KIBWTOU ...
You ask about the participle APEIQHSASIN. Here is a section from an
unpublished paper that I wrote on 1 Peter 3:18-4:6. The quotation covers
this point that Wayne Grudem raised about the participle APEIQHSASIN in
3:20:
Grudem has argued forcefully for a preaching by Christ's spirit through
Noah in 3:19-20, asserting that the participle "disobedient" has an
adverbial, temporal force: "when they disobeyed."28 He admits that an
anarthrous (not having the definite article) participle following the noun
it modifies can be adjectival if the noun has two or more modifiers and the
sense is unambiguous. But since the verb "preached" separates
"disobedient" from "spirits," Grudem finds an adjectival translation of
APEIQHSASIN ambiguous.29 On the other hand, Noahic preaching seems foreign
to the context; so are there arguments on behalf of an adjectival
translation of APEIQHSASIN? G. B. Winer states:
Participles as attributives [adjectival], in as far as they have not
entirely dropped the notion of time, are not treated in this case
[in the use of the article] altogether like adjectives. They take the
Article [sic] only when some relation already known or especially
noteworthy (is qui, quippe qui) ["he who," "indeed who"] is
indicated, and consequently the idea expressed by the participle
is to be made more prominent.30
Winer goes on to say that "whether the Article is to be used or omitted
before the Participle, depends sometimes on the subjective view of the
writer."31 If APEIQHSASIN can be attributive, the secondary,
circumstantial information it gives about the spirits sanctions omission of
the article.
Articular (having the definite article) nouns modified by subsequent
anarthrous participles occur frequently in the NT. Although such
participles vary in exact usage, the ancient reader of Greek would normally
have had little trouble discerning how the participle functioned when the
context was otherwise clear.
Translations of the Bible have rendered APEIQHSASIN at 3:20 with a
relative pronoun (e.g., "who") in a clause or with a demonstrative pronoun
subject (e.g., "these") in a new sentence.32 The translators believed that
the participle could bear an attributive sense here. No translation
consulted took the participle as adverbial, evidently because the Greek
does not require this intrepretation.
Peter's purposeful shifting of "spirits in prison" to the front of
3:19 may account for the interposition of the verb "preached" between the
attributive "disobedient" and its modificand "spirits." If the word
"disobedient" had directly followed "spirits," it would have brought in tow
the rest of 3:20, which modifies "disobedient" as a temporal clause. Thus
the words "going he preached" would not have come until the end of 3:20 in
a most awkward sentence. Peter may have put "preached" where he did to
give the reader the basic elements of his sentence (object, subject,
predicate) before the rest of the modifiers.
By its separation from "spirits in prison" APEIQHSASIN can have more
of the Greek participle's substantive force: "to ones disobedient."33 Lack
of the Greek article may permit an indefiniteness to APEIQHSASIN that
narrows the reference from all the spirits in prison to the Flood
generation. An analogous English sentence would be: "For even to the
people in prison going He preached, to ones having rebelled formerly in the
days of Louis XVI." Context could distinguish those rebelling as a subset
of the prisoners emphasized due to the circumstances of the crime. Or
Peter may have qualified the whole (spirits in prison) by the actions of a
part (Flood generation).34 The spirits in prison were disobedient formerly
while the ark was being built because many of their number were.
28 Grudem, _1 Peter_, 233-36, citing BDF, sec. 269.
29 A definite article with APEIQHSASIN would have so defined the spirits in
prison that this group was just "the spirits in prison who were disobedient
formerly when the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah." See
also Grudem, _1 Peter_, 233-36.
30 George B. Winer, _A Grammar of the Idiom of the New Testament_ (ed.
Gottlieb Lünemann, trans. J. Henry Thayer, 7th ed., enl.; Andover, MA:
Warren F. Draper, 1892) 134-35.
31 Adjectival uses: Acts 13:32; 17:8; 23:27; Rom 2:27 (debatable); 1 Cor
14:7; 2 Cor 3:2; Eph 6:16 (using the shorter reading); Heb 10:2; 1 Pet 4:12
(debatable). Adverbial uses: 2 Cor 11:9; Acts 3:26; John 4:6, 39, 45; Mark
16:10; John 1:36. Circumstantial uses: Luke 2;5; 16:14; Acts 17:27; 21:8.
H. E. Dana and Julius R. Mantey state that a Greek participle is a "verbal
substantive" and also a "verbal adjective: (_A Manual Grammar of the Greek
New Testament_ [New York: MacMillan, 1944] sec. 197). Whatever the
grammarians' classification of usage in a particular case, the participle
remains a verbal adjective.
32 This is the case with the Vulgate and Peshitta, along with the German
and French versions. It is so with the Geneva Bible of 1560, the KJV, NIV,
NASB, NJB, NAB, NRSV, NJB, and RNEB, as well as several other translations
(Moffatt, Goodspeed, Berkeley, New Century, Amplified, Young, Good News).
John N. Darby simply translated "heretofore disobedient."
33 See n. 31 above.
34 John S. Feinberg considers synecdoche here to be the desperate expedient
of a theorist, but the grammar does not seem unnatural ("1 Peter 3:18-20,
Ancient Mythology, and the Intermediate State," _WTJ_ 48 (Fall 1986) 330-31.
Yours,
Harold Holmyard
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