Eph. 5:33
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue May 16 13:49:40 EDT 2000
At 9:07 AM -0700 5/16/00, Michael Abernathy wrote:
>Fellow B-Greekers,
>My gut feeling in reading plhn kai `umeis `oi kaq `ena, `ekastos, thn
>`eautou gunaika òutws agapatw `ws `eauton, `h de gunh `ina fobhtai ton
>andra is that hina used as an imperative carries the idea that the wives
>must respect their husbands but that respect should be predicated upon the
>love of their husbands. Am I reading too much into this?
>Thanks in advance
>Michael Abernathy
Having seen Harold Holmyard's response to this,
At 8:39 AM -0500 5/16/00, Harold R. Holmyard III wrote:
>Do you mean that women are not obliged to respect their husbands if they do
>not sense love coming from their husbands?
I think I'd prefer to put it this way: I don't see any conditional aspect
either way: both obligations seem to be stated as absolute. If you start
making either imperative conditional, look what you get:
(1) wives aren't obliged to respect husbands who don't love them;
and
(2) husbands aren't obliged to love wives who don't respect them.
I don't read the text as implying either the one or the other of these
propositions.
I think that if one is going to be serious about Eph 5:33, one ought not to
imagine that either party is free from obligation. I suspect, however, that
when either party fails to fulfil such an obligation, the marriage is in
pretty bad shape (to put it mildly).
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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