1 Cor 7:40

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat May 27 10:44:52 EDT 2000


At 9:14 AM -0400 5/27/00, Dmitriy Reznik wrote:
>Dear friends,
>
>DOKW DE KAGW PNEUMA QEOU ECEIN has EGW as part of KAGW in nominative. But
>I thought this contraction should be infinitive with accusative (I think
>myself to have Spirit of God). Is this infinitive with nominative the
>same as if it were with accusative?

No: one of the peculiarities of Greek is that IF the subject of the
infinitive is identical with the subject of the auxiliary verb then the
subject of the infinitive (which may be only implicit) and its modifiers
(predicate adjectives quite frequently) are in the NOMINATIVE rather than
the accusative.

However, in the above instance, I think I would be more inclined to take
the EGW of the KA'GW (crasis) as the subject of DOKW rather than more
directly as the subject of ECEIN, although it is implicitly the subject of
ECEIN also. Most literally then and in the word-order of the Greek: "I
think in fact (DE) even I God's spirit to have" = (more normal English): "I
do think that I too have God's spirit." English puts the emphatic "I
too"/"I also" in the subordinate clause, but I think that in fact Greek has
put it with the auxiliary DOKW. And even if one prefers to understand KA'GW
as construing more directly with ECEIN, it is implicitly the subject of
DOKW as well and the above principle holds in this instance as usual.

-- 

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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