5 Case v. 8 Case
Jonathan Robie
Jonathan.Robie at SoftwareAG-USA.com
Tue Oct 17 10:53:53 EDT 2000
At 06:03 PM 10/16/00 -0400, Clay A. Kahler wrote:
>A friend of mine is asking some questions that I can not answer. I spoke
>of my preference of 8 case greek over 5 case. I mentioned that it allowed
>room for misinterpretation, and that this might have resulted in some of
>the liberalism that we have today.
There are only 5 syntactic forms. The 8 case system requires interpretation
of which function the syntactic form is serving. Because of that, once you
characterize one form more precisely according to the function you feel it
takes, you have ruled out some interpretations. Sometimes this is
clear-cut, at other times a form could easily be interpreted as having one
of two different functions.
I think it is generally best to start by understanding what the Greek forms
might legitimately mean, and leave aside labels like "liberalism" or
"fundamentalism" entirely. These labels tend to make us want to be open to
seeing only certain meanings in the Greek text. If our purpose, in
approaching the text, is to reconstruct what we already believe, there's no
point in going to the trouble to learn Greek. Let's start by figuring out
what the text seems to mean - and in some cases, there are several
legitimate interpretations.
Jonathan
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