Ou... hUPO NOMON ALLA hUPO CARIN (Rom 6:14)

Moon-Ryul Jung moon at saint.soongsil.ac.kr
Sun Jan 28 23:47:20 EST 2001


Dear List,

I think I stated my question in a confusing manner,
exposing too much what caused me to raise the question.
Let me restate my question. Sorry for my fuzzy questions.

I want to paraphrase Rom 6:141-15 as follows:

14(a) Sin will not be the master of you.
15(b) It is because  you are not under the Law, i.e.
                     not under the obligation to keep the Law
                                                      as a Law-people,
                     but you are under grace [which motivates you not
                                              to sin].


15   What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the obligation
                                 to keep the Law as a Law-people,
                                but under grace?

The point of this paraphrase is that the point of Rom 6:14b is
not so much  "you are not under the Law" as "you are under Grace".
In this paraphrase, the fact that "you are not under the Law" 
has nothing to do with the declaration "sin will not be the master
of you", but  the fact that "you are under grace" has. 

If you understand "not under the Law" as "not under the condemnation of
the Law" like Cranfield does, both "not under the Law" and "under grace"
have to do with "sin will not be the master of you". 

My question is: does OU GAR ESTE hUPO NOMON ALLA hUPO CARIN 
inherently prefer the rendering (e.g. Granfield's) which treats 
OU hUPO NOMON and hUPO CARIN symmetrically 
because of its sentence structure or the Greek grammar?

I like my paragraph especially because 6:15 makes a better sense
in this paragraph, rather than

   What then? Shall we sin because we are not 
                     under the condemnation of the Law but under grace?
  [Mine is:  Shall we sin because we are not under the obligation to
                             keep the Law as a Law-people
                           but under grace? ]


Note: I searched for all occurrences of hUPO NOMON in the NT. 
      [I could not find none in LXX]. In all of these occurrences
      hUPO NOMON seems to mean simply "under the regime or government
      of the Law", which is the nutshell of Jewish life.
      
Moon
Moon-Ryul Jung
Associate Professor
Sogang Univ, Seoul, Korea




More information about the B-Greek mailing list