Axioms of NT Greek Grammar

Harry W. Jones hjbluebird at aol.com
Sun Jun 24 18:42:50 EDT 2001


> Harry,
> > When I spoke of the," Axioms of NT Greek Grammar" I simply ment the
> > established rules of NT Greek grammar that's not based on inductive
> > reasoning. We of course get these rules from modern Greek as well as
> > sources closer to our time than NT Greek. I guess you could call these
> > rules, the "Mechanics" of the language.
> 
> I don't know of any grammars that actually apply rules of modern 
> Greek to NT Greek, but perhaps you've seen some works that I 
> haven't since I've spent the last several years focusing more on 
> Hebrew than on Greek.  Nevertheless, modern Greek can only tell 
> us so much, ditto for Byzantine Greek; induction is pretty much 
> the only approach we have available for figuring out the mechanics 
> of a dead language, whether Koine Greek, Palestinian Aramaic, 
> Ugaritic or any other such language.  I don't think it's correct to 
> write off something simply because it's arrived at by an inductive 
> approach, because I haven't seen any demonstration that an 
> inductive approach is incorrect.
> 
> Dave Washburn
<snip>

Hi Dave!

No Dave, I never said that inductive reasoning and statistical analysis 
didn't have a place in NT Greek or in other fields of interest. I only
indicated that there was no certainty to results of these methods.
Nows here's the problem Dave. I sit down with someone who doesn't 
believe in God. I then point to Titus 2:13 and say to him Sharps
rule(actually a theory) proves this to teach that Jesus is God. Well
now, he would be well within reason to reject that assertion. But
if I sat down with someone and said the Greek adjective agrees with
the noun it modifies, why that would be different. I believe Colwell's
rule(theory) as well a Sharp's rule have too small of a statistical
data base anyway for any high probability that they may be true. Also
you might want to take a look at those List articles on breaking 
Sharp's rule.

Harry W. Jones
hjbluebird at aol.com



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