Lk 18:13; TWi hAMARTWLWi
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Nov 28 16:49:02 EST 2001
At 3:07 PM -0600 11/28/01, Paul S Dixon wrote:
>On Tue, 27 Nov 2001 16:53:43 -0600 "Carl W. Conrad"
><cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> writes:
>> At 3:23 PM -0600 11/27/01, Paul S Dixon wrote:
>>
>> >But, more to the point. What is the justification for such?
>>
>> hO QEOS, hILASQHTI MOI TWi hAMARTWLWi
>>
>> Does this really signify anything more in the Greek than making
>> hARTWLWi an
>> attributive to MOI? I don't think the translators are doing anything
>> more
>> than expressing the sense of the Greek in idiomatic English. While I
>> can
>> conceive of hILASQHTI MOI hAMARTWLWi ONTI, I can't quite imagine
>> hILASQHTI
>> MOI hAMARTWLWi.
>
>Aren't there plenty of examples of appositional nouns in the Koine Greek?
> If so, then why should we not expect MOI hAMARTWLWi, if he intended to
>say, "to me, a sinner"?
>
>How could he have said it in the Greek, if he wanted to say, "to me, the
>sinner"?
No doubt it WOULD be MOI TWi hAMARTWLWi, Paul. But the problem is not with
the Greek so much as with the English; the Greek uses the article to refer
to hAMARTWLOS as a class. No doubt you can put it into English as "to me,
the sinner"--and Steve LoVullo has shown that some versions do just that.
But the point I thought you were making was that it's wrong to translate it
WITHOUT using the English definite article, and I think that's interpreting
the Greek in terms of English grammar.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months: 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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