Sentences in Greek

Richard Allan Stauch rstauch at charter.net
Wed Aug 7 10:34:36 EDT 2002


To All,

You read the reference line and said to yourself, "Oh no. Not again!"

Surely, this topic has been discussed to death here. Following a point
made after the recent discussion on Romans 1:17 (thank you Paul Toseland),
I merely want to see if I understand things correctly.

I have learned that words in Greek do not have a one-to-one correspondence
with words in English. I also now believe that sentence structure (if it
can be called that) does not have the same meaning in First Century Greek
as it does in Twenty-First Century English.

Where, in modern English, good sentence structure will carry a single
point, within a paragraph that carries a single thought, ancient Greek saw
thoughts flowing, from one point to the next. Like a living thing; a
plant, for instance: from the trunk flows the branches, and from the
branches flow the stems, and from the stems flow the leaves and flowers
and fruit. Paragraphs, then, constituted a complete entity.

So, as we read the Greek texts, we find ourselves inventing places to
insert full stops. This is foreign to our Greek prose, and so an incorrect
reading. To some degree then (and the NIV seems to be most active in
this), we change the thought process as we translate from Greek to English
when we stop the text before, say, "* GAR" or "* DE." Should we not try to
keep the Greek thought flow intact as much as possible? Isn't it a large
part of the methodology used by them to impart knowledge?

In short, instead of bending the text to conform to our way of thinking,
should we not bend our thinking to conform to the text?

What did that sign used to say? "Think Greek."

AGAPH hAGION,
Richard Allan Stauch
Long Beach, CA



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