Middle or passive (Was: Matth.24:7&11)
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Dec 9 20:28:43 EST 2002
Since Iver has already said much of what I would say in response to Steven,
I think I'll just piggy-back onto his response and add a note here and
there.
At 8:05 PM +0300 12/9/02, Iver Larsen wrote:
>Hi Steven,
>
>I am not sure if you are directing your post to me or some one else, but let
>me make a few comments, and let some one else comment further.
>
><snip>
>> I have kept an open mind for quite some time to the idea that the -QH-
>> verbs should be considered MP, and especially M unless accompanied by a
>> modifier that explicitly indicates an agent (e.g., hUPO with the
>> genitive).
>
>It seems that you are oversimplifying and overstating your opponents'
>position. At least, both Carl and I agree that an MP form in some contexts
>must be understood as passive, even if there is no explicit agent, e.g. with
>hUPO. He may be leaning more towards "middle" and I more towards "passive"
>in such cases. I think we agree that in many contexts, the distinction
>between Greek middle and passive is not as clear-cut as an appeal to English
>active and passive would suggest.
That is indeed an oversimplification of my argument--although in earlier
days, when I was more inclined to think that middle/passive was an
"either/or" type of judgment, I was inclined to think (and say) that we
ought to consider an MP form as middle unless we had some clear indication
of passive sense. Now in §8.2 of my paper (under "Suggestions to
Students)," I say: "When confronting a "middle-passive" form, assume it is
"middle" unless the context or construction points clearly to passivity;
respect the differences between ancient Greek and any modern language. ...
The student needs to grasp firmly that the Greek mind and the Greek
language didn't distinguish the middle and passive meanings as a student
who is not a Greek-speaker may think they ought to be distinguished; the
simple fact is they didn't consider that distinction very important" and
later, "There is no reason why EBAPTIZONTO shouldn't be Englished as "they
were baptized" in this context, but the student of Greek ought to be
sensitive to the fact that the verb-form itself is no less middle in sense
than it is passive and that the distinction between the two voices was
hardly so significant to the Greek-speaker as it is to the English-speaker."
>But I think the time has come to challenge this view. As I
>> have been reading through the NT and taking special note of the -QH-
>> verbs, I have come to the tentative conclusion that such verbs, whether
>> with or without an expressed agent, should be taken as passive by
>> default unless there is strong evidence to the contrary. I think an
>> exhaustive, annotated study of *all* the -QH- verbs is necessary to
>> solve this problem. I hope to do such a study soon. At the very least,
>> I think convincing answers to the following questions/objections need
>> to be forthcoming:
><snip>
>> (2) Though those who propose that the -QH- morphoparadigm may or should
>> be understood as middle unless accompanied by an explicit agent may
>> deny this, much of their evidence seems to be predicated on whether or
>> not a -QH- form is easily translated into English as a passive. Note
>> well Iver's comments above:
>>
>> " There are many so-called passive forms of this and other verbs that
>> in context cannot be interpreted as passive in the English sense of
>> passive."
>>
>> "The problem we have in translation is that when an English passive is
>> used, it usually indicates that the agent is different from the
>> experiencer. That is why a passive in English is sometimes an
>> inaccurate translation of the passive in Greek. These grammatical
>> categories do not match across language boundaries."
>>
>> While I understand and sympathize with the burden of translators, we
>> must always distinguish between the Greek idiom and that which is
>> understandable or preferable in English. Just because the grammar check
>> in Word 2000 may reject *our* use of the passive does not mean that
>> such a use is unacceptable in Hellenistic Greek idiom. Yet this seems
>> to be a constant underlying misconception in this discussion. It is
>> simply not enough to argue that because a passive sense in English is
>> "unnatural" that a verb in Greek is therefore not passive, and
>> understood as passive in the Greek idiom. I demand evidence that the
>> passive is unacceptable in the Greek idiom.
>
>I am afraid I do not understood what your point is here. The term "passive"
>is a syntactic term, not a semantic one, and therefore it needs to be
>defined within each particular language. It is often assumed that a Greek
>MP2 form in principle corresponds to an English passive. I don't think we
>should start out with such an assumption. Nor should we assume that it does
>NOT correspond to an English passive. My approach is to look at how the verb
>in question is used in terms of its basic, MP1 and MP2 forms, and look at
>the semantic roles in context.
Nor do I understand this either. I think an assumption is being made about
Greek idiom and voice-functions there that is itself at least as
questionable as what I've been arguing. My view is that Greek idiom uses
what was always essentially a "reflexive" morphoparadigm to express the
passive sense of a verb when that was felt important, that even where the
passive sense is most common for a particular verb, the form itself is not
intrinsically passive but ambivalent.
>> (3) There seems constantly to be an argument set forth from what can
>> legitimately be labeled as exceptions. It is not enough-at least for
>> me-to argue that, since a relatively few verbs in the -QH-
>> morphoparadigm should be understood as middle, that *all* verbs in the
>> -QH- morphoparadigm may or should be considered middle unless
>> accompanied by an explicit agent. I think that the majority of uses of
>> the -QH- verbs indicates that these verbs should be considered passive
>> by default unless proven otherwise. I think it is a methodological
>> monstrosity to argue from the few to the many.
>
>When exceptions occur, and when they are quite numerous, you need to revise
>your hypothesis in order to explain the exceptions. Traditional Greek
>grammar does not do this, nor is the term deponent helpful, since it gives a
>label, but no reason or adequate description of what is going on.
It may be said that there are few exceptions over against a plenitude of
regular verbs showing morphoparadigms with active, middle, and passive
senses, but I think that is very hard to prove. The so-called "deponent
verbs" are, in my opinion, numerous enough to give the lie to the notion
that the -QH- morphoparadigms are essentially passive in meaning. Moreover,
I could only discover 30 verbs used in the GNT that had aorists in BOTH the
older -MHN/SO/TO AND the newer -QHN/QHS/QH morphoparadigms.
>> (4) According to most authorities, the nuances associated with the
>> middle voice are all but dying out during the period in which the NT
>> was written. This is understandable in light of the fact that "the
>> subtleties of a language that could easily be mastered by native
>> speakers tend to fall away when that language is learned by
>> non-natives" (Wallace).
>
>Is this a generally accepted statement? I don't know, but it looks like an
>overstatement to me.
I've occasionally read this; it seems to me that I may even have seen
something like it in Wallace. I think it is basically wrong; I think that
the language was always in flux and that it is not the SENSE of the middle
voice that is evanescing in Koine so much as that the morphoparadigms used
for particular verbs are in flux: some verbs that had middle futures in
classical Attic now have active futures. On the other hand, so important
verb as EIMI that had only a future middle ESOMAI in classical Attic, now
in Koine has a middle imperfect HMHN, and in modern Greek its present tense
is EIMAI. I think the notion that middle voice is evanescing in Koine may
have gained some persuasiveness because the -QH- forms are supplanting the
so-called older aorist "middles"; I think in fact this is more a matter of
the -QH- morphoparadigm supplanting the older second aorist middles just as
the alpha endings supplanting the thematic endings in the second aorist
actives in Koine.
>Yet if we are to accept the "new perspective,"
>> the middle is not only alive and well, but capable of expressing
>> nuances never before thought possible. Take a few of our recent
>> discussions on B-Greek:
>>
>> When we discussed ESFRAGISQHTE in Ephesians 1.13, we were told that it
>> could very well mean "you allowed yourselves to be sealed" or "you
>> submitted to be sealed" or the like. Yet this is very much more nuanced
>> that taking ESFRAGISQHTE as a simple passive. If anyone cares, I think
>> it is obvious from the context that it should be taken as passive. I
>> think that, among other things, some stylistic considerations were
>> overlooked. At any rate, this interpretation demands a highly nuanced
>> middle sense.
>
>This is one case where I argued for a definite passive from the use of this
>verb in other places. Although Carl was reluctant to give up the possibility
>of it being middle, he did say that it "was more passive than middle." So I
>agree with you on this one being passive, not middle.
I will confess, for what it's worth, that I do have a tendency, arising
partly from a sense of humor, but more from a deep sense that the
distinction between middle and passive sense is rarely so distinct as one
might suppose, to inject into discussions where identification of a form as
passive has been asserted almost dogmatically the thought that it really is
conceivable to think of that verb as having a middle sense. At the core of
the matter is the sense that if KEIRATAI can mean either "he shaves
himself" or "he gets shaved," or more simply, "he gets himself a shave,"
why should we suppose that in Greek idiom that verb MUST be EITHER middle
OR passive? I really doubt that the Greek mind bothered to sort out the
distinction unless for some reason it was important enough to indicate by
the context that one nuance was intended rather than the other.
>> Or how about our recent discussion of hEUREQHN in Romans 10.20? It was
>> suggested that hEUREQHN was not passive at all, but rather meant "I
>> revealed myself." Considering the basic lexical meaning of hEURISKW is
>> "find," this entails the idea of "finding myself out to." A long way to
>> go considering the passive is readily understandable. And it is not as
>> if there is no middle sense to go by. In Hebrews 9.12 hEURAMENOS seems
>> to mean "obtained." This is a natural extension of the lexeme "to
>> find," while it is hard to see how "reveal myself" is in any way
>> natural even in a middle sense, especially when it is contrasted with
>> TOIS EME MH ZHTOUSIN ("those who did not seek me"). When we take into
>> consideration that Paul purposely rearranged the LXX wording so that
>> there is a play on the words "find" and "seek," it seems obvious that
>> the sense is, "I was found by those who did not seek me." Again, though
>> Word 2000 may not like this, it does not mean that it is unnatural
>> Greek.
>
>I agree with you on this one, too, as you can see from my brief postings on
>the subject.
And this was a point where I continued to differ from Iver, because (a) I
don't think that archaic usage of a middle hEURAMENOS in Hebrews is enough
to establish a standard active/middle/passive distinction for this verb,
(b) I felt that Danker was probably right in his suggestion that the
"passive" morphoparadigm hEUREQHN might be used in an intransitive sense of
"find oneself" or "be" in some of its distinct GNT instances. Nevertheless
I would concede that hEUREQHN in Rom 10:20 is probably best understood as a
passive, even if it should be Englished as "I let me myself be found (by
those ...)."
>> I have not seen much of a challenge to the "new perspective." But in
>> the limited time I have, I hope to provide at least some dissent to a
>> view that seems, for the most part, to be going unchallenged on B-Greek.
>
>Great. Challenges help us towards a better and hopefully more accurate
>understanding of a complex issue.
And I would add that (a) most of what I've argued in my paper is not really
new at all; I found most of the phenomena I've talked about pretty clearly
stated in A.T. Robertson, who knew very well that the notion of "deponent
verbs" was nonsense and that one needs to learn the behavior and meanings
of unpredictable verbs individually rather than by pigeonholing them, but
who was perhaps too wise or perhaps not bold enough to call for terminology
that more accurately characterizes the way Greek verbs function with
respect to voice; (b) although you may say you haven't seen much of a
challenge to this perspective on voice, I would say for my part that I
haven't seen much support for it either. Ward Powers wrote at some length
in our discussions last fall in defense of the traditional perspective on
voice. A few have said that they agree that the term "deponent" is a
useless and obfuscatory categorization of "middle" and "passive" verbs that
don't have active forms, but I can count on the fingers of one hand
(without using the thumb) those who have admitted being persuaded by my
views on -QH- morphoparadigms as being every bit as much "middle-passive"
as the MAI/SAI/TAI; MHN/SO/TO morphoparadigms. I think that the U.S. will
adopt the metric system LONG before many students and teachers give much
heed to the arguments in my "New Observations"--I don't think there's much
danger (or hope) of either eventuality.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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