Ephesians 4:12

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Jul 12 08:06:25 EDT 2002


At 6:22 PM -0400 7/11/02, Jay Anthony Adkins wrote:
>I  Asked :	(Snipped sections)
>
>Ephe 4:12 (GNT) PROS TON KATARTISMON TWN AGIWN EIS ERGON DIAKONIAS, EIS
>OIKODOMHN TOU SWMATOS TOU XRISTOU,
>
>Should a comma be placed after AGIWN, making a list 3 reasons for God's
>gift of Apostles, prophets, evangelist, pastors and teachers? Or should
>the comma be omitted as it is in my Greek text and the NASU making the
>AGIWN the one's who do works of service to build up the body.
>
>D.W. Roe (David) wrote:
>
>I know of no *rule* which would establish one reading over the other. It
>is my understanding, however, that the change of prepositions from PROS to
>EIS indicates a "more natural or expected" reading close to that of the
>oft-loosely translated NIV: "to prepare God's people for works of
>service..."
>
>Then Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>I'd agree with this comment, both in what it asserts and in what it says
>about ambiguity. The two phrases with EIS and verbal nouns are pretty
>standard in Hellenistic Greek to signal BOTH purpose and result, and it's
>often difficult to decide whether the phrase was intended by its author to
>express purpose or result. The same is true of hWSTE with either
>infinitive
>or indicative--such a clause may signal either purpose or result, and it's
>not always crystal clear which the author intended.
>
>First let me thank both people that responded to my query.  It makes sense
>to me as well that the change in prepositions may hold the key, but it
>would be most difficult to be dogmatic due to the ambiguity involved.
>Does anyone know of another verse we can look at to possibly resolve the
>conflict, either from the Bible or early church fathers? And since this is
>now outside of B-Greek, please respond off list unless your answer bears
>on the Greek text.  Thank you very much.

I really don't want to leave the realm of B-Greek at all, and I do hope
that my answer bears on the Greek text fundamentally. Nor do I want in any
way to discourage others with opinions on this text from having a say on it
(after all, I'm going to confess that I can't analyze it to my own
satisfaction).

I've changed my mind since yesterday with respect to this verse, and I
really must thank Jay for not letting the questions here rest. One of the
almost notorious features of the Letter to the Ephesians which some others
and I find particularly unsettling is the "looseness" of the syntax--the
difficulty the reader has in discerning clear connections between phrases
and relating each phrase to a central controlling verb (or even finding, in
some instances, a central controlling verb). We have had several threads on
the problems of sorting out phrase relationships in Eph 1:3-10. This
passage too has a certain looseness to it; it does to me to be
fundamentally intelligible in terms of its content, and yet, precisely
because one must settle upon choices of how to link the phrases where the
text itself provides no clear guidance, it is problematic as a text to
convert to a target language, as may quickly be recognized by an overview
of several English versions. Certainly one has to view Eph 4:7-16 as a
textual unit, and one must relate EDWKEN in vs. 11 to EDWKEN DOMATA TOIS
ANQRWPOIS, while vs. 12 pretty clearly indicates the intention underlying
the giving of the gifts and vss. 13ff. indicate the length and breadth of
the maturation process through which those gifts are intended to assist
"the saints." So: one can without a whole lot of difficulty discern the
essential flow of the content of this passage,but when we start dissecting
the passage and analyzing the syntactic flow, I think we do get bogged down
pretty badly. I must confess quite honestly that I am far less confident
this morning about what I wrote yesterday (cited above by Jay in his
reformulation of his original question) than I thought I was yesterday.
Perhaps there is no clear differentiation between the usage of PROS and EIS
in vs. 12--and I almost think that it would be more "honest" to represent
the looseness of the Greek in a loose English (for English substitute any
other target language) rather than to attempt a more precise articulation,
the effect of which is to tip the scales in favor of one interpretation of
what's ambiguous rather than another. So I'd suggest:

"for the equipping of the saints for servanthood-work, for construction of
Christ's body" The comma following "servanthood-work" reflects the
punctuation of UBS4/NA27, but quite frankly, I think that this construction
is so loose that there's no way of being sure that EIS OIKODOMHN TOU
SWMATOS TOU CRISTOU is intended other than as a parallel to PROS TON
KATARTISMON TWN hAGIWN.

While I have personally been very impressed by the NET as a whole--and what
I like best about it is that it explains and defends its translators'
conception of "how the text means"--, I am inclined to think that NET errs
in its attempt to articulate this text in English far more precisely than
it is articulated in the original:

"4:12 to equip12 the saints for the work of ministry, that is,13 to build
up the body of Christ, "

The translator notes then explain this reading thus:

"12tn On the translation of PROS TON KATARTISMON TWN hAGIWN (pros ton
katartismon ton hagion) as "to equip the saints" see BAGD 418 s.v.
KATARTISMOS. In this case the genitive is taken as objective and the direct
object of the verbal idea implied in KATARTISMOS (katartismo").
"13tn The EIS (eis) clause is taken as epexegetical to the previous EIS
clause, namely, EIS ERGON DIAKONIAS)."

Now I do think this is one perfectly reasonable articulation of the
elements of vs. 12, but (a) I don't find the explanation so cogent that I
cannot just as likely conceive EIS OIKODOMHN TOU SWMATOS TOU CRISTOU to be
parallel to PROS TON KATARTISMON TWN hAGIWN.

So I ask myself: do we really understand this particular passage better
through our efforts at detailed syntactic analysis. As a "grammarian" I
want to say: "Certainly we do." But my common-sense and skeptical bent
comes in from the other side and tells me: "You know very well that you
understand what the whole sequence is saying and that in this instance the
old Aristotelian strategy of 'divide and conquer' doesn't work: the more
you attempt to fine-tune the analysis of this passage, the more puzzling
you're likely to find it, and you may even persuade yourself of what you
really know is not true, that you don't understand the passage at all. But
you DO understand it; you just can't ANALYZE it." Thus my inner dialogue.
So, if we/I DO understand this text without being able to analyze it to our
technical satisfaction, what does it say? It says that  "the risen Christ
gave human beings gifts, distributing roles among them with a view to
turning believers into more adequately functional servants; those roles
which he gave part of his overall intention to make the body of Christ
become a fully-functional organism." Now obviously that's not a
translation, but I think that within its larger context of Eph 4:7-16 this
is what the original audience/readers were meant to understand from these
verses. In this instance, it seems to me, the whole is not only greater
than the sum of its parts; the whole really cannot be articulated
convincingly into its parts.
-- 

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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