GAR KAI DIOTI
Richard Ghilardi
qodeshlayhvh at juno.com
Mon Jul 29 19:36:55 EDT 2002
Dear B-greekers,
I have continued my memorization of Rm 8 in Greek. I've gotten as far as
vs. 23. I've noticed that Paul uses GAR a lot in this chapter (16 times
in all). But he does use DIOTI once. (I do not count the v.l. in vs. 21
which is not as well attested as hOTI.) They seem to mean the same thing,
unless I've missed some nuance of meaning here. BDAG divides the lemma
for GAR into three sections. All the citations from Rm 8 are in the first
subdefinition:
1) marker of cause or reason, for
BDAG defines DIOTI in Rm 8:7 as:
3) marker used to indicate why something just stated can reasonably be
considered valid, used in place of hOTI: for
My question is why does Paul use DIOTI this one time among the 16 GAR's
of Rm 8? Surely it's not to vary his style. Then he would have used
perhaps 3 or 4 DIOTI's not just one. Does DIOTI have some DA funciton
here that I'm missing? Definition 3 of DIOTI from BDAG seems slightly
wrong, too. If we strictly apply this definition to DIOTI in vs. 7, then
the first clause of that vs., TO FRONHMA THS SARKOS ECQRA EIS QEON, gives
the reason why TO DE FRONHMA TOU PNEUMATOS ZWH KAI EIRHNH, the last
clause of vs. 6, can be considered valid. But that's nonsense. The
inconcinnity is only slightly relieved by taking the whole of vs. 6 as
the "something JUST stated". The definition ought to be amended to read,
"something in the near context".
Yours in His grace,
Richard Ghilardi -- qodeshlayhvh at juno.com
New Haven, CT USA
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