HN PROS TON QEON... (Jn. 1,1)

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Jun 1 05:16:32 EDT 2002


At 4:40 AM +0200 6/1/02, Roe wrote:
>Greetings B-Greek,
>
>John 1:1...   "hO LOGOS HN PROS TON QEON" (the Word was *TOWARDS[?]*
>God...)
>
>Does the expression in Greek "PROS + [accusative]" necessarily mean that
>instead of being "with" God, the Word was *towards* God -- i.e., that the
>Word was moving towards God, closing some kind of former seperation??

Hardly, with a stationary verb such as EIMI. PROS means "close to" or even
"facing" or "in front of." Although one doesn't want by any means to rely
upon etymology as a sole indicator of semantic force, and although PROS
can, with a verb of motion, involve movement or direction or address
"toward," I do think it's worth knowing that PRO and PARA and PROS are
essentially  in origin correlative adverbial forms with a sense of "facing"
or "in front of" or "confronting" or "in the presence of." Usage with the
different cases and with different verbs will make a big difference. At any
rate there's no notion of "convergence" in the present expression PROS TON
QEON, but rather the sense is "immediate proximity."
-- 

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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