matt 21:25

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Jun 25 11:26:36 EDT 2002


At 6:08 AM -0700 6/25/02, john umland wrote:
>my first question to b-greek, surely a softball.
>i was doing my exercises in ward power's book and
>couldn't understand why the definite article before
>john's name is neuter.
>
>Mat 21:25  TO BAPTISMA TO IWANNOU

Usage of the article is one of the trickier things a student confronts in
beginning Greek. Here the TO functions to indicate that IWANNOU is an
"attribute" of TO BAPTISMA, and since TO BAPTISMA is a neuter noun, the
article referring back to it will agree with it normally in number and
gender.

What's confusing is that Greek would allow three (or more) expressions all
to mean "The baptism of John":

	TO BAPTISMA IWANNOU
	TO BAPTISMA TOU IWANNOU
	TO BAPTISMA TO IWANNOU
	TO BAPTISMA TO TOU IWANNOU

and it would also be possible to make any of these forms of IWANNOU precede
TO BAPTISMA:

	IWANNOU TO BAPTISMA
	TOU IWANNOU TO BAPTISMA
	TO TOU IWANNOU BAPTISMA

I think these latter three are less common, but they are by no means
unnatural or ungrammatical.
-- 

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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