Indexing?

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Oct 15 12:08:03 EDT 2002


Forwarded for George Somsel <Polycarp66 at aol.com>
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 12:00:53 EDT

In a message dated 10/15/2002 9:35:07 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
WmHBoyd at aol.com writes:

>My son (a High School Senior)was questioning his Greek instructor
>concerning the the legimitacy of John Dobson's suggestion that TA ERGA
>XRISTOU means "the wonderful things Christ was doing." (Learn New
>Testament Greek - 2nd edition page 46.) He did not understand the
>insertion of the idea of "wonderful." His instructor told him this was an
>example of "indexing." What is "indexing?"  Is this a legitimate example
>of indexing?  Are their rules or norms or generally accepted limits to
>indexing?
>



Huh??!!¬Ý This sounds more like a librarian's term than a Greek term.¬Ý I
never heard of a term 'indexing' in regard to a syntactical form or
lexicographical term.¬Ý Just to be sure I checked (what else!) the index in
Robertson's grammar and came up empty.¬Ý An electronic search of Wallace
wasn't much better though there was something which might be somewhat
related [p. 52, note]
____________________________

51. This construction constitutes a part of primitive speech. When a child
learns to speak, frequently complete sentences will be uttered with one
word *** and an index finger. "Toy!" is a pedocrypt for "That toy over
there’Äîthat's what I want!"¬Ý *** At a later stage of speech development,
the logical subject is thrown to the front of the sentence, followed by a
sentence in which this "subject" now takes its rightful syntactical place.
E.g., "Ice cream! I want ice cream!" In these examples it is easy to see
that emotion at the time of an utterance is what sometimes produces a
pendent nom.

In more sophisticated speech, the pendent nom. may function more as a
heading to a sentence in which its introduction at the proper syntactical
location might be somewhat awkward to communicate. E.g., "John’Äîdidn’Äôt I
see him at the game last night?" or, "The drug problem: I don’Äôt think it
will go away."

Daniel B. Wallace. (1999;2002). Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics -
Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament. Zondervan Publishing House and
Galaxie Software.
_______________________

If your son's instructor meant to say that it pointed to particular works "
**those** works of Christ", that's possible.¬Ý The question is "Where does
he get the 'wonderful?'"¬Ý Surely that is an interpretation which goes
beyond the Greek.

gfsomsel



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