Romans 8:28 and "in" all things PART 2

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Sep 17 19:13:59 EDT 2002


At 2:55 PM -0700 9/17/02, waldo slusher wrote:
>Part 2 of my original question. Thank you Richard for
>your comments. They were most helpful and actually
>form the basis of this second part question.
>
>OIDAMEN DE hOTI TOIS AGAPWSI TON QEON PANTA SUNERGEI
>EIS AGAQON...
>
>Which I asked if this was acceptable:
>
> "we know that he works in all things for..."
>
>Apparently to which Moo would say:
>
>"The one syntactical difficulty is that the verb
>SUNERGW normally takes a personal subject..."
>
>My question deals with assigning priorities in making
>translational decisions. Is it a good practice to
>weigh each piece first and assign it some degree of
>tolerance?
>
>For example, suppose that Moo's concern that SUNERGEW
>should have a personal agent as subject is valid.
>Suppose further that the position of PANTA is awkward
>if it is the subject here. By assigning priorities I
>mean if only 2 percent of the time SUNERGEW takes a
>non personal agent and PANTA is positioned as the
>subject as here only 17 percent of the time in its
>other occurences, should we then conclude that it is
>statistically more likely to have PANTA out of
>position than for SUNERGEW to have an impersonal
>agent. And by implication, we are then "forced" to
>take SUNERGEW with the personal agent "he works..." as
>our first priority.
>
>If this is really a b-Translation question, by all
>means please respond offlist to me.

I would suggest some caution before making such decisions on that sort of
percentage basis: there are 4 instances of SUNERGEW in the GNT apart from
Rom 8:28: 3 of them involve personal subjects, another has hH PISTIS as
subject. Is that 25% of instances in the GNT a statistically significant
figure to help you decide whether or not PANTA might be the subject in Rom
8:28 rather than an implicit hO QEOS? Without more overwhelming statistical
evidence I wouldn't want to decide on that basis.
-- 

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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