[B-Greek] Rom 8:14

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon May 5 06:13:54 EDT 2003


At 10:52 AM +0100 5/5/03, Daniel and Rachel King wrote:
>hOSOI GAR PNEUMATI QEOU AGONTAI hOUTOI hUIOI QEOU EISIN.
>
>A question about the significance of word order. Do you think the hUIOI is
>being fronted for emphasis here? The two halves of the sentence seem to
>balance nicely and hence PNEUMATI and hUIOI might be taken as a balancing
>pair, closely linked as the key words in the sentence.
>
>There are textual alternatives here: B, followed by Tischendorf and NA25
>have hUIOI EISIN QEOU, and Maj. has EISIN hUIOI QEOU. This makes the
>question interesting, because one could ask whether these alternatives have
>a different nuance given he different word order. For instance, is the KJV
>translation : "for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the
>sons of God" influenced by the Maj word order in using the words 'they are'
>at the beginning of the second part?
>
>Would you ascribe any significance to fronting here at all?

Perhaps I'm not really understanding the question; the text as given above
at the outset is, of course, what appears in NA27/UBS4; the word-order here
strikes me as unexceptional of the type that has a relative clause
preceding the main clause and describing a subject indicated by a
demonstrative in the main clause. hUIOI QEOU here is really a unitary
conception and as the predicative word normally does, it precedes the
copula EISIN. I don't see any "fronting" here at all. And although the KJV
version you've cited does indeed reflect the word-order of the TR (and MT)
standard ENGLISH would have converted either hUIOI QEOU EISIN or EISIN
hUIOI QEOU the same way, precisely as did KJV.

On the other hand, I suspect that hOSOI in the first clause here is not
much more than a relative pronoun, as it is in later Greek (i.e. that the
quantitative force of the -OS- infix is no longer present), so that the
sense of the whole construction is rather, "it is those who are led by the
spirit that are sons of God."
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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