[B-Greek] Nominative to verb

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri May 9 14:08:43 EDT 2003


At 9:36 AM -0700 5/9/03, Mitch Larramore wrote:
>hH MARTURIA TOU IWANNOU
>
>My question is why can you convert a nominative noun
>into a verb (John testifies) which converts the
>genitive into its subject. I see that this is a verbal
>noun, but I don't see why the writer wouldn't use the
>verb form if he wanted it to function verbally.

It would help if you'd not only cite the phrase you're asking about but
indicate the context or passage it's in as well. I'm guessing that you're
referring to
John 1:19 KAI hAUTH ESTIN hH MARTURIA TOU IWANNOU ... I'm not quite sure
what you're asking; it's true that the same thought COULD have been
expressed by hOUTWS EMARTURHSEN hO IWANNHS ... with no difference of
meaning. My own sense of the reason for the phrasing that the evangelist
prefers here has to do with the way a theme of "judgment" (KRISIS) is
operating in his larger narrative: there is the theme of a trial in John's
gospel: Jesus puts the world (humanity) on trial while at the same time the
world (humanity individually) is judging Jesus. John begins his gospel with
the "testimony" of a major "witness," John the Baptist. In John 1:19 the
hAUTH points forward to the actual responses of John to the questions posed
him by interrogators sent from Jerusalem to "depose" him.

It's also worth noting that there's something of a tendency in Hellenistic
Greek to make nouns, especially verbal nouns, bear more of the weight in
narrative and argumentative exposition than was the case in older Attic
Greek, where the verb was perhaps the primary bearer of information. You
might also see the phraseology exemplified in your question elsewhere in
John's gospel:

	John 3:19 hAUTH DE ESTIN hH KRISIS, hOTI ...
	John 6:29 TOUTO ESTIN TO ERGON TOU QEOU ... hINA
	John 6:39 (so 6:40) TOUTO ... ESTIN TO QELHMA TOU QEOU ... hINA
	John 6:50 (CF. 6:58) hOUTOS ESTIN hO ARTOS hO EK TOU OURANOU
KATABAINWN ..., etc., etc.
-- 

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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