[B-Greek] Mark 1.14
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Nov 5 09:19:11 EST 2003
At 6:03 AM -0800 11/5/03, waldo slusher wrote:
>> >From: Mark Goodacre
>> >Mark 1.14, META DE TO PARADOQHNAI TON IWANNHN HLQEN
>> hO IHSOUS EIS THN
>> >GALILAIAN EIS THN GALILAIAN KHRUSSWN TO EUAGGELION
>> TOU QEOU
>> >
>> >I've always thought of TOU QEOU as an objective
>> genitive here, gospel
>> >of / about God, but it occurs to me that it makes
>> good sense as a
>> >subjective genitive, the gospel which comes from
>> God.
>
>And Carl said...
>
>> Is it even necessary to characterize this genitive
>> as either "subjective"
>> or "objective"? I've argued here before that these
>> are translation matters
>> rather than anything inherent in the Greek
>> formulation. All the
>> subcategories of adnominal/adjectival genitive
>> listed in many grammars are
>> interpretative categories rather than descriptive of
>> anything inherent in
>> the Greek text;
>
>I think this comment by Carl is correct only in that
>it applies to us some 2,000 years later. I hardly
>think on the other hand that the writers and readers
>of the first century were bound by this inability to
>be "descriptive" in their own language-culture. And of
>course as more and more ancient Greek writings are
>discovered, the more and more objective constructs
>like this become.
Waldo, I'll readily grant that there are contexts in which it is quite
clear that the adnominal/adjectival genitive associated with a noun with a
verbal sense would be a subject or object if the noun were a verb; on the
other hand, I think that the question of which it is will be asked by the
non-Greek-speaker--admittedly in the modern context.
As for how "objective" constructs like this become with discovery of more
ancient Greek writings (and it's not as if we're making exponential growth
in our corpus of ancient Greek literature), I guess that there can be
different opinions, but my own observation is that what we're becoming more
aware of is how SUBJECTIVE constructs like this actually are. Which is why
I suggested that "God-gospel," although not academic English, probably
expresses all that an ancient Greek-speaker/writer said with TO EUAGGELION
TOU QEOU; certainly it's not matter (in my opinion) of a clear intention by
the original speaker/writer to specify "the good news THAT GOD DELIVERS" or
"the good news PROCLAIMING GOD" or "the good news ABOUT GOD"; one may say
that any or all of these notions is/are implicit,but I don't think one can
specify objectively that it's one or the other exclusively.
--
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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