[B-Greek] "Is Deponency a Valid Category for Koine Greek?"

Stephen C. Carlson scarlson at mindspring.com
Mon Nov 24 07:35:03 EST 2003


Yesterday at SBL, I heard a delightful paper by Jonathan
T. Pennington of the University of St Andrews entitled
"Is Deponency a Valid Category for Koine Greek?"  He
argues that "[d]eponency is a grammatical category that
has been misapplied to Greek because of the influence
of Latin grammar and our unfamiliarity with the meaning
of the Greek middle voice."

Pennington cites a paper by B-Greek's very own Carl Conrad.

I think he's very right that many verbs that we've been
calling deponent are true middles because it is hard for us
English speakers to understand the subject's self-involvement
or self-interest in the action.  For example, DECOMAI.

Pennington lists the interchange between the active and
middle voice of some verbs with little apparent change in
meaning as among the potential objections to the non-deponency
thesis.  An example he gave was AITEW, which alternates
in voice in the following passages: Matt. 20:20-22 // Mark
10:35; Mark 6:22-25; John 16:23-26; James 4:2-3; 1 John
5:14-16.  He notes that there is a semantic distinction
between the active and middle of AITEW, which he can see
operative in the Matt., Mark, and James passages, but that
it is hard to spot in the John and 1 John passages.  P.
suggested that in John, the lack of distinct senses of AITEW
in the active and middle may be due to local dialect or
interference from the writer's native tongue, but I have
to wonder whether another explanation is more probable.

I am struck that the two passages in which is it hard to
tell the intended difference between the active and middle
of AITEW both occur in John (John and 1 John).  As we surely
know from at the question of AGAPAW and FILEW in John 21,
this author apparently likes to interchange two nearly but
not exactly, synonymous words in the same context.  Thus,
I'm not sure that the interchange between AITEW and AITEOMAI
without any apparent intended difference in meaning in *John*
is the kind of evidence that can be extrapolated beyond this
writer's own stylistic behavior to a general principle of Koine
grammar.

A question that came up in the question period is: what's the
middle meaning of ERCOMAI, if ERCOMAI is not deponent?  I would
suggest that there is an English idiom, reflexive in form,
with a similar meaning: TO GET ONESELF (SOMEWHERE).  So
perhaps Mark 8:22 KAI ERXONTAI EIS BHQSAIDAN "And they get
themselves to Bethsaida."  Now, I'm certainly not suggesting
that GET ONESELF (SOMEWHERE) can be or ought to be a plug-in
replacement for all occurrences of ERCOMAI.  Rather, I am
suggesting that, if English, which strongly prefers to employ
the active over the reflexive, can have a formally reflexive
idiom of similar meaning to ERCOMAI, then it should not be
so strange that Greek, which makes use of the middle in far
more circumstances that English is comfortable with in using
the more restrictive reflexive, would have this verb in the
middle.

Stephen Carlson
--
Stephen C. Carlson                        mailto:scarlson at mindspring.com
Weblog:    http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/hypotyposeis/blogger.html
"Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs chant the words."  Shujing 2.35




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