John 20:31 was Re: [B-Greek] Phil 2:11

Doug Hoxworth dhoxworth at charter.net
Wed Oct 15 11:18:55 EDT 2003


><Stephen>
>It is not just the presence of the article on CRISTOS that makes it the subject; it is that fact plus the absence of the article on IHSOUS is what strongly indicates that Jesus is the predicate noun and the Messiah is the subject.

<doug>
as i said before, if the only argument being made is that 
one has the article and the other doesn't i don't think 
this *has* to mean that CRISTOS is the subject. as i've 
tried to point out, the article is not ONLY used to 
identify the subject. i'm not saying your reading is 
impossible or grammatically incorrect just that there may 
be other options and may be other reasons why all [?] 
english translations render it as "that Jesus is the 
Christ" rather than "that [the] Christ is Jesus."

><Stephen>
>The fact that hO IHSOUS is the subject in John 20:30 has no bearing on the construction of John 20:31, where IHSOUS is anarthrous.

<doug>
recall that there are no verse breaks in the original. i 
don't mean to belittle you by stating the obvious but this 
is important. the aAuthor (to borrow a convention used by 
someone else on this list) is developing a coherent 
thought...in other words, the ideas/verses are connected. 
v. 31 is not independent from v. 30 or to be read and 
analyzed in a vacuum. utterances only have meaning in 
context (or outside of context they can have whatever 
meaning we want them to mean).

><Stephen>
>See, e.g., Smyth §§ 1126 ("[The article's] presence is often determined by the need of distinguishing subject from predicate") and 1150 ("A predicate noun has no article, and is thus distinguished from the subject."); BDF § 273 ("Predicate nouns as a rule are anarthrous" and "proper names are regularly anarthrous in the predicate").

<doug>
yes, but is the rule inviolable?

i'm not denying this *general* rule. please don't 
misunderstand me. i'm simply saying that *perhaps* there's 
more to it than that (i.e., just the article). notice the 
author's use of "other" and "regularly". and the reader 
from the verses before already knows that it is IHSOUS who 
is the subject or who is under discussion. this is why i 
believe nearly all english translations translate it as 
"Jesus is the Christ" rather than "[the] Christ is Jesus." 
perhaps you could propose another more probable reason why 
all english translations (i could not find one translation 
that adopts your reading; even the wycliff translation 
from the Latin reads the same) adopt the same reading.



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