John 20:31 was Re: [B-Greek] Phil 2:11
Stephen C. Carlson
scarlson at mindspring.com
Thu Oct 16 10:04:10 EDT 2003
At 08:23 AM 10/16/03 +0300, Iver Larsen wrote:
>> Not at all. I'm suggesting that hO CRISTOS is subject, so the rule about
>> whether it gets the article in the predicate is not implicated.
>
>I thought one of your main reasons for suggesting that it has to be subject
>was that it could not be the predicate, because it has the article.
No, my initial post included a citation to the article that made the
argument with a brief allusion to a well-known syntactic rule in Greek
that the presence and absence of the article is used for distinguishing
subjects and predicate nouns. The article also included contextual and
historical reasons for his proposal, some of which range beyond the scope
of B-Greek.
When it appeared to me that the allusion missed its mark, I followed up
by explaining the rule and citing the relevant sections in the standard
grammars. I did not expect to find that the people most strenuously
contesting this interpretation would have little or no apparent appreciation
of the existence or significance of this rule. Yes, there are subtleties
and exceptions to the rule (which Carl Conrad has been grappling with in
his messages, which I appreciate very much), counting how many times a
particular lexeme has the article in non-analogous grammatical constructions
--in a restricted corpus no less--is not going to illuminate the syntactical
issues at play in John 20:31.
At this point, I have become rather non-plussed about how to proceed, and
I fear that future participation in this discussion is going to be more
frustrating than productive when we cannot even come to agreement that in
John 1:41, hO ESTIN MEQERMHNEUOMENON CRISTOS, hO is the subject, ESTIN
MEQERMHNEUOMENON is the copula, and CRISTOS is the anarthrous predicate
noun. If this is something that you are interested in pursuing, I hope
that the citations I provided turn out to be good starting points.
Stephen Carlson
--
Stephen C. Carlson mailto:scarlson at mindspring.com
Synoptic Problem Home Page http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/synopt/
"Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs chant the words." Shujing 2.35
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