[B-Greek] gender of pronouns
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Apr 12 12:00:59 EDT 2004
At 10:25 AM -0500 4/12/04, Joseph Weaks wrote:
>On Apr 12, 2004, at 4:48 AM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>> At 5:05 PM +1000 4/12/04, Lew Osborne wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> In John 1:3 the pronoun 'him' was translated as 'it' until about 1568.
>>> Taking all doctrinal thinking out of the equation and understanding
>>> that the
>>> word 'logos' is the 'essential thought' ; 'the concept of an idea'
>>> should
>>> the word 'autos' be translated 'it'; 'he'; 'she' or whatever in this
>>> context. What governs this?
>>
>> Quite simply put, the antecedent of AUTOU and AUTON in John 1:3 is hO
>> LOGOS; the antecedent noun is masculine singular and therefore the
>> gender
>> of AUTOU and AUTON is masculine singular. The gender of LOGOS is
>> masculine but that fact doesn't imply anything about biological
>> gender.
>
>And, quite simply, the translation of the pronoun as "him" is a
>theological assertion (presumably that the logos is the pre-existent
>male Christ), not a grammatical one. That doesn't make it wrong, but it
>does make it a quite interpretive feature.
And perhaps I wouldn't respond any further to this at all, had not the
question been addressed to me originally.
Ultimately you're asking a translation question, and this is not really the
proper forum for that; perhaps you should take the question to the
B-Translation list. In my opinion, translation of AUTOU and AUTON as "it"
in John 1:3 is neutral: it doesn't prejudge the question whether the
pre-existent LOGOS has biological gender, whereas translation of those
pronouns as "him" seems to imply a biological gender to the LOGOS. The
translator's choice is made on grounds of the translator's theology rather
than on grounds of what the Greek text necessarily indicates. And as this
is not the proper forum for dealing with the translation question, it is
even less the proper forum for dealing with the theological question. But
let me suggest that this question is being posed in a manner somewhat
similar to a related question occasionally raised on this list: whether the
pronoun referring to hO PARAKLHTOS should be masculine when there's a
pretty clear indication that hO PARAKLHTOS is identical with TO PNEUMA.
However one decides a question such as this, one ought to be clear about
the distinction between grammatical gender and biological gender and not
confound the two.
--
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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