[B-Greek] Col. 1:13a causal pronoun FOLLOW Up2

Dr Dale M Wheeler dalemw at multnomah.edu
Sun Apr 18 11:41:33 EDT 2004


Reply interspersed...

At 09:54 AM 4/18/2004 -0400, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>At 5:49 AM -0700 4/18/04, waldo slusher wrote:
> >We can certainly teach relationships that exist
> >between clauses, but I would not appeal to the
> >grammar. (Dr. Conrad, who I believe would agree with
> >Dr. Wheeler, described this process as "divining" if I
> >recall; I would agree with that description more so
> >than appealing to a semantic one.)
>
>I'm very sympathetic to this stance, Waldo; I really think it's not so very
>far removed from what I myself said in my last message:
>
>At 8:51 AM -0400 4/16/04, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
> > ... I have no intention of disputing what Dale Wheeler has said on this
> >matter. I will only say that interpretation of these nuances may well be a
> >matter of reading between the lines and guessing intelligently at what's
> >going on in the mind of the writer; remember that in conversation--and
> >often enough in writing also--we often have to "divine" what the person
> >we're talking with is thinking about. In the first two chapters of
> >Galatians I think there's need for a lot of such intelligent guesswork
> >required in order to perceive what's implicit but left unspoken. At any
> >rate, I don't really think this is something that can be cataloged in a
> >neat list to be committed to memory; I think rather it's a matter of
> >reading lots and lots more of Greek texts and attaining an intimate sort of
> >familiarity with the substance of the larger text.

I would suggest (in defense of the "neat list") that there are only a 
limited number of ways that two clauses/ideas can be linked together, not 
an infinite number.  The list I gave (means, manner, purpose, result, 
reason, condition, concession...to which one could add: time) is, you will 
note, the list of possibilities for circumstantial participles.  The reason 
I'd say that such a list is complete is illustrated by the use of the 
circumstantial ptc, which itself is semantically neutral, but admits just 
these relationships (there are sub-categories to these relationships, eg., 
Means...Reason; Purpose...Result; cf., Beekman/Callow, Translating the Word 
of God, which was picked up by Tom Schreiner in his Interpreting the 
Pauline Epistles; but these I've listed are the main, overarching 
ones.).  Thus I would argue that simply adapting such a list to ALL 
semantically neutral structural markers is valid.  I'm also not convinced 
that one has to have been a reader of Greek for many many years to be able 
to figure these things out, since the list is finite, and the ideas on both 
sides of the marker are there for all to see, whether neophyte or 
old-timer.  I'll grant that old-timers, because of their larger experience 
with both the Bible and with Greek, are more likely to quickly understand 
the ideas than are the neophytes; it seems to me that neophytes can still 
figure out such things, if they are willing to do the work.



>I remember still when I first realized that Latin "cum" and "quod" clauses
>variously translated "since," "when," "although," "because" actually were
>introduced by a particle that means no more than "it being the case that
>.."; the same is true with the so-called "subjective" and "objective"
>genitive: they are not semantic categories in Greek at all: the
>speaker/writer uses them as syntactic links; even if he IMPLIES a more
>precise meaning, that precise meaning is not at all EXPLICIT in the
>syntactic link itself; it's something that one has to surmise from the
>broader context--and making that surmise is always somewhat subjective.

That is my point exactly.  But I would argue that since everything admits 
more than one possibility in both grammar and lexicography, the interpreter 
must analyze all the possibilities of the data involved and see how the 
pieces most reasonably fit together...I wouldn't call that subjective, 
since that makes it sound like its totally up to the interpreter to impose 
any meaning he chooses on a text.  Objective versus Subjective genitive 
choices, for example, are based on the lexical and contextually conditioned 
possibilities of the words/phrases connected by the genitive case 
form.   The choice between the two is something we all do every time we 
read or hear English (if that's your native language); we are constantly 
making choices between the valid and sharable possibilities for each verbal 
icon.  We make those choices based on the limited lexical and grammatical 
options we share with other native speakers and the clues the 
speaker/writer has embedded in the context of the utterance.  Again, I 
wouldn't call that subjective; its just the way language works...its 
probabilistic, in my mind, not subjective.

Its just that NT interpretation has not normally dealt with, recognized, 
cataloged, etc., the use of these various semantically neutral 
connections...ie., you won't find them in any grammar book (well, you will 
find asyndeton, Semitic KAI, some others occasionally), but that doesn't 
mean that writers are not using them in the same way as circumstantial 
ptcs., ie., to advance the development of the argument.  It has been my 
observation that semantically neutral connections are used in one of two 
ways:  1) to make a connection VERY forceful (eg., Eph 4:1-3 with vv. 4-6) 
or 2) to continue a developing argument in a minor way (ie., the major 
subject and complement have already been explicitly laid out with 
grammatically and semantically obvious structural markers, eg., 
conjunctions), frequently as a means of transitioning from one complete 
idea to the next complete idea by means of a gradual change of subject matter.

  Blessings...


**************************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Asst. Prof., Biblical Languages/Bible  Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street                       Portland, OR  97220
V: 503-251-6416    F:503-251-6478     E: dalemw at multnomah.edu
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