[B-Greek] RE: Masculine pronouns referring to both men and women
George F Somsel
gfsomsel at juno.com
Fri Dec 17 23:48:39 EST 2004
On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 12:16:49 +0900 (KST) <moon at sogang.ac.kr> writes:
>
> > I recently read some articles on 1 Cor 14:26- 40. Those
> articles claim that the masculine expressions in v. 26 - 33, e.g.
> (1) hEKASTOS, hEIS, hEAUTWi, PROFHTAI, ALLWi, DIERMHNEUTHS indicate
that this passage talks about only men.
(2) hUMAS MONOUS in 14:36 also indicate that the referent of this
expression is men only, because MONOUS is masculine.
>
> [George wrote]
>
> Moon,
>
> I'm surprised that Ann Nyland hasn't responded to you as yet since this
is a subject very near and dear to her heart. It is correct that the use
of a masculine form does not exclude women. To bring up an old chestnut
I refer you to Rom 16, but I'm not going to reference the question of
IOUNIA (or IOULIA) / IOUNIAS. In 16.3, 4 we read
>
> 3 ASPASASQE PRISKAN KAI AKULAN TOIS SUNERGOUS MOU EN XRISTOU IHSOU
> 4 hOITINES, hUPER THS YUXHS MOU hUPEUHKAN . . .
>
> While TIS, TI has a common M/F form, OSTIS does not. [See: Jdg 21.14;
Mt 25.1, 27.55; Lk 8.3, 23.55; Philip 4.3; 1 Tm 1.4, 6.9; Heb 10.8, 11; 1
Pt 2.11] Note that the masculine is used here for this husband & wife
team.
>
> [MOON writes]
>
> So, you seem to say that the example sentences using TIS is
ambiguous with respect to our problem, because we can say that TIS is a
common gender pronoun, which Ward Power calls "personal pronoun". But the
example sentences using hOITINES, hAITINES, hATINA are good for our
purpose. Rom 16:3,4 use the masculine pronoun hOITINES, which refers to
both a man and a woman. (All the other examples you cited use hAITINES.)
>
> This is a good example, but could you give other examples?
>
> In this case, the referent of hOITINES is the husband and the wife.
> There might be some people who would argue that the husband and the
wife is a one unit represented by the husband, and it would be the best
to use the masculine pronoun to refer to them under the condition that
there is no common gender pronoun.
>
> Moon Jung
> Sogang Univ, Seoul, Korea
__________
Moon,
You really must get a better e-mail program. I had to edit your post on
two occasions now to eliminate all of the white space it introduces. Or
perhaps you have it set to send HTML when you should have it set for
plain text.
Yes, my other examples were nom f pl of hOSTIS -- quite deliberately in
order to show that they actually exist. And no, it is not the case that
there MAY be some who maintain that the husband and wife are one unit
represented by the husband -- there definitely ARE such, viz. Wayne
Grudem and Vern Poythress of the Council on Biblical Manhood and
Womanhood (this may not be exact). From what I've heard from him I would
say that he has a basic failure to correctly understand Greek. If you
want a 200,0000 word essay on the subject, just ask Ann. :-) Hi, Annie.
Ahem! That's Dr. Ann Nyland. Let's show some respect. She's really
good, but I think she has a bit of a mania on this subject (and I might
say understandably so).
As regards other examples, I'll need to give that some study. Perhaps in
a day or two -- or three (who's counting anyway?).
george
gfsomsel
___________
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list