[B-Greek] 1 Jn.5:18 AUTON vs. hEAUTON
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun May 2 06:28:16 EDT 2004
At 3:09 PM -0400 5/1/04, Tony Costa wrote:
>Dear Friends, I was wondering about 1 Jn.5:18, the phrase, hO GENNHQEIS EK
>TOU QEOU THREI AUTON. The hO GENNHQEIS is admitted as a reference to
>Christ, although this is used of Christian believers as well in Johanine
>writings. Jn.1:12-13 was held by some early Christian writers as a
>reference to Christ being "born of God".
>This seems to be the only place in the NT where Christ is designated as
>such. I was wondering what would have led to the variant reading of using
>the reflexive pronoun hEAUTON in other MSS (one of which is Codex
>Siniaticus!) instead of AUTON (but Codex Vaticanus has AUTON) in 1
>Jn.5:18. Was it due to theological considerations regarding the idea of
>being born of God as an designation of Christian believers and not one
>descriptive of Christ? I was just wondering what would have led to the
>variant readings here between AUTON and hEAUTON in this passage. Many
>thanks.
The fuller text: OIDAMEN hOTI PAS hO GEGENNHMENOS EK TOU QEOU OUC
hAMARTANEI, ALL' hO GENNHQEIS EK TOU QEOU THREI AUTON KAI hO PONHROS OUC
hAPTETAI AUTOU.
Tony, there are useful notes on this in Metzger's Textual Commentary on the
GNT and in the NET on the construction of the text in the passage in
question. I don't think it is theological considerations in play in these
variants but rather that it's a matter of completing the construction
properly in accordance with how one understands the meaning of the subject
of THREI hO GENNHQEIS EK TOU QEOU: if one understands that subject phrase
to refer to Christ, then AUTON will have as its antecedent the PAS hO
GEGENNHMENOS EK TOU QEOU from the first clause in the hOTI construction; if
one understands that subject phrase to refer to the believer, then hEAUTON
is more appropriate to indicate that "the believer (as on who has been born
of God) protects HIMSELF." That is quite sufficient, I think, to explain
the variants AUTON and hEAUTON. The editors of NA27/UBS4 believe(d) that
AUTON was more likely the original reading and that hEAUTON was intended as
an emendation to make the grammatical construction clear. The real
difficulty of the verse, of course, is the apparent usage of two subject
phrases in the same sentence that are so very similar and yet apparently
refer, the first (hO GEGENHMENOS EK TOU QEOU) to the believer, the second
(hO GENNHQEIS EK TOU QEOU) to Christ. The "inelegance" (if I may call it
so) of the phrasing of this verse evidently occasioned copyists to attempt
to overcome the nigh-intolerable ambiguity of the phrase with the aorist
passive substantive participle indicating a differrent person from that
indicated by the perfect passive substantive participle. There's another
textual variant hH GENNHSIS EK TOU QEOU for that aorist passive substantive
participle which is evidently yet another attempt to untie the knots of
this riddling sentence. As the NET note expresses what I've called an
"inelegance," "Again the author's capacity for making obscure statements
results in several possible meanings for this phrase ..."
--
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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