[B-Greek] Heb. 10:22 -- Perf. Pass. Ptcs & Accusatives

CWestf5155 at aol.com CWestf5155 at aol.com
Tue May 18 23:43:49 EDT 2004


In a message dated 5/18/2004 3:43:59 PM Mountain Standard Time, 
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il writes:
Westfall egrapse
>If baptism is being treated as a counterpart to the Levitic 
>washing, that reinforces taking this as passive--it is done to the
believer.

An interesting analogy, yet Jewish baptisms were all 'middle', even if
sometimes assumed to have passive terminology. That is, a person 'got
immersed', immersed themselves with an authority as a witness. Culturally,
such middle understandings make good sense, and even have a couple of echos
in NT morphology, like 1Cor 10:2 p46, B kai oligoi: EBAPTISANTO. 
Whether this works for Heb 10 I reserve judgement, but at least the analogy
has strong self-administering/submitting proto-types.
Greetings Randall!

Thanks.  I 'm not sure about the baptism association, but this is a helpful 
correction to my remarks about a possible association.  

I suggest that the Levitic washing is activated primarily.  I'm sure the 
Levitic washing could also be depicted in such a way so as to stress the priest's 
participation, but that's not what has been expanded in the context here.

Cindy Westfall
Adjunct Faculty Denver Seminary



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