[B-Greek] Gal 2.4: ellipsis or anacoluthon?
Steven Lo Vullo
themelios at charter.net
Sun Nov 28 19:37:56 EST 2004
On Nov 28, 2004, at 5:53 PM, Steven Lo Vullo wrote:
> On Nov 28, 2004, at 3:49 PM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>>> 3 ALL' OUDE TITOS hO SUN EMOI, hELLHN WN, HNAGKASQH PERITMHQHNAI; 4
>>> DIA
>>> DE TOUS PAREISAKTOUS YEUDADELFOUS, hOITINES PAREISHLQON KATASKOPHSAI
>>> THN ELEUQERIAN hHMWN hHN ECOMEN EN CRISTWi IHSOU, hINA hHMAS
>>> KATADOULWSOUSIN, 5 hOIS OUDE PROS hWRAN EIXAMEN THi hUPOTAGHi, hINA
>>> hH
>>> ALHQEIA TOU EUAGGELIOU DIAMEINHi PROS hUMAS.
>>
>
>> FWIW, I think it's an anacoluthon. I rather doubt even that the NET
>> understood this as an ellipsis; I think rather that they inserted
>> phrasing
>> to indicate what they think that Paul surely meant--and that seems to
>> me
>> what the "translator's note" actually means: "No subject and verb are
>> expressed in vv. 4-5, but the phrase "Now this matter arose," implied
>> from
>> v. 3, was supplied to make a complete English sentence." And I would
>> agree
>> with that, i.e. I think that this is what Paul as writer/dictator of
>> the
>> letter intended to say, but I think that Galatians is a later written
>> in a
>> white heat of passion (that's an exaggeration, I guess) and leaving an
>> awful lot, especially in chapter 2, to be read between the lines as
>> something that writer and auditors among the Galatians readily
>> understood,
>> although we modern readers can't be quite sure about it. So I don't
>> think
>> it's an ellipsis, which term would seem to imply that this phrasing
>> was
>> DELIBERATELY omitted, rather I think it's an anacoluthon resulting
>> from
>> hasty composition and no proofreading of a dictation that the
>> amanuensis
>> may have had difficulty enough getting down. When I look back at some
>> of
>> the messages I've sent to this list, I sometimes wonder how I could
>> have
>> let that go without doing a better job--or any job--of reading what I
>> wrote
>> before hitting the "send" button.
>
> Thanks, Carl.
>
> On the one hand, I'm not so sure that the translation in the NET Bible
> (and others) doesn't reflect the translator's understanding that the
> Greek is elliptical. It seems to me that the note quoted above could
> easily be taken to indicate just that. On the other hand, your points
> about Paul's state of mind and hasty composition are well taken.
Carl, I think I initially gave short shrift to your point about
deliberate omission. Looking again at the flow of the text, it doesn't
seem like a verb would be deliberately omitted here. In other words, it
doesn't seem like the natural types of ellipsis found throughout the
NT. It seems that Paul originally meant to add a verb at some point
after the opening prepositional phrase, but got lost in the following
chain of relative clauses and never recovered (perhaps because of his
agitated state of mind). This seems similar to what we find only two
verses away in 2.6, where we have an opening prepositional phrase, an
interjection, then a change to a different syntactic construction. Here
It seems that Paul got lost in the interjection but recovered with a
different syntactic construction, a clear example of anacoluthon.
============
Steven Lo Vullo
Madison, WI
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