[B-Greek] John 1:1 & Sharp's rule?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Oct 7 05:46:45 EDT 2004
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Forwarded for: "Alexander Loney" <alexander.loney at duke.edu>
To: <b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: RE: [B-Greek] John 1:1 & Sharp's rule?
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 01:45:14 -0400
It seems to me that Sharp's rule doesn't apply here because PROS TON QEON
KAI QEOS (as you quote it) is not a copula. There are two separate copulae:
KAI hO LOGOS HN PROS TON QEON and KAI QEOS HN hO LOGOS. The KAIs do not
indicate additional modifiers to QEON, rather they setup three distinct
copulative sentences.
As far as Colwell's rule here, I don't quite see your problem with taking
that as a good explanation for why QEOS lacks the definite article. A
simple way of thinking about this is that in a copulative sentence, the
noun with the definite article is marked as subject. (Though you can have
the predicate with an article when it comes after the verb, which is
different from this example. In that case, I think,--here I am not 100%
positive--the noun occurring first is your subject.)
This is all related to the fact that the normal, unmarked, word order of
the simple sentence in Greek has the subject first. Thus, in this final
clause of verse 1 QEOS is marked by position (the so-called predicate
position). Perhaps we might say in this way it emphasizes the
"definiteness" of QEOS more than an article would have, since including an
article would have required normal, (attributive) position. Plus, John
couldn't have kept up his chiastic structure that way. The verse has: ...hO
LOGOS KAI hO LOGOS... and then... TON QEON KAI QEOS. Hence John also had
this chiasmus in mind as a stylistic concern.
Hope that sounds reasonable and useful. I am afraid I don't quite
understand your issue with Colwell's rule here.
-------------------------------------------------------
Alexander Loney
Duke University
Classical Studies
now the ears of my ears are awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened
- e e cummings
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