[B-Greek] Matt. 28:19

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Jan 17 07:19:13 EST 2005


At 11:53 AM +0000 1/17/05, Andrew Rowell wrote:
>Andrew (Birch),
>
>You said:
>
>"Regarding Matt. 28:19, a fairly literal translation would be:
>"Going, then, disciple all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the
>Father..."
>Surely the word "them" is masculine for the simple reason that you can't
>actually baptize nations - only people! If we expand MAQHTEUSATE to mean
>"make disciples of", then AUTOUS could naturally refer to the the people of
>"all the nations" who are willing to become disciples."
>
>If this is true then...
>Can we generalise this into a principle?
>
>The first imperative verb focuses on the whole human race divided into its
>different groups.
>The second and third dependent verbs use the masculine gender as an implicit
>acknowledgement that there will not be a 100% success rate.
>Can we say that Jesus clearly intended us to understand that from the use of
>the masculine gender?

A couple observations here:

(1) This is a question that perhaps cannot be answered in terms of the
Greek text itself: I'm not so sure that EQNH (note that our standard
transliteration scheme uses Q for Theta) doesn't have its standard
Bib-Greek sense of "Gentiles" here. It may be that this is a commandment to
make the Gentiles part of the "New Israel" that has accepted Jesus as
Messiah and Lawgiver.

(2) I don't think the shift to AUTOUS, the masculine plural pronoun, bears
any relation to expectations of success or failure; I think it's simply a
matter of CONSTRUCTIO AD SENSUM, inasmuch as "discipling" involves
individual persons, turning them individually into MAQHTAS, rather than
turning an EQNOS into a MAQHTHS.

>Is the sense "make disciples out of" (in the sense of some will be willing
>and some will not) implicit in the greek of the verse
>
>(I am not sure if I am using the correct terminology here....)
>So ...whereever there is a change of gender for the object pronoun of a
>dependent verb it signifies something different about the subject of the
>dependent verbs as opposed to the antecedent verbs subject...???
>Do you understand what I am asking?

I don't think you can lay down general principles here; I think you have to
examine each instance of a gender shift when you come to it; suffice it to
say that there are some (but not all that many) shifts in gender, and that
it's not usually difficult to figure out why that has taken place.
-- 

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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