[B-Greek] John 6:33, 35
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Mar 24 06:12:49 EST 2005
At 9:46 AM +0100 3/24/05, emmanuel.le4 wrote:
>Hi! I'm going through the bread of life discourse (John 6) at the moment
>and was asking myself a few questions. Which I now ask you. Sorry if these
>have already been asked in the past, just give me the references in the
>archives then.
>
>In v 33: hO ARTOS TOU QEOU what is the Genitive? Does it mean that God is
>the source or origin of the bread (which could fit the context, because
>this bread comes down from heaven)? Or is it a possessive genitive? What
>are the other possibilities?
>
>In v 35: hO ARTOS THS ZWHS. Same question: does the genitive point toward
>production: the bread that produces life? are there any other
>possibilities?
>In that same phrase, what is the significance of the article? Is it used
>to show the uniqueness of that bread (monadic)? Or is it "par excellence"?
Although the grammars like to set out half a dozen subcategories of the
genitive dependent upon a noun, the fact is that there is no distinction
whatsoever in the Greek between these so-called subcategories; the
subcategories are attempts to sort out the kinds of usage that might be
represented in translation. What the noun in the genitive actually does
with regard to the noun it depends upon is the same thing that an adjective
does to a noun: it adds specificity to it: hO ARTOS TOU QEOU = "God-kind
bread" or "God-bread" and hO ARTOS THS ZWHS = "life-type bread" or
"life-bread." The Greek phrases tell you no more than that and a really
LITERAL translation would yield no more clarity than those English
equivalents. That is to say that you have to read the author's intent from
the context alone.
It might be worth while to think through the variety of possible senses to
these phrases: hO ARTOS TOU QEOU might mean "bread that comes from God" or
"bread that belongs to God" or even "bread that IS or CONTAINS God" or
"bread that gives the eater ACCESS TO God." One might do well to consider
ALL these possibilities.
It is the context of the entire bread discourse that will offer whatever
clarity you may gain over the sense of these phrases. One general aspect of
these Johannine discourses of Jesus is that they tend to offer meditations
on the range of meanings of a powerful metaphor. In the present discourse,
I think that the most helpful methodology would be to suppose that the
"bread" in each of these expressions is Jesus himself and that the various
genitives attached to ARTOS are employed to explore the relationship of
Jesus to God and to those to whom the bread is given; I really do not think
that determining which subcategory of adnominal genitive in which any one
of these adnominal genitives may be pigeonholed can assist the
understanding. Moreover, it seems to me that in a Johannine discourse, it
might even be better to think of HOW MANY different senses are suggested by
each of the adnominal genitives: these discourses do not seem intended to
provide the reader/listener with precise information about the "bread" so
much as to invite the reader/listener to MEDITATE upon the depth and
breadth of meanings that "bread" may bear as a cipher for Jesus himself.
--
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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