[B-Greek] Adjectival and Adverbial Prepositional Phrases

Steven Lo Vullo themelios at charter.net
Sun May 15 23:57:47 EDT 2005


On May 13, 2005, at 4:15 PM, Carl Conrad wrote:

> Nor do I think I've ever seen a prepositional phrase modifying an 
> accusative pronoun.

Carl, I was strongly inclined to agree with you until I did a limited 
search of META with genitive. Now I'm not so sure. Of particular 
interest was 1 Cor 16.11 and 12, where we may see META with genitive 
construed in one case with the verb and in the other with a pronoun. 
First check out the hINA clause in v. 12:

hINA ELQHi PROS hUMAS META TWN ADELFWN

It seems pretty clear to me that the prepositional phrase here must be 
construed with the verb. The act of coming is performed with the 
brothers. The plural hUMAS would already cover the brothers on the 
other end. "You people with the brothers" does not make good sense, 
since the plural "you" would already consist of "the brothers."

But look at the last clause of v. 11:

EKDECOMAI GAR AUTON META TWN ADELFWN

Of course, it is possible that what Paul is saying is that he along 
with the brothers are awaiting Timothy. But this seems ambiguous. It 
seems as though he may be saying that he is awaiting the arrival of 
Timothy and some others. If this is so, the prepositional phrase must 
construe with the pronoun. My question is this: Even if Paul did not 
mean the latter in this particular case, how would he have expressed 
this idea otherwise in a context in which he DID mean this?

One idea I had is that this may be an ellipsis, with ELQEIN understood 
and the prepositional phrase construing with ELQEIN. Then the idea 
would be, "I am waiting for him to come with the brothers." But is 
EKDECOMAI AUTON ELQEIN authentic Greek?
============

Steven Lo Vullo
Madison, WI
MAR student
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School




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