[B-Greek] him which is, and which was, and which is to come

Webb webb at selftest.net
Mon Nov 21 14:06:00 EST 2005


Dear Carl,

You said,
APO hO WN...comparable to writing in English: "You have in your hands a
letter from I.

I reply, 

Might it be more comparable to saying, "Greetings from He Who Is"? 

I think it's a fair bit more jarring in Greek, but it's still the same idea.
I'm guessing that John had been around so many other people for whom Greek
was a second language, that his sense of what was possible to say without
sounding flat out erroneous was relatively broad. And I'm hoping that the
formulation "from the is, the was", etc. conveys both the level of
grammatical impropriety and the sense of poetic license that justifies it.

Webb Mealy

-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Carl W. Conrad
Sent: Monday, November 21, 2005 10:23 AM
To: B-Greek B-Greek
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] him which is, and which was, and which is to come

On Nov 21, 2005, at 12:40 PM, Harold R. Holmyard III wrote:


>> Well, I, for one, am going to translate it as "from the is, the  
>> was, and the
>> coming one", and I won't be doing it because I don't know English.
>>
>
> HH: As far as I know there is no reason to translate the first term
> as "the is," since it can be translated "the One who is." This seems
> like needless solecism. It is the second term that is a solecism, but
> the Greek is evidently to be understood as "the One who was," in
> parallel to the first term.
>

I would agree that the real solecism here is hO HN.  As for:

On Nov 21, 2005, at 12:34 PM, Webb wrote:

> Well, I, for one, am going to translate it as "from the is, the  
> was, and the
> coming one", and I won't be doing it because I don't know English.  
> In other
> words, I resist the idea that it's a solecism, if that implies (as  
> it does
> to me) that John didn't know the rules of grammar well enough to  
> know it was
> incorrect. I agree that it is John's way of casting the  
> tetragrammaton into
> Greek--and the tetragrammaton isn't exactly grammatical in Hebrew  
> either! :)
>

I would still call APO hO WN a solecism; even if hO WN is perfectly  
normal Greek, APO hO WN is, as I said earlier, intelligible but not  
grammatical Greek. I suggested that it was rather comparable to  
writing in English: "You have in your hands a letter from I." While  
"It's me" has become standard spoken idiom in American English and  
the now archaic "It is I" will earn the speaker jeers, catcalls or  
skewed glances, we still can't say "a letter from I" even if it is  
perfectly intelligible.

Now the question is whether the author of Revelation consciously and  
deliberately violated rules of Greek grammar that he well understood  
when he wrote APO hO WN KAI hO HN KAI hO ERCOMENOS. I do think that  
he wrote this phrase deliberately in this manner; I think he probably  
was aware that it wasn't grammatically "approved." But it is  
intellgible and forceful in its rhetorical expression. Actually the  
usage of ERCOMENOS as a FUTURE participle is questionable too as  
Greek idiom, but I would guess this is governed by the expression in  
OT eschatological texts using Hebrew HaBBa or the like.

The nearest thing I'm aware of in extra-Biblical Greek literature  
that is like this is from Hesiod's Theogony 36-38 where the Muses are  
invoked:

	... MOUSAWN ARCWMEQA, TAI DII PATRI
	hUMNEUSAI TERPOUSI MEGAN NOON ENTOS OLUMPOU,
	EIROUSAI TA T' EONTA TA T' ESSOMENA PRO T' EONTA.

	"Let us take our start from the Muses, who singing to Zeus the
father
	give pleasure to his mighty insight within Olympus,
	singing the things that are and the things that will be
	and those that were before."

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/

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