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

Harold R. Holmyard III hholmyard at ont.com
Tue Nov 22 07:52:36 EST 2005


Dear Dan,

>Here is what Wallace says re Rev 1:4
>
>D. B. Wallace, Exegetical Syntax, 63, argues: "Either of these is doubtful
>here because (1) such a flagrant misunderstanding of the rudiments of Greek
>would almost surely mean that the author could not compose in Greek, yet the
>Apocalypse itself argues against this; (2) nowhere else does the Seer John
>use a nominative immediately after a preposition (in fact, he uses "from" 32
>times with the genetive immediately following)." The passage appears to be
>an allusion to Exodus 3:14 (in the LXX) where God refers to himself as "he
>who is," the same wording in Greek as here in Rev 1:4. Thus, it appears that
>John is wanting to leave the divine name untouched (perhaps to allude to
>God's immutability, or as a pointer to the Old Testament as the key to
>unlocking the meaning of this book), irrespective of what it "looks" like
>grammatically. The translation has placed the "he who is" in quotation marks
>to indicate to the reader that the syntactical awkwardness is intentional.
>For further comments see D. B. Wallace, Exegetical Syntax, 63

HH: That is pretty interesting, because if John was looking at the 
words in the LXX as a proper name, then you can see why he might 
hesitate to change the grammar. Perhaps he was thinking of the case 
ending as part of the name and so to be left as revealed to Moses 
(according to the Greek transcription).

				Yours,
				Harold Holmyard




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