[B-Greek] MONOGENES John 1:18

dhindley at compuserve.com dhindley at compuserve.com
Fri Aug 25 06:19:35 EDT 2006


 

I haven't looked into this personally, but perhaps one could look at the grammatical peculiarities of the Greek text of Josephus'
_Antiquities of the Jews_ where Monogenes and variants are used, to see if the nominative is used instead of the accusative for the
object of a sentence, or some other use that might explain the function of QEOS in the nominative:

Antiquities of the Jews 2:181  [...] Dan had an only begotten son, Hushim. 

Antiquities of the Jews 1:222  222 Now Abraham greatly loved Isaac, as being his only begotten, and given to him in his old age, by
the favour of God. The child also endeared himself to his parents still more, by the exercise of every virtue, and adhering to his
duty to his parents, and being zealous in the worship of God. 

Antiquities of the Jews 5:264  264 But as he came back, he fell into a calamity no way correspondent to the great actions he had
done; for it was his daughter that came to meet him; she was also an only child and a virgin: upon this Jephthah heavily lamented
the greatness of his affliction, and blamed his daughter for being so forward in meeting him, for he had vowed to sacrifice her to
God.

But the most interesting one is this instance, where monogenh is used of the younger of a king's multiple sons (nothing like
destroying everyone's carefully crafted exegesis to make one's day, eh?):

Antiquities of the Jews 20:18-20  18 Monobazus, the king of Adiabene, who had also the name of Bazeus, fell in love with his sister
Helena, and took her to be his wife, and begat her with child. [... 19 ...] and when his son was born, he called him Izates.  20 He
had indeed Monobazus, his older brother, by Helena also, as he had other sons by other wives besides. Yet did he openly place all
his affections on this his only begotten son Izates ...

Respectfully,

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio USA



 




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