[B-Greek] Acts 1:16

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Feb 26 15:47:51 EST 2006


This appears to be more a translation question that a question about  
the construction of the Greek, but I'll attempt to get at both.

On Feb 26, 2006, at 3:34 PM, Richard Lindeman wrote:

> Acts 1:16  PERI IOUDA TOU GENOMENOU hODHGOU TOIS SULLABOUSIN IHSOUN
>
> "Concerning Judas who became a guide to those who arrested Jesus"

If it's not yet clear, I would note that the phrase TOU GENOMENOU ...  
IHSOUN is attributive or adjectival to IOUDA; one might even want to  
call it appositional because it functions, as you're Englishing it,  
in much the same way as a relative clause.

> Is this a case where
>
> The definite article TOU is to be translated as the pronoun "who".
>
> and the participle GENOMENOU should be translated as a simple verb  
> "became"

My guess is that GENOMENOU here functions simply as the aorist of  
EIMI, which itself has no aorist. So, using your manner of  
Englishing, I'd make it "who WAS a guide ... " or "who served as a  
guide ..."

> and the noun hODHGOU should be translated as a simple anarthous  
> noun "a
> guide"

Simple anarthrous noun it may be, but grammatically it's predicate  
word with GENOMENOU.

> Or. Is this a case where TOU GENOMENOU hODHGOU should be taken  
> together as
> an attributive expression "concerning Judas, the one having become  
> a guide"
>
> Or. does it really make any difference?

"concerning Judas, who was a guide to those who arrested Jesus ..."  
will be more idiomatic than "concerning Judas the one having been a  
guide to the ones arresting Jesus," which second version is  
intelligible but not really acceptable English.

What bothered me particularly about the phrasing of this question is  
that it seems to be confounding the questions of how the construction  
should be understood and how it should be Englished -- and these are  
two very different matters.

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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