[B-Greek] Diakonon in Romans 16:1
Stephen C Atnip
stevea3 at juno.com
Thu May 11 18:22:39 EDT 2006
I was wondering if someone could explain to me the progression of the
addition of the female article to the lexical form of diakonos and
anthropos. I notice in Davis Greek Grammar that the Lexical form of
these two nouns contain only the masculine omicron as the accompanying
article in the New Testament. In Thayer's translation and revision, and
Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek, I notice that anthropos retains only
the masculine omicron as the article, but both Thayer and Mounce add the
feminine article eta to the word diakonos. The Analytical Greek Lexicon
by Zondervan Press, Arndt and Gingrich, and Friberg's annotated Greek
text (BibleWorks Hermeneutika ed. 3.5), all add the feminine article eta
to the lexical forms of both anthropos and diakonos.
The reason that this puzzles me has nothing whatsoever to do with whether
feminine gender individuals can be included under the meaning of
anthropos and diakonos; rather after studying the 29 various inflexions
of diakonos and the 550 various inflexions of the word anthropos in the
NT with accompanying articles, I could not find a single feminine article
ever modifying either of these two words, unless twn anthropwn is to be
arbitrarily assigned a feminine inflexion (it is possible that I have
overlooked something, and ask for help). While I found the inflected
form diakonon declined as feminine only one time (Romans 16:1) in the
Friberg annotated text (per Bibleworks Hermeneutika) , and that without
the masculine or feminine article, I could not find even a single
instance of any inflection of the stem anthropo ever given as feminine.
This is highly puzzling to me.
Are Friberg et. al. trying to tell me that these words contain people of
both genders in the word? If so, that is already in the definition of
the word. Why attack the integrity of the inflected forms and their
modifying articles? Either diakono and/or anthropo are 2nd declension
stems found to be modified only by second declension masculine articles,
or else produce a case of a 1st declension article modifying either of
these two words in the NT. If there are cases outside the NT, while this
may be beneficial to a further study of the word in Koine Greek, it seems
to me to belong to a another type of lexicon that addresses the full set
of words used during the time of the NT Greek that might shed further
light on the subject. But let the inflections stand with their actual
articles in the subset of NT words. While I am not even sure that there
is such a pairing of 1st declension articles with these two second
declension words (diakono and anthropo) outside the NT, it would
certainly be helpful to know that such did indeed exist, so that the
authors are not just pulling something out of the air for whatever
reason. And finally, if such article pairing could be found, two
questions immediately arise for Romans 16:1. First, since there is no
article there at all, why did Friberg and Zondervan see fit to give the
inflection a feminine gender in their works? Second, if this is indeed
an aberration from the normal usage, and to be found in no other place in
the NT, are we to assume that Phoebe's diaconate is also an aberration
from all the other places and usages found in the NT?
A final note is in order. I am well aware that there are 2nd declension
words requiring 1st declension inflected articles and vice versa. But
this appears never to be the case in the NT with the two words under
consideration.
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