[B-Greek] love: or love,
Harold Holmyard
hholmyard3 at earthlink.net
Wed Apr 11 12:42:40 EDT 2007
Scott Wells wrote:
> Forgive me for belaboring the point; I want to ensure I understand correctly
> how you are approaching this text. Paul's usage in Gal 3:16 (a deliberate &
> conspicuous plural usage for a normally collective singular noun)
> establishes a paradigm whereby all plural usages of normally collective
> singular nouns should be understood. Does that statement accurately
> represent your understanding of Paul's usage? If that is the case, is this
> something that is more readily applicable to Pauline texts (in contrast to,
> e.g., the plural usage in Matthew 7:16-20, Luke 3:8, James 3:17? Thanks for
> your insights.
>
HH: That seems to be the opposite of what I said. Paul very obviously
made a wordplay with "seed" in Gal 3:16, but he does nothing like that
in Gal 5:22-23, so we should not assume such a wordplay.
You mention three passages with five verses where you see the plural
"fruits," but even one of those verses uses the collective singular
(Matt 7:19). The fact is that the collective singular for KARPOS is a
well-established usage. The word occurs 67 times in the NT, and 51 of
those times it is singular, almost always, if not always, with a
collective sense. So the collective singular for KARPOS is by far the
most common use of the word. The collective singular for SPERMATOS is
also the standard, established usage, although the word can take a plural.
Yours,
Harold Holmyard
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