[B-Greek] Titus 2:11

Iver Larsen iver_larsen at sil.org
Sat Aug 18 13:22:52 EDT 2007


Dear Father James,

Now I have a question for you (and for Carl).

If we look at the alternative reading which includes the article:

EPEFANH GAR hH CARIS TOU QEOU hH SWTHRIOS PASIN ANQRWPOIS

Would you say that the second article could function as a relative pronoun? 
I have come across this usage of the article several times in Greek, and it 
doesn't seem to be clearly recognized or described in the grammars. I did 
talk about this way back in a post from Jan 23, 2001, entitled 
predicative/attributive - position and function.

This would suggest the sense:

> 'The grace of God shone forth, (the grace) which (is) salutary for all 
> human beings.'

In this case SWTHRIOS is a predicate within its own relative clause that as 
a whole modifies (is attributive to?) the head noun CARIS. (I am familiar 
with a language - unrelated to Greek - which does not have attributive 
adjectives at all, but all adjectives are predicates in relative clauses, so 
that one would always say "the boy who (is) big", and never "the big boy". 
The verb "to be" is implied, but never stated in this construction.)

With this analysis the adjective functions as a predicate whether the second 
article is present or not, but the text with the article functioning as a 
relative marker makes the most sense to me.

Iver Larsen 




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