[B-Greek] 2 Cor. 1:9 Death sentence currently in place?
Webb
webb at selftest.net
Thu Jan 4 16:23:00 EST 2007
2 Cor. 1:9
ALLA AUTOI EN hEAUTOIS TO APOKRIMA TOU QANATOU ESCHKAMEN hINA MH PEPOIQOTES
WMEN EF hEAUTOIS ALL EPI TWi QEWi TWi EGEIRONTI TOUS NEKROUS
But we have a death sentence inside ourselves so that we won't have
confidence in ourselves but in God, who raises the dead.
Or, more naturally rendered:
But if we have a death sentence inside ourselves, it's so that we won't have
confidence in ourselves but in God, who raises the dead.
The translations I've looked at treat ESCHKAMEN as pluperfect in force,
locating the sense of a death sentence in the past, during the time of the
severe trouble Paul refers to in v. 8. But I'm not so sure. Perhaps Paul
sees the sword of Damocles as continuously hanging over his head, which
would match what I have come to understand about the force of the perfect,
and would match Paul's statement that God rescued and continues to rescue us
(or, following different mss, will rescue us), v. 10. Or does ECW follow a
non-standard pattern in the perfect?
Interestingly, Lattimore takes a different approach: "For all we could do,
we would have got the death sentence; so that our trust had to be not in
ourselves but in God, who raises the dead".
Webb Mealy
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