[B-Greek] 2 Cor. 1:9 Death sentence currently in place?
Carlton Winbery
winberycl at earthlink.net
Thu Jan 4 22:10:41 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?
ESCHKAMEN is perf. active indicative. The two translations above seem
to see it as perfect and thus denoting an existing state, "we have."
Obviously the coming into being of the sentence of death is past but
the emphasis in Paul's sentence is on the existing situation.
The basic stem of ECW in the third and fourth principal parts is SC.
The augment is simple E when the stem begins with a double consonant.
The H before KA is epenthetic (for ease of pronunciation). Hence this
is the perfect tense and I think properly translated in the above
translations.
>
>
>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".
This does not look to me to match the meaning of the Greek,
especially the purpose clause with the subjunctive WMEN preceded by
hINA.
Carlton Winbery
--
Carlton L. Winbery
Retired Professor of Religion
Louisiana College
318-448-6103
winberycl at earthlink.net
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