[B-Greek] EINAI TON CRISTON IHSOUN, Act 18:5
Webb Mealy
webb at selftest.net
Mon Nov 12 20:51:29 EST 2007
EINAI TON CRISTON IHSOUN, Act 18:5
NRSV bucks the trend among translations in taking CRISTOS as the subject and
IHSOUS as the predicate nominative here in relation to the infinitive EINAI:
".testifying to the Jews that the Messiah was Jesus". It occurs to me that
that makes excellent sense conceptually. But it also raises the question of
its plausibility in grammatical terms alone. Would it have been phrased any
differently if the author had wished IHSOUS, the more definite of the two
nouns, to be understood as the subject, and CRISTOS to be understood as the
predicate nominative? After all, in general the more definite noun kind of
gets first refusal in terms of being considered subject. Or is the phrase
utterly ambiguous?
Webb Mealy
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