[B-Greek] EINAI TON CRISTON IHSOUN, Act 18:5
Elizabeth Kline
kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Tue Nov 13 00:16:55 EST 2007
On Nov 12, 2007, at 5:51 PM, Webb Mealy wrote:
> 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?
The NRSV isn't alone see F.F. Bruce Acts 1988:348, Barrett ICC
1998:866 and Parsons-Culy 2003:345.
The NRSV and FFBruce are translations and since this isn't a
translation forum (doens't Wayne from SIL have several translation
forums?) -- you cannot read greek grammar from a modern english
translation unless the translator provides notes telling you why a
certain decision was made. Anything short of that is just guess work.
Barrett (articular CRISTON) and Parsons-Culy (proximity to the
infintive) are probably wrong, see Wallace p194. Arguments based on
word order and proximity have been demosrated to be unreliable.
Elizabeth Kline
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