[B-Greek] EINAI TON CRISTON IHSOUN, Act 18:5
Elizabeth Kline
kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Tue Nov 13 00:29:36 EST 2007
That post was sent before it was edited. Too many errors.
The main point I was trying to make is that the process of
transforming a greek construction into idiomatic english often
obscures the greek syntax even when formal correspondence is the
intention of the translation team. "The messiah was Jesus" doesn't
have the same impact as "Jesus was the Messiah" in english. This is a
question about english not about greek.
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 (doesn'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
infinitive) are probably wrong, see Wallace p194. Arguments based on
word order and proximity have been demonstrated to be unreliable.
Elizabeth Kline
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