[B-Greek] EINAI TON CRISTON IHSOUN, Act 18:5
Webb Mealy
webb at selftest.net
Tue Nov 13 13:39:51 EST 2007
Dear Carl,
You wrote:
'My own subjective choice is "that Jesus is the Christ" --
and I guess the criterion I prefer to go with is that the predicate
term is the one marked by the article.'
I reply:
This raises the question, how would it have been phrased differently if the
author had intended to say, "that the Messiah/Christ is Jesus"?
If it is the article that sways it for you in the direction of Jesus being
the subject/topic, I don't see how you can take out the article in front of
CRISTOS to swap the polarity, because then it raises the question, "That
Christ Jesus is what??" (see Acts 24:24 for CRISTOS IHSOUS functioning as a
name or at least with CRISTOS being used as an appellative to IHSOUS).
To my eye, both removing the article from CRISTOS and adding it to IHSOUS
also fails to reverse the polarity:
To me, EINAI CRISTON TON IHSOUN and EINAI TON IHSOUN CRISTON both say,
"Jesus is Messiah". Or do they?
Also, intriguingly, see Acts 3:20, which does seem to assert of the expected
Messiah that that figure is Jesus:
[hO KURIOS] APOSTEILHi TON PROKECEIRISMENON hUMIN CRISTON IHSOUN
I still think the more definite/specific nominal element automatically
stands first in line to be subject (or topic). Which would speak in favor of
Jesus being the subject unless something told us otherwise. So what kind of
counter-weight would be required to overcome that expectation?
I'm absolutely betwixt and between on this.
Webb Mealy
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