[B-Greek] Basic Dictionary Work in John 1

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 27 23:42:06 EDT 2008


Jon,
   
  May God bless you in your efforts and we will pray for your
  safety.  As far as PROS TON THEON in 1:2 goes, I am sure
  that there are all sorts of deep theological significance here but
  I remember very well when I first read Acts 5:10 and noticed
  where Sapphira is buried "with her husband" you have the
  same use of PROS with the accusative in a very
  non-theological context.  I remember thinking, maybe 
  "with God" means "with God."  As Freud said, sometimes
  a banana is just a banana.  But keep on asking these
  questions.
   
  Mark Lightman 
   

Jonathan Bailey <baileyjn at hotmail.com> wrote:
  Dear List,

I am here in Iraq and have a friend who has just recently completed his first year of Greek at an Orthodox seminary. I'm Protestant and going to Liberty Baptist Seminary through distance learning. I've been teaching myself Greek since 1996 but there has been much learning, forgetting, and relearning going on. I guess I'd call myself intermediate. Anyway, we have never really done any serious Greek exegesis other than what we have read in commentaries. Anyway, we we have decided to slowly read through John together. Our last assignment was John 1:1-4 (we are just starting).

I have Wallace here, but not BAGD. I am basically using a GNT on my pocket PC and have very limited resources. I was thinking of basically using the list to ask some very basic questions that I could probably answer myself if I had more tools, thinking maybe the list would have someone who was excited about some of the theological ramifications of the Greek that we are going to run across. So I am going to write this mail to the list and see if there are any bites.

The most interesting thing about John 1:1-4 is the prepositions. Unfortunately, Wallace pretty much assumes you have BAGD in front of you and only gives short definitions followed by in-depth commentary on texts using the prepositions. So I though I would see what people on the list could add to our understanding.

Truly the most striking feature of our text is the use of PROS in 1:2 instead of META, PARA, or another preposition translated as 'with'. Also, I generally find EN is often used in connection with means, but you have DIA in 1:3, which tends to have a more spacial dimension in a lot of cases. Is there anything unusual about the use of prepositions here? Of course these verses are of crucial importance to any given number of christological and trinitarian discussions. I was wondering if there has been a lot of theological significance attached to the use of prepositions here.

Also, keep in mind that I do not have Bibleworks here so have not done any real word studies of usages to confirm or deny my general understanding. So basically I was just wondering if anyone was interesting in helping us out until we can get more of our own resources. I'd love to hear what anyone has to say about the use of the prepositions mentioned above as they stand in our text.

Regards,

Jon
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