[B-Greek] Solecisms in the book of Revelation

Dr. Don Wilkins drdwilkins at verizon.net
Mon Aug 18 16:33:38 EDT 2008


Agreeing to disagree is fair enough, Carl, especially since the  
authorship is in question. The number of "lapses" or solecisms  
supports the concept of an author who knows what he is doing, I  
think. As for the corrections by later scribes, it is only to be  
expected. I doubt that they gave any thought to the possibility that  
the solecisms were original and intentional on John's part. It is  
perhaps more significant that early scribes did not attempt  
corrections. This means that they accepted the constructions in  
question as John's work, for better or worse. In any case, this is  
clearly a judgment call, as you said earlier.

Don Wilkins

On Aug 18, 2008, at 12:08 PM, Carl Conrad wrote:

>
> On Aug 18, 2008, at 2:52 PM, Dr. Don Wilkins wrote:
>
>> PERIBEBLHMENOUS is not so much a matter of middle vs. passive,  
>> which Carl has clarified; rather, the unexpected accusative forces  
>> the reader to think of the unexpressed actor who has dressed the  
>> multitude. To me, the effect is similar to one of attraction  
>> (which redirects the reader's attention elsewhere), though I don't  
>> think that there is any kind of attraction to STOLAS LEUKAS.
>>
>> I would agree with Carl that Semitic idioms probably play a part  
>> here, though it does not seem necessary to explain the PANTOS  
>> construction. It is natural enough to assume that PANTOS is meant  
>> to cover everything; otherwise, you would need a string of PAS  
>> forms that would give the phrase a different nuance.  Carl's  
>> constructio ad sensum certainly explains the singular/plural  
>> mismatch. It also explains the AUTWN with FOINIKES. As for  
>> FOINIKES itself, unless I'm missing something, one needs only to  
>> add an understood HSAN to make FOINIKES the subject of its own  
>> clause.
>>
>> If one really attributes all these constructions to the  
>> inexperience or ignorance of a non-native Greek speaker, then how  
>> does one explain John's overall fidelity to standard grammar and  
>> syntax? It seems to me that if these constructions are blunders,  
>> then we either have someone who is struggling with the basic  
>> demands of grammatical agreement etc.--in which case we should  
>> expect the book to be overrun with similar blunders--or we have  
>> the work of an old man who is just getting careless. The latter  
>> may seem reasonable, but in that case I would still expect to see  
>> a lot more of the same.
>
> There really is no point in carrying this forward; we clearly have  
> a fundamental difference of opinion here. I just don't discern this  
> author's) certainly not the same John as that of other Johannine  
> docs in the GNT) "overall fidelity to standard grammar and syntax."  
> If he gets it right much of the time, he gets it wrong too often.,  
> and the argument that the lapses are all deliberate is one that  
> many will find hard to swallow. GB Shaw once quipped, "God saw that  
> the world that he had created was good; I looked at it and saw that  
> it could be improved." Evidently later scribes who copied the text  
> of Revelation "saw that it could be improved."
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
>



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