[B-Greek] JN 10:20 hO PATHR hO DEDWKEN MOI PANTWN MEIZWN ESTIN

Richard Ghilardi qodeshlayhvh at juno.com
Wed Jul 30 15:58:55 EDT 2008


Hello Folks,

I am in substantial agreement with the conclusions reached by Elizabeth
and James. I agree that hO... MEIZWN is at worst improbable Greek, but
not impossible. I also agree that hO can be construed as the masc nom def
art pinch-hitting for the relative. Finally, I agree with James that
"what [the sheep] the Father has given me is [are] greater than all" is
impossible Johannine theology. Besides creating an inconcinnity  with the
following clause, hO... MEIZON is itself highly improbable Greek with its
explicit subject fronted outside the relative clause, Metzger's
invocation of hyperbaton notwithstanding. I may be wrong about this, but
where else in the GNT do we find the explicit subject of a relative
clause fronted outside its clause?

May I suggest one other possible alternative?

Accepting the reading hO... MEIZWN and taking hO as a neut acc rel, we
may construe the acc as that of specification and translate literally
thus:

My Father, with respect to what he has given me, is greater than all.

or more paraphrastically,

My Father is greater than everyone else when it comes to the sheep he has
entrusted to my care.

PWS hUMIN DOKEI;

Yours in His grace,

Richard Ghilardi - qodeshlayhvh at juno.com
West Haven, Connecticut USA

=========================================================================
===

On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:25:42 -0400 "James Ernest" <j.d.ernest at bc.edu>
writes:
> > Is this a well formed sentence?
> 
> As you suggest, Elizabeth, it would seem that most of the scribes 
> who wrote
> hO DEDWKEN must have been content to read hO as functionally 
> equivalent to
> hOS; also that the scribe of D thought it awkward or solecistic and 
> changed
> DEDWKEN to DEDWKWS. The NA editors clearly believe (as Metzger's 
> textual
> commentary explicitly claims) that the hOS reading cannot be 
> original
> because no one would have ever changed it to the more difficult hO. 
> If hO
> was original, then the scribes who changed it to hOS seem to agree 
> with the
> NA editors, Turner, and Metzger that hO . . . MEIZWN is (in 
> Metzger's words)
> "impossible Greek, and cannot be construed."
> 
> I'm more inclined to judge that MEIZON (which has to boil down to 
> saying the
> sheep [what my father gave to me] are greater than all) rather than 
> MEIZWN
> (the father is greater than all) is more definitely impossible 
> Johannine
> theology than hO . . . MEIZWN is impossible grammar.
> 
> So I think I agree with your bottom line: scribes who wrote hO . . . 
> MEIZWN
> somehow managed to be content basically to construe hO as a 
> relative
> pronoun. How many of them thought it was good grammar (or had any 
> concept of
> good grammar, for that matter) we'll never know.
> 
> I have no difficulty imagining either that the urtext had hO because 
> the
> urscribe made a mistake or that the urtext had hOS and a later 
> scribe
> accidentally dropped a sigma (and subsequent scribes followed along 
> like
> [Johannine or non-Johannine] sheep). Actually, how about this: a 
> scribe
> misread hOS EDWKEN as hO DEDWKEN because the sigma was messed up?
> Anyway, the Ernest edition of the GNT would read hOS . . . MEIZWN, 
> but that
> edition will never exist, so I'm content to read hO MEIZWN and sign 
> on to
> the Elizabethan understanding thereof (to which I think Cooper 
> finally ends
> up contributing nothing). hO . . . MEIZON is what you get from 
> scribes who
> misheard the (either ungrammatical or doubtfully grammatical) 
> masculine hO
> as neuter hO and are therefore heard masc. MEIZWN as neuter MEIZON, 
> and from
> modern critics who in establishing their text rely too much on 
> analysis of
> transcriptional probabilities, assuming that scribal mistakes always 
> follow
> a tidy logic and are never the inexplicable random goof-ups that the 
> rest of
> us see and perform every day. ;-) I'd give more weight to content: 
> the point
> has to be that the Father has given the sheep to the Son, and 
> because the
> Father is greater than anyone, no one will be able to pluck the 
> sheep out of
> the Son's hand.
> 
> Of the commentaries I have here, Barrett and Temple discuss the 
> variants and
> their meanings; so also, more briefely, Whitacre.
> 
> James Ernest
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Elizabeth Kline <
> kline_dekooning at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> >
> > I agree that Cooper is not describing what is going on in the
> > Sinaiticus reading for John 10:29. What Cooper is  describing is
> > similar to what we find in BDF #267, Turner p182 and ATR 766. So 
> if we
> > just set aside that issue, and forget about Cooper, BDF, Turner 
> and
> > ATR. Returning to Codex Sinaiticus JN 10:29 and Westcott and 
> Metzger's
> > statements that this is impossible greek which cannot be 
> construed:
> >
> > >>
> > >> Codex Sinaiticus*[c]
> > >> JOHN 10:29 hO PATHR [MOU] hO DEDWKEN MOI PANTWN MEIZWN ESTIN
> >
> >
> > My question is a linguistic one. Is this a well formed sentence?  
> What
> > is the function of hO? It seems to me that hO marks what follows,
> > DEDWKEN MOI, as something that qualifies hO PATHR. I don't seem 
> to
> > have any problem reading this sentence[1]. The relative hOS 
> DEDWKEN
> > MOI is an easier read but calling hO DEDWKEN MOI "impossible 
> greek"
> > appears to me unwarranted. The corrector [c]  of Sinaiticus 
> didn't
> > have a problem with it. That should give us a sufficient reason to 
> go
> > looking for a way to make sense out of the syntax of this text, 
> not to
> > just declare it ungreek.
> >
> >
> > Elizabeth Kline
> >
> > [1] My current inclination is to question N.Turner's blanket 
> denial
> > that hO can function as a relative in NT greek.
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