[B-Greek] genitive participle in Matthew 22:10

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Fri Oct 3 14:34:18 EDT 2008


On Oct 3, 2008, at 9:26 AM, rinas jody wrote:

> For some years I have looked at Matthew 22.10, being unsure of how  
> the English translations came up with:
>
> "...so the wedding hall was filled with guests."
>
> taking it from the phrase in NA 27:
>
> KAI EPLESTHE HO GAMOS ANAKEIMENWN
>
> ANAKEIMAI reappears in v.11 as well, where it seems a bit more  
> straightforward.
>
> I have checked out BAGD and LSJ. (Sorry, I don't have BDAG yet.) I  
> presume that ANAKEIMENWN must be rendered into good English. Thus,  
> what is literally written in the genitive participle -- "of the ones  
> who are reclining" -- must be rendered as "with guests." "Guests"  
> are the very ones who are "reclining to dine."
>
> There is a variant in v.10: TWN is inserted in front of the  
> participle. Are the copyists trying to make it more obvious that  
> this participle should be understood as a substantive?
>
> If I were to analyze this participle from categories in Wallace's  
> GGBtB, I might call it a Genitive of Content (p.92) or Genitive of  
> Agency (p.126).
>
> But I have found it odd to translate it as "with guests." To me this  
> would require a dative and not a genitive participle.

Jody,

It appears that you undersand the issues here quite well and don't  
really need much in the way of clarification.

One of the problems with reading primarily the NT and not more  
difficult texts, e.g., Attic Tragedy, is that the NT often lends  
itself to literal translation. If we spend some time in Sophocles or  
Aeschylus we will soon discover that translation involves significant  
syntactical transformation between the source document and the target  
language. What you are looking at here is a relatively minor case of  
transformation from a Greek idiom to an English idiom.


Elizabeth Kline







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