[B-Greek] Genitive of Subordination and Revelation 1:5
Edgar Foster
edgarfoster2003 at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 27 20:18:55 EDT 2009
Greetings B-Greekers,
Text for Revelation 1:5: καὶ ἀπὸ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ὁ μάρτυς ὁ πιστός ὁ πρωτότοκος τῶν νεκρῶν καὶ ὁ ἄρχων τῶν βασιλέων τῆς γῆς τῷ ἀγαπῶντι ἡμᾶς καὶ λύσαντι ἡμᾶς ἐκ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν ἐν τῷ αἵματι αὐτοῦ [KAI APO IHSOU XRISTOU hO MARTUS hO PISTOS hO PRWTOTOKOS TWN NEKRWN KAI hO ARXWN TWN BASILEWN THS GHS TWi AGAPWNTI hHMAS KAI LUSANTI hHMAS EK TWN hAMARTIWN hHMWN EN TWi hAIMATI AUTOU].
My question regards how the genitive hO PRWTOTOKOS TWN NEKRWN in this verse might be understood. Is it partitive of a genitive of subordination? Whether this grammatical construction is the former or the latter, another question that has occupied my thinking here lately is whether the so-called "genitive of subordination" is an example of a category that exemplifies the famed unnecessarily multiplied entities which Occam's Law militates against. I ask because of what Daniel B. Wallace (Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, pp. 103-104) writes about the genitive of subordination in his work.
Wallace writes that the genitive of subordination "is a subset of the objective genitive, but not always." Hence, "For this reason, most likely, such a category is not to be found in standard grammars."
I have looked in other grammars to see what they might say about the genitive of subordination. I did not find a mention of this category in Robertson, nor in William D. Chamberlain's An Exegetical Grammar of the Greek New Testament. I also do not think that the category appears in Brooks and Winbery's Syntax of New Testament Greek, or in Biblical Greek by M. Zerwick or BDF. Cf. Richard A. Young, Intermediate New Testament Greek: A Linguistic and Exegetical Approach.
I guess an additional question is when did grammarians begin to call certain genitive constructs "genitives of subordination"?
Best regards,
Edgar Foster
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