[B-Greek] John 1:18

Yancy W Smith yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net
Sat Nov 7 11:50:43 EST 2009


I think Carl's suggestion gives an accurate sense and preserves the  
puzzling, shocking sense of Jesus' relation to the monotheism of his  
context and the God of Moses that is one of the principal themes of  
the narrative of GJohn. Of course you can preserve the Greek grammar  
by using Biblish, "only begotten" but many people will not understand  
it. Faithfulness in translation must be gaged, in part, at least, in  
terms of the audience's understaning of the text. So, how does the  
following work?

  "No one has ever seen God. The only Child/Son God has shown us what  
God is like. He is himself God and is very close to the Father."

Of course you could also translate without caps or use caps for part  
and substitute "an" for the, but those choices are theological  
influenced by social factors and fuzzy logic.

What do I mean by linguistic fuzzy logic? For example, if someone asks  
me, are you staying late tonight?I respond, no, I'm going home. Is  
"home" definite? Quite. It has no article and in English in this sense  
it never does but is always definite. What if I say, "Yes, and this  
job is going to send me to the home" ? Now it may imply that I won't  
be going home at all.  It is not definite at all, however. Or, "no I'm  
going to a house"? Now in this case I will be telling the questioner,  
perhaps, not to ask me where I'm going. But I am not likely saying  
that I am going home. It is really interesting to me how these very  
similar formulations give quite distninct senses that seem  
counterintuitive in terms of definiteness and meaning. Natural  
language like what we find in the GJohn is much more chaotic and wild  
and fuzzy, infuenced willy-nilly by rhetorical and social and local  
idiomatic forces than most of the toy models of language given us by  
linguists have trouble with. Don't get me wrong, I think scientific  
models are valuable, as long as we recognize their limitations. Why,  
sometimes seems downright mystical in the real world.

Yancy

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 7, 2009, at 9:51 AM, Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> wrote:

>
> On Nov 7, 2009, at 10:10 AM, Mark Lightman wrote:
>
>> Carl egrapse (with wry humor:)
>>
>> <I accept that "only-begotten" is good 17th-
>> century English for MONOGENHS>
>>
>> Roma locuta, causa finata.  ;)
>
> Actually I was deadly serious about "only-begotten" as archaic,
> "Biblish" English. Ordinary English-speakers today talk of an "only
> child," an "only son," or an "only daughter."
>
>> --- On Sat, 11/7/09, Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
>> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] John 1:18
>> To: "Leonard Jayawardena" <leonardj at live.com>
>> Cc: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
>> Date: Saturday, November 7, 2009, 2:28 AM
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 7, 2009, at 12:14 AM, Leonard Jayawardena wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> One final comment on the meaning of MONOGENHS in the first chapter
>>> of John: Doesn't TON YION TON MONOGENH in John 3:16 clinch my
>>> position that MONOGENHS means "only-begotton."  In view of this
>>> verse, would you still hold that MONOGENHS means "one of a kind" or
>>> unique?
>>
>> You evidently missed my message of November 6, 2009 2:30:59 PM EST
>> where I conceded that the meaning of MONOGENHS must be "only
>> generated." h John 3:16 is different from John 1:18 precisely in that
>> the noun construed with MONOGENH is hUION; in 1:18 the noun construed
>> with MONOGENHS is QEOS, if that reading as accepted in NA27/UBS4 is
>> preferred. At any rate, I accept that "only-begotten" is good 17th-
>> century English for MONOGENHS.
>>
>> Carl W. Conrad
>> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>>
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>
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