[B-Greek] Reflections on the recent BG thread on Rom 8:4 (long)

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Tue Sep 1 17:51:03 EDT 2009


(For many I suspect that these reflections will be of no interest; if  
they haven't already done so, they may delete this at once.)

  On Wednesday of this past week (August 26) Donald Cobb initiated in  
this forum a thread on Romans 8:4 and the phrase τὸ  
ἀδύνατον τοῦ νόμου [TO ADUNATON TOU NOMOU]. Since my  
computer went down on Monday, I didn’t see this until Friday the 28th  
and didn’t digest it until today. I don’t know that the thread  
resolved the difficulties to the satisfaction of all interested  
parties, but I think that it did illuminate the problem and at the  
same time brought to light some other items that I, at least, have  
found of interest.

(1) The construction under consideration: I don’t really want to  
rehash the discussion so much as to note salient points in the  
discussion. The interesting thing to me is that we don’t really seem  
to be having any difficulty understanding what Paul is saying in this  
text; our difficulty is rather in offering an intelligible accounting  
for the syntax.

Donald Cobb: “Could Τὸ ἀδύνατον τοῦ νόμου [TO  
ADUNATON TOU NOMOU], for instance, be understood as a kind of  
Accusative of reference? … I'm not necessarily advocating  
understanding this passage in another way than the usual one. But  
verse 4 seems to be difficult on any count, and it might be worth  
wrestling with it to see if more clarity can come out of it.”

Elizabeth Kline, citing Cooper: “Cooper talks about this (Attic Greek  
Prose Syntax v.1 p. 114    #4.6.3)  ‘Substantivized neuter adjectives  
are used to give a general remark, characterization, a summary  
evaluation, which applies to a whole sentence, or to a part of a  
sentence … These substantivized adjectives are commonly accounted  
accusatives, but sometimes they seem clearly predicative and so can be  
take as nominatives in indefinite predication …’”

Cobb: “As I continue to look at Rom 8:3, I'm wondering if there's a  
real difference in content between the two ways of taking Paul's  
instruction. If we follow BDAG's lead, Paul is saying that what the  
law was incapable of doing,  God did it by condemning sin in his Son.  
If we take TO ADUNATON TOU NOMOU as an accusative of reference, a  
nominative in indefinite predication (Cooper), or something of the  
like, Paul says that, As concerns the inability of the law, God  
condemned sin in his Son. So God ends up doing the same thing for the  
same reason. The latter has the advantage of being less stilted.  
Again, are other understandings possible?”

(2) The question of methodology and terms of reference: In her first  
response Elizabeth nicely highlighted at the outset the question of  
how we go about resolving a recognized unsettling feature of a textual  
sequence – an APORIA. What are the steps we take and in what sequence  
as we set about analyzing the difficulty? I suspect that we don’t  
often enough ask this methodological question.

Kline: “prolegomena … The first hurdle to get over is choosing a  
framework for analysis. One could just review what the standard  
grammars and most often quoted commentaries and journal articles have  
to say about this passage and then somewhat arbitrarily decide which  
one seems most appealing. The problem with this approach is to choose  
a criterion by which one will judge among the various scholarly  
opinions. Finding an acceptable set of criteria is in itself a crux.”

In the course of her analysis and discussion, Elizabeth tackled head- 
on the question of how we describe or refer to the key elements of the  
construction we are analyzing, coining in the process the term  
“discourse ligament” to refer to the focal phrase of the  
discussion, TO ADUNATON TOU NOMOU:

Kline: “A contextualizer a.k.a. discourse ligament is a semantically  
significant constituent (i.e., not a conjunction) used between  
predications in an argument or narrative which serves to semantically  
“tie things together”. It doesn’t have to be an absolute  
construction. It might be a fronted element in the following clause.”

We really do make an effort to be understood or not to be  
misunderstood; I particularly admired Elizabeth’s followup comment on  
the above statement about “contextualizer”:

Kline: “The word “context” was used here as it has been  
traditionally used in the study of the bible, e.g. “context, context,  
context …” in a recent post by George Somsel. This is quite  
different than how the term has been used in linguistics where context  
refers to the social, cultural, physical setting for the discourse. In  
writing my previous comments, the focus was on the semantic coherence  
of the text. ... If this bothers the linguists, then we can use a  
different term. I am not at all concerned about what term we use.”

I don’t think that last comment was intended to be funny, but it  
amused me, calling attention as it does to the essential irony  
involved in designating with clear terminology what it is we’re  
trying to describe. As I recall, Plato deliberately employed  
alternative terms for his key notions (e.g. EIDOS and IDEA), perhaps  
deliberately calling attention therewith to the fact that the words we  
use to designate and/or describe things – in particular, abstract  
things – point in the direction of what we mean rather than express  
clearly what we mean; such words are necessarily metaphoric.  
Aristotle, on the other hand, set out to be precise in his  
terminology, but nevertheless often felt at a loss for the “mot  
juste”: In the Ethics he speaks of excessive and deficient sorts of  
behavior relating to virtues, often saying, “We don’t have a word  
for this, but we know what it is.” But when it comes to such a  
fundamental notion as “what is essential about a thing,” the best  
he can do is τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι (TO TI/ HN EINAI)  –  
something like “its being just exactly what it is/has0continued-to- 
be.”

3. The problem of analyzing language by using language as a tool:  
Grammatical analysis is a questionable, narcissistic exercise,  
something like using a mirror as an instrument for examining what a  
mirror is. We cannot talk about how language works without employing  
the tools of language, and we often fail to realize how woefully  
inadequate they are to the task.

Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 6. “Philosophers can never hope  
finally to formulate ... metaphysical first principles. Weakness of  
insight and deficiencies f language stand in the way inexorably. Words  
and phrases must be directed toward s a generality foreign to their  
ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as  
technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an  
imaginative leap.”
       p. 20. “... no language can be anything but elliptical,   
requiring a leap of the imagination to understand its meaning in its  
relevance to immediate experience. The position of metaphysics in the  
development of culture cannot be understood without remembering that  
no verbal statement is the adequate expression of a proposition.”

If Whitehead is right about the capacity of language to grasp what it  
ultimately real, what shall we say about the capacity of language to  
grasp what language is and does? I have often referred to academic  
linguistics as a “Tower of Babel,” by which I have meant that  
academic linguists do not speak and write the common language that the  
rest of us speak and write nor do they speak and write a common  
language when they talk to each other. What they do when they speak  
and write may not properly be called glossolalia, but in my experience  
it has usually been a matter of  “speaking in an unknown tongue.”

  It is all the more ironic that we should employ for teaching  
language a  pedagogy centered on grasping these woefully inadequate  
tools of linguistic analysis and expect them to turn our students into  
competent users of the language.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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