[B-Greek] Failure to communicate (was "Ambiguity")

Dr. Don Wilkins drdwilkins at verizon.net
Fri Feb 5 17:08:42 EST 2010


Thanks for the clarification, Carl, but I think you have let an  
elephant into the room, and one that we cannot acknowledge and  
dispose of without violating B-Greek protocol. I'm of course speaking  
of the issue of divine inspiration. If you're going to make a  
judgment call of NT composition, you are treading on that  
battleground. I appreciate your honesty, and as one with a similar  
background of study, I empathize with your position. But those of us  
who advocate verbal plenary inspiration etc. cannot just put on the  
glasses of a classical scholar and be content to say, "Well, it's a  
mess, isn't it?" I once had a friend at UCLA who challenged a  
grammatical construction in Revelation as a barbarism, and I asked  
him, "By what standard?" He replied, "By any standard!" He was quite  
right by any conventional canon of Greek grammar, but I maintained  
that a modern critic has to grant a writer long dead who was fluent  
in ancient Greek the freedom to play with the language to make a  
point, just as experts in English and other languages sometimes do.  
But in some respects debating this issue would be like a debate  
between evolution and creationism, and totally beyond the scope of B- 
Greek. I'll just close by saying that I understand and duly respect  
your position, but what you have said unfortunately calls for dialog  
that would have to be off-list, if worth the trouble at all. You are  
a gentleman and a venerable scholar, and I doubt that you intended to  
do that. If anything I have just said offends you, I beg your pardon  
in advance.

Don Wilkins

On Feb 5, 2010, at 12:06 PM, Carl Conrad wrote:

> It would appear that I have unintentionally illustrated precisely  
> what I really
> intended to say in my original comment on Mark Lightman's note. The
> ambiguity Don Wilkins has been lecturing on and the apparently  
> deliberate
> wordplay of ANWQEN in John 3:3 to which George Somsel calls attention
> are at best tangential to the point I was trying to make: that  
> speakers and
> writers as often as not fail to communicate what they intend to say  
> because
> they express themselves carelessly or at least without taking  
> sufficient pains
> to avoid being misunderstood. I think that this has happened not that
> infrequently in the NT texts where the syntax has been at least  
> somewhat
> muddled. This is not just a matter of a middle-passive verb form  
> that can
> be interpreted in either of two ways nor a matter of an adnominal  
> genitive
> that can be understood either as "subjective" or "objective" or --  
> if you go
> that route -- "plenary." Rather it's the sort of thing that I've  
> often called
> attention to in Ephesians 1:3-14 with its undiagrammable run-on  
> sequence
> of clauses strung together loosely like pearls on a string in what  
> Homeric
> scholars used to call λέξις εἰρομένη [LEXIS EIROMENH],  
> "strung
> style" or "run-on-sentence style." It's the kind of text that gives  
> rise to
> monumental commentaries by scholars who are at odds with each other
> over the meaning of critical passages of potentially profound import,
> the kind of text that makes the poor layperson (which is what we all,
> whether we admit it or not, really are) scratch his or her head and  
> say,
> "That's all very fine, but what does it really mean?"
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
>
> On Feb 5, 2010, at 8:37 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:
>
>> On Feb 5, 2010, at 8:14 AM, Mark Lightman wrote:
>>> For what it is worth, Todays Greek Version renders the first
>>> hHNIKA with οποτε hOPOTE and the second hHNIKA with
>>> οταν hOTAN.  The ABE Modern Greek gives οσακις hOSAKIS
>>> for the first, and for the second it gives
>>> μολις (which in Modern Greek means something like
>>> "as soon as")   All temporal expressions, though
>>> maybe as Carl said, "temporal/generalizing."
>>>
>>> The Modern Greek has no more authority than any other
>>> translation, but I mention it only to remind everyone that
>>> Ancient Greek is a more ambiguous language than even
>>> Modern Greek.
>>>
>>> I think Donald is correct that while one CAN go
>>> see the conditional and or causal force of the
>>> hHNIKA's here, one should not.
>>
>> I think Mark's statement about the ambiguity of ancient Greek is
>> right on target. I do believe that there are quite a few texts, the
>> meaning of the Greek text which is essentially unmistakable. I
>> think, however, that there are several that are open to alternative
>> interpretations whereof one or more is/are more probable than
>> othres -- and I rather think that there are more passages than we  
>> readily
>> admit that do not provide clear grounds for determining which
>> sense is preferable (my apologies to any who find my opinion
>> offensive). I think too that we often ask questions about
>> what's in an author's mind that go beyond anything that s/he has
>> clearly stated. This is not, of course, just a matter of ancient  
>> Greek;
>> it's true, I believe, of all communication: making oneself clear is
>> an enterprise that we sometimes succeed at and sometimes don't.
>> It does demand an effort -- if we really care to be understood.
>
>
>
>
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