[B-Greek] 2Cor 4:3-4 (was 2Cor 3:15-16 hHNIKA ... AN)
Brian Abasciano
bvabasciano at gmail.com
Wed Feb 10 15:04:09 EST 2010
[Yancy Smith] said: "In fact, Paul says, ??????? ??? ??? ??????? ?????
??????
KALUMMA EPI THN KARDIAN AUTWN KEITAI
What is the use of the present tense here? How does the KALUMMA become more
or less active in KEITAI-ing? This statement of Brian's is mystifying. But I
suspect here a problem of mismatching assumptions between Paul's writing and
Brian's (or my) reading."
My Response: Well, I went on to explain what I meant. It puzzles me that you
found my statement mystifying given that the explanation followed:
I said: hHNIKA AN + subjunctive in 2 Cor 3:15
highlights this conditional aspect of the veil, that its effects (at least
those that Paul is specifying here in this context) come into play upon
reading/hearing the word of God, whether that be Moses of the gospel of
Christ. If at any time they hear Moses read, then a veil lies over their
hearts hindering their understanding of the word.
[Yancy Smith] said: "Here I think the problem is one of mismatch of form and
logical meaning. The form of the conditional statement is straightforward
enough (apart from the temporal/conditional polysemy of hHINIKA) but the
content is metaphorical.
My Response: Ok, but it has been being denied that there is even a
conditional statement.
[Yancy Smith] said: "It cannot represent a real state of affairs if it has
to do with veils and reading and hearts all the rest. And here, I think, is
where the breakdown in meaning occurs, especially if we think of paintings
and what not. In reality, there is no veil. Only Moses had a veil. For the
Jews, from Paul's perspective, there is a failure to understand something.
The "heart" KARDIA represents an activity of human minds, viz,
understanding. What is Paul saying, in his highly rhetorical and
metaphorical and Scriptural-Midrashic modes?"
My Response: That is all fine and good. I spoke of the meataphorical meaning
some. But the focus of discussion has been on the logical connection between
the turn to the Lord and the removal of whatever the veil represents (the
misunderstanding or hard-heartedness or spiritual blindness or what have
you). The way Paul speaks of it, "whenever someone turns to the Lord, the
veil is removed" indicates that turning to the Lord leads to removal of the
misunderstanding or however one wants to describe it.
Your point about metaphor does not seem too relevant to me. My use of an
analogy of how the language works was for the very reason of illiustrating
how the language works and to explian that I was not claiming that what the
veil represents is necessarily removed in the abscence of the word of God,
but that its effects Paul highlights are not experienced. I could adjust the
illustration with metaphors or abstractions and illustrate the same thing.
Here's an illustration that is taken from something I have heard many people
actually say: "Before I was a Christian, whenever I read the Bible I could
not understand it. But once I believed in Jesus, I could understand the
Bible when I read it." Here the abstraction (which one might regard as quite
similar to Paul's veil metaphor) is "inability to understand the Bible". The
"whenever" phrase indicates that the person's inability to understand the
Bible was experienced upon reading it. Presumably, the inability did not go
away when the Bible was not being read, it was simply irrelevant. The
temporal conditional highlights that the inability was experienced as a
result of reading the Bible (this doesnt mean that rewading the Bible caused
the inability, but that it led to experience of the inability).
[Yancy Smith] said: "He is saying that the Jewish who don't accept Messiah
do not understand something important about their founding, cultural icon:
the Law of Moses. That misunderstanding persists always since they live,
breath, eat, sleep the Law of Moses, "when they rise up, when they lay down
and when the are walking on the way." What they don't understand about it,
according to Paul was that it was temporary and that its time for dividing
between Jews and non-Jew has come and gone (3:11, 13), i.e, it is "TO
KATARGOUMENON." And Messiah has come with a whole new set of rules.
My Response: That really seems to be getting into interpretation to me and
is debatable. My focus has been on the force of the Greek construction,
which includes that the action of the "whenever" phrase is somehow
conditional for what follows. Whenever/if at any time someone turns to the
Lord, (then) the veil (or misunderstanding or what have you) is removed.
That is how the construction is used everywehere else in the Bible (which is
only in the OT apart from 2 Cor 3:15-16). Elizabeth objected to this on the
basis of 2 Cor 3:15, basically arguing that the construction does not seem
conditional there and that the veil should be understood as remaining apart
from the reading of Moses. I pointed out that the veil can remain and that
even there the construction does have a conditional type of force, that it
highlights the fact that the veil (whatever it represents) is experienced
upon the reading of Moses. Hence the illustrations of such language used in
a conditonal way but that don't require that the equivalent of the veil is
non-existant or removed when the action of the whenever-phrase is not taking
place.
God bless,
Brian Abasciano
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