[B-Greek] Colossians 1:16 TA PANTA ... EITE ... EITE

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Feb 20 07:04:50 EST 2010


On Feb 20, 2010, at 5:49 AM, yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net wrote:
> Iver wrote:
> 
>> Because of the affinity between Colossians and Ephesians, I would take the last 
>> two of the four words as referring to spiritual powers, the ANORATA, but I don't 
>> see any grammatical, contextual or lexical reason to take the first two to be 
>> anything but powers on earth, the hORATA EPI THS GHS.
> 
> Here is a "contextual reason" that supports Elizabeth (and BDAG) but it is not textual. Two first century gemnata depict a very interesting vision of the sort of world view Paul had in mind. The following links give the image and a good discussion. In order to understand the references, one might have to think outside the box of text and look at first century images used to legitimate the divine right of imperial power. A great basic resource that is required reading for freshmen in classics departments now (and has been for some time) is Paul Zanker, _The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus_, but the graphic messages of that time is permuted and developed all the way through the imperial period.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemma_Augustea
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Cameo_of_France
> 
> Another great source: http://www.portraitsofcaligula.com/3/miscellaneous13.htm
> 
> In the first, representing the apotheosis of the divine Augustus a two-storied universe is represented in which THRONOI in the upper register are occupied by Augustus and Roma divine figures surround them as retinue and human imperial figures accompanied by divinities are shown to have concourse with the divine Augustus, while divine and human figures wage war on the earth against the enemies of Rome.
> 
> It may be too much to ask of textual scholars to imagine anything outside of their text and it may be beyond b-greek to consider anything outside of texts in discussing Greek. But sometimes a picture can speak more than many squiggles on a page.

I think that Elizabeth and Yancy are exactly right here; this is an instance where the problem of understanding lies not in appreciating what the Greek text says but in recognizing what the words refer to -- and that is background information, which is generally tangential to list discussion and could lead to wrangling over what might seem vagaries of exotic -- or exoteric -- "pagan" religious beliefs of the Hellenistic-Roman cultural world. My first Greek teacher (Joe Billy McMinn, of blessed memory) was working on a doctoral dissertation at Tulane when I was a freshman there on the term KOSMOKRATWR in Eph. 6:12 ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἡμῖν ἡ πάλη πρὸς αἷμα καὶ σάρκα ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὰς ἀρχάς, πρὸς τὰς ἐξουσίας, πρὸς τοὺς κοσμοκράτορας τοῦ σκότους τούτου, πρὸς τὰ πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις. [hOTI OUK ESTIN hHMIN hH PALH PROS hAIMA KAI SARKA ALLA PROS TAS ARCAS, PROS TAS EXOUSIAS, PROS TOUS KOSMOKRATORAS TOU SKOTOUS TOUTOU, PROS TA PNEUMATIKA THS PONHRIAS EN TOIS EPOURANIOIS.] Without doing a reasonable amount of exploration or research into Hellenistic conceptions of astrology and its sway over popular thinking and understandings of astral powers governing human destiny, one can't really appreciate this dimension of much of the literature of this era. A very popular poem in this era was a hexameter verse version of an astronomic treatise of Eudoxus, the FAINOMENA, basically a description of the celestial geography; it was translated three times into Latin, not because of its literary merit, but because it helped people to visualize those celestial powers that most people actually believed to exist. This is a matter of shared cultural assumptions, such as our acceptance of the roundness of the earth and its orbiting about the sun in a planetary system. These cultural assumptions of an era do impact immeasurably the way people think in any era, and they find expression in the NT texts composed by those living in the Hellenistic-Roman world.


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






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