[B-Greek] TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU--can the traditional translation be sustained?

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sat Feb 27 05:03:31 EST 2010


Hi, David,
 
To come right out and answer your question, yes indeed the
traditional translation can be sustained.
 
Let me make sure I understand the guy's argument first.
 
Is he saying the text says "Let no one judge you in matters of
food et cetera, which are only shadows of the things to come.
PERIOD.  Rather (DE) (supply 'it's all about') the body of Christ."
("The important thing is) the body of Christ."  Or, as the title
of his article reads: "But (let everyone discern) the Body of
Christ."  He appears to be saying that Paul intends no
contrast between "shadows" and "body."
 
If this is what he is saying, I say that his analysis is clever,
far fetched, and not exactly wrong.  He seems to me to be
pouncing on the Greek text in order to make the text say
something a little more than it clearly says.  As often with
minute grammatical analysis, nothing is really at stake here,
as his DE is still (even more so) contrastive, though
the contrast is now between the practices and Jesus.
He would be asking us to put his grammatical 
hair splitting above what appears to be an obvious
contrast between shadow and SWMA.  Or even
worse, he is saying that Paul intends a different
contrast which picks up and plays off the obvious
contrast.
 
I may be misrepresenting the argument.  I AM
misrepresenting the argument because I do not
have access to his entire article.  If I understand
him properly, I disagree with what he says about
DE.
 
You ask:
 
<What do you all think of his arguments?>
 
His arguments are fine as far as they go.  I would
prefer that if he has something important to say about
what Paul says Jesus and ritual, he come out and
say it and not get sidetracked by the Greek, which
is clear or unclear, depending on how you look at 
it.  I would say that many of these JBL articles that
find new meanings based on Greek grammatical
analysis are of not much value to two groups
of people--those who do not know Greek and those
who know Greek well.
 
Thanks for bringing it to our attention though. Stuff like
this is fun. 
 
Mark L


FWSFOROS MARKOS

--- On Fri, 2/26/10, David Stuart <m7feettall at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: David Stuart <m7feettall at yahoo.com>
Subject: [B-Greek] TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU--can the traditional translation be sustained?
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Friday, February 26, 2010, 8:58 PM




I recently came across the following article from the Journal of Biblical Literature:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3266938

I have been trying to evaluate his argument, but I lack the expertise to critique some of his points, so I thought I would run it by you fine folks. 

The article looks at the phrase:

TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU

τὸ δὲ σῶμα τοῦ Χριστοῦ

and its relation to the larger passage. It contends that the reading that relates the body to the shadow such as the KJV and most other versions, has a couple of grammatical problems. 

Here is the KJV: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.

The two problems he cites are:

1. He states that DE cannot be used to connect two clauses that are not grammatically equivalent. More specifically he states that the clause 

hA ESTI SKIA TWN MELLONTWN 
ἅ ἐστι σκιὰ τῶν μελλόντων

is a subordinate relative clause (connected to verse 16) and that this cannot be linked with DE to TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU if TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU is taken to be an independent clause, a "nominal clause with an ellipsed ESTIN."


2. If ESTIN is supplied then TOU CHRISTOU should be in the nominative.

What do you all think of his arguments? Are there uses of the genetive that could support the traditional reading? 

Is it true that DE cannot be used in this way? 

Is there a better reading? The author himself examines one other historical reading and his own novel reading, but I am not sure which fit best with the grammar. 

I read some of the archives but did not see these particular grammar issues addressed. 

Thanks for any feedback! 


David Stuart
Gardner, KS 


      
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