[B-Greek] TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU--can the traditional translation be sustained?
David Stuart
m7feettall at yahoo.com
Sat Feb 27 10:05:11 EST 2010
To help clarify some things, here is a copy of the article that I found through Google scholar, hosted on a pro-sabbatarian site. It is poor quality, and I can only hope they have permission to use it, but I understand that the original JBL article was first printed in a sabbatarian church's ministerial journal, so they may have permission.
http://www.friendsofsabbath.org/Further_Research/Holy%20Days/Col%202_17_Journal%20of%20Biblical%20Literature.pdf
His actual translation seems rather strained, so I didn't post so much in order to look at that, but just to see what folks thought of the use of the genitive, and to see whether it is indeed a problem for DE to connect the two disparate clauses.
Thanks for your thoughts,
David Stuart
Garnder, KS
--- On Sat, 2/27/10, Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU--can the traditional translation be sustained?
> To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org, "David Stuart" <m7feettall at yahoo.com>
> Date: Saturday, February 27, 2010, 4:03 AM
> 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
>
> ---
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