[B-Greek] TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU--can the traditional translation be sustained?
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Feb 27 13:51:52 EST 2010
On Feb 27, 2010, at 10:05 AM, David Stuart wrote:
> 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.
Well, for what it's worth, I've scanned the article rather than perused it. It strikes me as what I've seen described as a procedure of explaining "obscurum per obscurius," which is to say, attempting to explain what is unintelligible by means of what is even less intelligible. In the first place, it seems to me that he has misrepresented what BDF§§438, 449 about DE (the clause TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU is of a different order from hA ESTI SKIA TWN MELLONTWN and therefore cannot be contrastive with it, but must rather relate to the only independent clause in verse 16, MH OUN TIS hUMAS KRINETW ..., and we should understand the elliptical verb KRINETW as carried forward from that initial independent clause to TO DE SWMA TOU CRISTOU.
I confess that I have no clear understanding of what Col 2:16-17 intends to communicate. What has been termed "the traditional translation" seems to me to represent the Greek text plausibly, although it is no more obvious from the translation than it is from the Greek exactly what is being asserted. I cannot but applaud an effort to suggest an accounting for this text that makes more sense than what has hitherto stood in its place, but I don't think this effort succeeds.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
> --- 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
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list