[B-Greek] the antecedent of relative pronoun
Barry H.
nebarry at verizon.net
Wed Oct 6 18:37:09 EDT 2010
----- Original Message -----
From: "Oun Kwon" <kwonbbl at gmail.com>
To: "Barry H." <nebarry at verizon.net>
Cc: <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 5:49 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] the antecedent of relative pronoun
However, ... (see below).
On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 6:58 AM, Barry H. <nebarry at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> In Revelation 5:8, the antecedent must be FIALAS, because hAI is feminine
>> plural, not QUMIAMATWN, which is neuter plural.
>Doesn't it make a better sense to take incenses = prayers, than bowls
= prayers? (bowls full of prayers}.
This strike me as more of an interpretive decision than a grammatical one.
>> In Eph 6:17, hO is neuter singular, and therefore must refer to the
>> neuter
>> singular PNEUMATOS. Sword (MACAIRAN) is feminine.
>
>Most (except those of literal rendering) seem to take it MACAIRAN as
the antecedent. That is, "God's word (utterance) from the Spirit as
the sword", rather than "the sword of the Spirit' - the Spirit as God's
utterance".
I wasn't going to get into this, but is struck me after I fired off my
missive that Eph 6:17 was a somewhat more complicated example than at first
blush. What really caught my interest was Jerome's rendering:
6:17 et galeam salutis adsumite et gladium Spiritus quod est verbum Dei...
He uses the neuter quod even though both gladium (sword) and Spirit
(Spiritus) are masculine, which suggest to me that a) either he is being his
often hyper-literal self and imitating the Greek even when it's not the best
Latin, or b) that he sees the relative hO as proleptic, or neuter by way of
attraction, since "word" is ῥῆμα, RHMA, a neuter noun close enough in the
context to effect an attraction, and verbum in Latin is similarly neuter,
and Latin and Greek are close enough syntactically that it works nicely in
both languages. Or similarly, you could say it's attraction with PNEUMA but
ad sensum refers to the entire phrase, and then we have the possibility that
it's neuter simply because it refers to the entire preceding phrase.
Sorry, HH -- in trying to keep it simple I fell into the beginning language
teacher's trap of "when you teach a beginning language, you lie a lot..."
:)
There is a chance that this could also be the case in Rev 5:8, since
"prayers" follows closely, and is also feminine plural. Dangerous to bet
too much on the grammar of Revelation, of course, but in we do have a good
candidate for an antecedent in FIALAS.
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, semper melius Latine sonat...
Classics and Bible Instructor, TAA
http://www.theamericanacademy.net
(2010 Savatori Excellence in Education Winner)
V-P of Academic Affairs, TNARS
bhofstetter at tnars.net
http://www.tnars.net
http://my.opera.com/barryhofstetter/blog
http://mysite.verizon.net/nebarry
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