[B-Greek] The relative pronouns in Ephesians 6:17 and Revelation 5:8
Leonard Jayawardena
leonardj at live.com
Thu Oct 14 22:42:12 EDT 2010
________________________________
> Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:54:35 +0800
> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] The relative pronouns in Ephesians 6:17 and
> Revelation 5:8
> From: john.franklin.sanders at gmail.com
> To: leonardj at live.com
> CC: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> Conderning Ephesians 6:17:
>
> I consider the simile to be PNEUMATOS construed with hRHMA QEOU, then
> the simile and the grammar work together. To consider the simile
> something else will require an explanation of why the grammar of the
> relative pronoun is wrong.
> --
> John Sanders
> Suzhou, China
LJ: A further comment on above.
As I have already mentioned before, I understand hO ESTIN in THN MACAIRAN TOU PNEUMATOS, hO/ ESTIN rRHMA QEOU in Ephes. 6:17 to be explanatory hO ESTIN, seen also in the same book in 5:4.
If the ordinary relative is used, then the "correct" form is hH, feminine singular, to agree with MACAIRA (feminine noun), which is the headword in the phrase THN MACAIRAN TOU PNEUMATOS. The word of God, here meaning the gospel, is metaphorically called a sword. "The sword of the spirit" is the offensive weapon wielded by the Christian soldier, the spiritual counterpart of the earthly, literal sword of, say, a Roman soldier. (A discussion of how exactly the gospel is a sword would take us beyond B-Greek.)
Therefore if Paul did not use explanatory hO ESTIN, then we can only understand the relative pronoun here as being assimilated in gender to the predicate substantive, viz. rHMA (neuter), in the same way that the relatives in Rev. 4:5 and 5:8 are.
PNEUMATOS is not even a possible antecedent for the relative because construing the relative with PNEUMATOS would make THN MACAIRAN TOU PNEUMATOS equivalent to "the sword of the word of God." To make any sense of that, you have to take TOU PNEUMATOS adjectivally, in which case the phrase means "the-word-of-God sword." But when the relative clause is addded, we have "the-word-of-God sword, which is the word of God" (!), which is nonsense.
Leonard Jayawardena
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