[B-Greek] The relative pronouns in Ephesians 6:17 and Revelation 5:8
John Sanders
john.franklin.sanders at gmail.com
Fri Oct 15 00:44:40 EDT 2010
2010/10/15 Leonard Jayawardena <leonardj at live.com>
>
>
> ________________________________
> > 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.
>
JFS: I am not sure I am going to buy into that. Once a substitution has
been made, then employing it in the original sentence would insure
redundancy. By seeing the "spirit" as the word-of-God, I see the sword as
the means that "spirit", or word-of-God is spread. I do not require that
you see the simile, or metaphore, as I do. But the metaphor I see conforms
to the "grammar" of the text. You need to amend the "grammar", so that the
text reads differently than what one would expect. I see no advantage in
that admendment and its resultant reading, but you do. The burden of
pursuasion lies with (because you are admending the expected syntax of the
relative pronoun).
--
John Sanders
Suzhou, China
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