[B-Greek] The relative pronouns in Ephesians 6:17 and Revelation 5:8
John Sanders
john.franklin.sanders at gmail.com
Thu Oct 21 00:12:49 EDT 2010
Leonard, I apologize for not answering your last post in a timely manner,
but livelihood does consume much of my time. You do deserve an answer.
I am in full agreement as to the general thesis that Robinson is presenting,
it makes sense and represents the language as one would think it would be
spoken. But I disagree with him on this specific case. Rather bold of me,
I suppose. I, of little knowledge, am questioning one of the legends in the
field. But I will and I think on rational grounds (when I have time, I
shall make a posting questioning a contention of one of the living
knowledgeable ones).
On page 712 (Robinson’s Opus Magnus) two examples are listed. The first two
examples have a common pattern: THS AULHS O ESTIN PRAITWRION (Mk. 15:16),
and TWi SPERMATI SOU OS ESTIN XRISTOS (Gal 3:16). The pattern is that the
relative pronoun follow directly on the antecedent (consider SOU as an
enclitic and part of the noun). In our case, THN MAXAIRAN TOU PNEUMATOW, O
ESTIN RHMA QEOU has to overstep, bypass, go around, go through or go under a
noun which has a natural connection in terms of gender and number to use a
noun of a different stripe as its antecedent.
A second objection that I have is that, as the Rev. Williams has pointed
out, Paul is making an extended list of comparisons with a physical entity
in the accusative and the spiritual in the genitive and this includes our
THN MAXAIRAN TOU PNEUMATOW. This is clever; it diminishes the importance of
the physical and allows us to focus on the spiritual. But the way you and
others are seeing this, it makes “the sword of spirit” the “word of God”. It
makes TN MAXAIRA a real sword with an epithet. For modern sensibilities it
is a natural, I think, to make this type of comparison because we are so use
to using objects with epithets. But I do not think that is what Paul had in
mind and the syntax works, in my mind, better the way I have suggested.
> --
> John Sanders
> Suzhou, China
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