[B-Greek] John 11:4 and the Middle/Passive of DOXAZW

John Sanders john.franklin.sanders at gmail.com
Fri Feb 25 07:13:23 EST 2011


If I may make a few comments.



1.  I agree with Dr.Conrad and others, but I also am in agreement with
MARKOS on his rule of medio-passivity.  But one should keep in mind that the
rule cannot be applied indiscriminately, there is a place for it.



2.  Although there has been much written lately concerning the middle voice
and reflexive use, I would not think that the normal sense of the
middle/passive form is reflexive.  If anything, I would suggest that an
intensifier would be more appropriate:  I myself, you yourself, he himself,
she herself, we ourselves, you yourselves, they themselves, etc.



This is not to say that there are not other senses to be understood,
depending upon the specific word, such as the middle of NIPTW being
understood as reflexive or the active of APTOMAI being understood as
lexically different, etc.



3.  If I may, I would like to present how I would read this text and how I
understand it, this is not a grammatical analysis.



I will begin with the hINA clause, after Hina.  DOXASQHi “encodes” third
person singular aorist middle subjunctive (in the passive form).  That is
how I see it, it “encodes” nothing more.  This followed by the subject, hO
VIOS TOU QEOU, then by a prepositional phrase, DI’ AUTHS, which marks for
“passivity” and identifies the agent of passivity specifically.



It might be easier to understand my thinking by using some simple English
examples.  First an English sentence demonstrating the active voice:  “Peter
it Roger.”  Now I will transform this into a “middle voice”.  I do this by
defining, for my purposes here, a verb in the “middle voice” as one that is
prefixed by some type of intensifier, in this case it is “himself”, so we
have “Peter himself-hit Roger.  Now to turn this into a passive I turn Roger
into an agent, so we have:  “Peter himself-hit by Roger”.



Normally I would construct the English to be something like “Peter is being
hit by Roger.”  If we think of the verb as the complex “is-being-hit”  then
we have the first component “is”, marking the tense, the second component,
“being” marking passivity, and the third component, “hit” identifying the
lexical meaning.



In other words, in modern English we mark the verb for passivity.  In
classical and koine Greek passivity is marked by an appropriate
prepositional phrase identifying the agent of passivity.



4.  This brings us to another issue.  What if we have a construction such as
“Peter himself-hit.”  In general we can view the verb as either middle or as
passive with an implied agent.  This is where the “Carl Conrad Rule of
Medio-Passivity” come into play.



Some time ago (a year, perhaps longer) some one wrote on this list that in a
scriptural verse (I forget which verse) he understood the Greek verb to have
a “middle force”, whereas he saw the same verse in the KJV translation as
being passive (with an implied agent).  Some one else chimed in saying that
was another case of the KJV getting it wrong.  Those are words that I want
to verify myself and not take at face value.  So I looked at the verse in
question and chuckled to myself.  What they saw in the English as a passive
(with an implied agent) I saw as intransitive.  Therefore, I thought the AV
got it exactly right, even translating the ambiguity of the Greek (middle or
passive with implied agent) to an English gloss with ambiguity (intransitive
or passive with implied agent).



If one comes to a reading with middle in mind, then you will read it as
middle or if you come with passive in mind you will tend to read it
accordingly.



5.  Now let me drop a wrench into what I have constructed.  Some verbs
regularly use both a middle form and a passive form.  We can think that they
are just duplicates of one another in some form of transition stage.  Or we
can think that the passive form is “encoding” for passivity and the middle
form is “encoding” for a middle force.  This is what I think is happening.



So with this exception, I tend to think of a passive form as middle rather
than passive with an implied agent.



John Sanders

Suzhou, China


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