John 12:49

From: Dale M. Wheeler (dalemw@teleport.com)
Date: Sat Sep 28 1996 - 13:59:50 EDT


In chasing the various uses of AUTOS, I ran into another
interesting structure in John 12:49.

hO PEMYAS ME PATHR AUTOS MOI ENTOLHN DEDWKEN...

Starting with the KJV (not criticising, just observing)
the translations make PATHR the subject and translate
hO PEMYAS as if it were Adjectival (the one who...) to
PATHR. Following that logic, the NASB then makes AUTOS
go with PATHR as well and translates "The Father Himself..."
(I'm personally more inclined to see AUTOS as redundantly
picking up the preceding phrase and thus acting as the
pronomial subject of DEDWKEN; cf., esp., the use of
EKEINOS in the same structure in John 5:37; sorry again
Don; I asure you that I don't go around bashing the
NASB all the time, indeed that's the version I feel
most comfortable teaching from, esp., the NT; as I
tell my students, I'm an equal opportunity translation
basher...sometimes its the NIV, sometimes the NRSV, etc.,
though I do attempt to praise all when they do a
particularly good job handling some difficult Greek and
Hebrew).

But I'm wondering if the article with PEMYAS and the fact
that PATHR is anarthrous (not to mention the word order...
so I won't mention it :-) )indicates that the Subst Ptc
should be read as the Subject with PATHR as either
Predicate or in Apposition. John has written the same
or very similar thing with PEMPW in 5:37; 7:28; 8:16,
18, 26; 14:24).

If the Ptc is the subject, it seems to me that even in
an English translation PATHR would become more emphatic;
viz., "The One who sent me, (namely) the Father, He gave..."

This question/observation relates to the next round of
electronic text tagging (which we've discussed on the
Hellenistic Greek forum), namely indicating what each
word is doing in a sentence, what is related to it in
that sentence, etc. (this is a simple example of the
kind of thing that needs exhaustive (or is that
exhausting) study to determine if there are solid
patterns or if we are faced with the individual style
of authors (if I remember correctly, that discussion
began with a query about thesis topics...).

***********************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Th.D.
Research Professor in Biblical Languages Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street Portland, OR 97220
Voice: 503-251-6416 FAX:503-254-1268 E-Mail: dalemw@teleport.com
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