From: Jeffrey Gibson (jgibson@acfsysv.roosevelt.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 21 1997 - 00:28:30 EST
On Sat, 20 Dec 1997, Paul F. Evans wrote:
> Jeffery,
>
> Could it not be that to make sense of translating the genitive EI hUIOS EI
> TOU QEOU requires the definite article in English. I don't think that we
> need to resort to hermeneutics in order to discover the reason for its
> presence in the English. How the hUIOS in the context is to be understood
> is a different matter. My money is on the notion that the noun in a
> genitive construction can still have specificity in spite of the absence of
> the article, as Fee suggests is true in many construction where Paul uses
> PNEUMA. I guess I don't buy into the notion that the absence of the article
> automatically means that the noun is "unqualified." However, the experts on
> the list will have to adjudicate that!
I would agree with you that the address has specificity. But that does not
mean that the translation "*the* Son of God", is demanded, let alone
implied by the grammar of the text. As Paul Dixon noted, the translation
of hUIOS TOU QEOU by "God's Son" fills the bill without violating the
wording. I was trying to point out that the context of the address seems
also to demand that "God's Son" and not "the Son of God" is how the
address should be rendered. If hermeneutics is being resorted to, it is on
the part of those who see the address as deictic. For it seems that they
want to ignore the implications of the text that Jesus is being tested as
God's Son Israel was once tested, and that the overiding theme of the
story in which the address is found is Jesus adherence to the duties by
which Israel was constrained to show covenant faitfulness, in favour of
reading the text against backgrounds of certain alleged expectations of
what the Messiah was supposed to do. For it is the assumption that the
phrase hUIOS TOU QEOU *is* deictic, and therefore is a Messianic title,
equivalent to "Deliverer", that undergirds this interpretation.
Jeffrey Gibson
jgibson@acfsysv.roosevelt.edu
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