Re: (To Carl) Two routes to the passive voice

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sat Apr 17 1999 - 09:40:50 EDT


At 9:24 AM -0400 4/17/99, Jim West wrote:
>At 07:07 AM 4/17/99 -0500, you wrote:
>
>>At any rate, Moon's question has prompted me to anticipate the major new
>>item that I intended to add to my revised discussion of tense in the
>>ancient Greek verb. It's only in the last couple years that I have come to
>>think that BOTH the "middle/passive" morphology AND the -QH- morphology
>>much more commonly bear "reflexive" or "deponent" senses, and much less
>>commonly do they bear any real "passive" sense.
>>
>>Carl W. Conrad
>
>This would be true except for one major problem: the writers of the NT are,
>so far as we know it, Jews (except of course "Luke"). Being Jews they bring
>with them their own cultural perspective. Perspective becomes language, and
>language may or may not fall into neat categories. This is such a place.
>For, in my estimation, the middle/passive form verbs are either active or
>truly passive in function- and not so much middle. Why? That old bugaboo,
>the "divine passive". Jews can readily conceive of action in an active
>form, and action in a passive form, but activity in a reflexive form is good
>Greek theology but really bad Hebrew theology.
>
>The notion that Jews writing in Greek would have adopted Greek thought
>patterns does not really seem to hold water. They would have used Greek- to
>communicate Hebrew thought- and theres the rub. The Greek verb may be
>middle/passive in form, but it would be a rare thing indeed for a Hebrew
>thinker to use a Greek thought and make use of a form that had no place,
>really, in their theology.
>
>Now I realize that I am lumping "Jews" together- and that this is not really
>the right thing to do- as Judaism was as fragmented and sectarian in the
>first century as Christianity is today. Still, I think it is VERY important
>to recognize that Hebrew thought (perspectives, whatever you want to call
>it) was different than Greek, the work of James Barr and his cohorts
>notwithstanding. That difference in perspective has to be kept in mind when
>we translate the NT elsewise we will certainly translate poorly.

Not only was Judaism fragmented and sectarian in the first century; even if
you could speak of Palestinian Judaism alone, it is Hellenized Judaism. And
while I readily grant the point Jack Kilmon especially but others as well
keep calling our attention to--that Aramaic phraseology must underly a fair
portion of the oral traditions represented in the Synoptic gospels and in
John's gospel, nevertheless Paul was a Hellenized Jew and much, if not
most, of the GNT was composed by people who spoke and wrote Greek, probably
NOT as an acquired second language. And for that reason, while I grant
there's a bit of truth in what you say, Jim, I honestly think that your
statement,

>The notion that Jews writing in Greek would have adopted Greek thought
>patterns does not really seem to hold water. They would have used Greek- to
>communicate Hebrew thought- and theres the rub. The Greek verb may be
>middle/passive in form, but it would be a rare thing indeed for a Hebrew
>thinker to use a Greek thought and make use of a form that had no place,
>really, in their theology.

represents a very questionable perception of the nature of most of the
Greek of the NT. Granted that none of the Greek of the GNT is Attic Greek,
yet the deviations of the Greek of the GNT from first-century Koine are not
such as to mark off this Greek as a radically different language. I thought
we'd gotten rid of that conception of the Greek of the NT long ago.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/

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