Hi Jonathan,jonathan.borland wrote:Dear Fellow B-Greekers,
I've read this thread with interest, and also Mike Aubrey's insightful blog posts, but still don't remember seeing any good examples that would negate Güting's statement, that "με ist in den Varianten, die ποιησω haben, ungrammatisch" (Heinrich Greeven, Textkritik des Markusevangeliums [ed. Eberhard W. Güting; Münster: LIT Verlag, 2005], 521). Are we saying (or surmising) that με is an ungrammatical slang that Mark chose to use? It's interesting to see so many conjectures on what the με means in this construction, especially if με ποιησω is, as Greeven reasoned (520), merely a halfhearted correction that betrays that the scribe knew the reading με ποιησαι.
Jonathan C. Borland
I was originally convinced that Mark 10:36 as represented by the NA27 *was* ungrammatical. However, I have thoroughly changed my mind on the issue. The point of what I've written on my blog was precisely to determine whether or not the construction is acceptable. The fact is that we are dealing with a construction (V+Vsubjunctive) that is incredibly rare in literary texts and probably relatively common place in spoken Greek. The result of this situation is (as I've said in the comments of my most recent blog post on the verse "Textual History and Mark 10:36") where there are probably less than 300 instances of the construction across the literary history of the language. My own searches have been limited to all of the texts available in Perseus' digital library, Philo, the Apostolic Fathers, the LXX, and the Greek OT Pseudepigrapha and I have found less than 50 instances of the V+Vsubjunctive construction with or without an intervening pronoun of any kind. I doubt there are more than a couple hundred instances total in available texts. We do know, however, that θέλω with its modal meaning can take as an object what would normally be the subject of the second clause from other examples. Between Stephen Carlson and myself, we've found some nice parallels from other types of (equally rare) complementation:
Mine:
4 Baruch 3.13 καὶ οὐ θέλω αὐτὸν ἵνα ἴδῃ τὸν ἀφανισμὸν τῆς πόλεως ταύτης
Matthew 27:43 ῥυσάσθω νῦν εἰ θέλει αὐτόν
Stephen's:
Dorotheus of Gaza, Doctrinae 14.155: θέλει ἡμᾶς ἵνα θλίβωμεν αὐτὸν.
Dorotheus, Doctrinae 7.87: ᾔδει γὰρ ὅτι εἰ ἤθελεν αὐτὸν ὁ Θεὸς ἵνα μέλι φάγῃ, καὶ τὸ ὀζόμενον ἔλαιον μετέτρεπεν εἰς μέλι.
The majority of those don't even use θέλω, but instead βούλομαι. The fact that the construction is so rare in literary Greek, combined with the reality that modern scholars have no access to actual speakers is precisely the reason why scholars (even those who know the language quite well) consistently treat it as ungrammatical. They only really know literary Greek and not spoken Greek.
All of that to say, I would consider Greeven's proposal to be a quite good one, *if* it were not for the fact that he assume the appearance of the pronoun is ungrammatical from the get-go. But the με is grammatical. And once we recognize that, there's no reason why the με cannot be original. In that way, the με does the exact opposite of what Greeven suggests: the με is precisely what caused the impetus from the change to the infinitive (which is the more acceptable literary/written form anyway that a scribe would likely want to change it to).
In terms of textual criticism, the problem with this case is that there are too many plausible possibilities. It is entirely possible that Greeven is right--I'm sure when Holmes did the text for the SBLGNT he followed a similar train of thought. But once you recognize that the με is grammatical (and it is), then there's really no way to choosing between Greeven's proposal and the text of the NA27.