Recitative Ὅτε in Oratio Recta ATR 1027-28
Posted: November 3rd, 2015, 5:31 pm
I was having some difficulty following Robertson's discussion of "Recitative Ὅτε in Oratio Recta":
The highlighted sentence introduces what appears to be incoherence, why introduce an example the doesn't support your argument? After rereading it half a dozen times I mentally replaced "can be" with "might be" which would suggest that we want to read it as Oratio Recta for the sake of the argument. So perhaps this is just a side comment which reworded "Mt. 7:23 is ambiguous and might be understood as u]indirect[/u] discourse ..." in which case wouldn't we be better off not citing it in the first place? Perhaps I am overlooking the value of Mt. 7:23 as an example since this ambiguity is important to understand when dealing with the Oratio Recta / Oratio Obliqa distinction. Robertson frequently nuances his argument in a manner that makes it hard to follow.9. INDIRECT DISCOURSE (Oratio Obliqua). pp. 1027-28
(a) Recitative Ὅτε in Oratio Recta.
{snip ...)
We find this idiom occasionally with ὅτι, more seldom with ὡς, in the
Attic writers.2 It is very rare3 in the LXX, since the Hebrew so
frequently has a special participle like ‘saying.’ But see Gen. 28:
16. In the N. T. Jannaris4 counts 120 instances of recitative ὅτι.
The idiom appears chiefly in the historical books. See Mt. 7:23,
ὁμολογήσω ὅτι οὐδέποτε ἔγνων ὑμᾶς. This particular instance can be
looked upon as indirect discourse, since the person is the same in
both clauses and the tense and mode are unaffected. It is prob-
able that indirect declarative clauses grew out of constructions of
this nature. But in Mt. 27:43, εἶπεν ὅτι θεοῦ εἰμὶ υἱός, there is
no doubt at all.