[B-Greek] Justin and objective genitives

Richard Smith rbs58 at comcast.net
Tue Mar 8 06:54:57 EST 2011



I think we have as much ambiguity in English, except maybe that we who speak English are more able to discern appropriate contextual clues in the English. 



There is nothing grammatically to distinguish whether the " book of Ehrman" means about, written by, or owned by Ehrman. 



Richard Smith 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Carl Conrad" <cwconrad2 at mac.com> 
To: "Bart D Ehrman" <behrman at email.unc.edu> 
Cc: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org 
Sent: Tuesday, March 8, 2011 5:47:11 AM 
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Justin and objective genitives 


On Mar 8, 2011, at 5:04 AM, Ehrman, Bart D wrote: 

> Mike and Carl, 
> 
>     Thanks for this – I don’t seem to have received Carl’s reply, and so have it only in  Mike’s affirmation of it. 
> 
>     Could I ask for a further explanation?  I’m not disinclined to agree in principle, but I don’t fully understand.  You seem to be saying (at least at the end) that grammar cannot be used to decide the meaning of the two words in relation to one another.  But that’s what grammar *does*, isn’t it?  I’m not too worried about the precise labels (“objective genitive” “subjective genitive” “genitive of origin” and so on); my question is really whether the phrase “Memoir + genitive” can mean “Memoir that is about X” as opposed to, say, “Memoir that is written by X” or “Memoir that is owned by X” etc.   And if it can mean “memoir that is about X” what analogies do we have for the usage, apart from instances where the noun is an “active” term of some kind? 

There've been a couple other responses; James Ernest: 

On Mar 7, 2011, at 10:04 PM, James Ernest wrote: 

> fwiw, a blog post on this question last year by a Marquette PhD whose diss 
> is on GosPet: 
> 
> http://earliestchristianity.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/did-justin-martyr-cite-the-gospel-of-peter/ 

and Alistair Haines (in part) 

On Mar 7, 2011, at 9:03 PM, Alastair Haines wrote: 

> Although I don't like pushing for a decisive grammatical point here any more than the others who've replied, in favour of your proposed "action noun", I would think, is its transparent analysability: that is, it's not hard to construe a "verbal" semantic notion from its component morphemes, as an "abstracted action". "A document" is hardly an action noun by default in English, but again, I would think, is quite readily construed as such in certain contexts, because of its association with the verb "to document". 


What I was saying, and what I think Mike Aubrey was agreeing with me about, is that the "grammatical" subcategories "subjective genitive" and "objective genitive" aren't really "encoded" in the Greek construction; rather they are interpretations based on context, one element of which context is the presence of a verbal noun. I would prefer to call these subcategories "translation strategies" that may sometimes be applied as a blade to cut a Gordian knot. Such a Gordian knot is the much-disputed GNT phrase πίστις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (PISTIS IHSOU CRISTOU) of the last decade or more. There's nothing about the word PISTIS that can determine the intended sense of the genitive IHSOU CRISTOU. And so here there's nothing about  the noun APOMNHMONEUMA that can resolve whether the memo was produced BY "him" or produced CONCERNING "him." 
Moreover, APOMNHMONEUMA (ἀπομνημονεῦμα)  with its -MA (-μα)  nominal stem should indicate something produced by an action rather than an action itsself, which might be APOMNHMONEUSIS (ἀπομνημονεῦσις). 

Unfortunately, however, it's still not even that simple; we have to steer clear of the etymological fallacy, i.e. we should be careful not to claim that a -μα (-MA) noun can not ever refer to the process of annotation. It's been noted, I think, that -μος (-MOS) and -μα (-MA) nouns can overlap in usage (the problem of ἁρπαγμός [hARPAGMOS} in Phil. 2:6). But even if APOMNHMONEUMA is conceded to be a verbal noun of action, the determination of whether the genitive attached to it is "subjective" or "objective" is an interpretative determination rather than a grammatical one. There's nothing about the grammatical construction that will clarify whether APOMNHMONEUMASIN AUTOU means "his notes" or "notes about him." That's all I'm saying, and it hardly seems like something to waste that many words on. 

Carl W. Conrad 
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired) 

> ________________________________ 
> From: Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> 
> To: "Ehrman, Bart D" <behrman at email.unc.edu> 
> Cc: "b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org> 
> Sent: Mon, March 7, 2011 1:28:00 PM 
> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Justin and objective genitives 
> 
> 
> On Mar 7, 2011, at 4:12 PM, Ehrman, Bart D wrote: 
> 
>> Greekers, 
>> 
>>   There is a much disputed passage in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, which may indicate (or not) that he was familiar with a Gospel of Peter: 
>> 
>> Καὶ τὸ εἰπεῖν μετωνομακέναι αὐτὸν Πέτρον ἕνα τῶν ἀποστολῶν, καὶ γεγράφθαι ἐν τοῖς ἀπομνημονεύμασιν αὐτοῦ γεγενημένον καὶ τοῦτο, μετὰ καὶ ἄλλους δύο ἀδελφοῦς, υἱοῦς Ζεβεδαίου ὄντας, ἐπωνομακέναι ὀνόματι Βοανεργές, ὅ ἐστιν υἱοῖ βροντῆς.... Dial 106.3 
> 
> [KAI TO EIPEIN METWNOMAKENAI AUTON PETRON hENA TWN APOSTOLWN, KAI GEGRAFQAI EN TOIS APOMNHMONEUMASIN AUTOU GEGENHMENON KAI TOUTO, META KAI ALLOUS DUO ADELFOUS, hUIOUS ZEBEDAIOU ONTAS, EPWNOMAKENAI ONOMATI BOANERGES, hO ESTIN hUIOI BRONTHS.... Dial 106.3] 
> 
>>   Justin refers to the “Memoirs” on fifteen occasions in his writings; most of the time the term occurs with a genitive of origin or source: “the Memoirs of the apostles.”  In one instance Justin states unequivocally what he means – these are “the Gospels”: οἱ γὰρ ἀπόστολοι ἐν τοῖς γενομένοις ὑπ’ αὐτῶν ἀπομνημονεύμασιν, ἅ καλεῖται εὐαγγέλια (I Apol. 66.3). 
>> 
>>   In the passage I’m interested in, Dialogue 106.3, the debate is over whether he is referring to the Gospel of Peter (presumably, though not certainly, the same as discovered in the Akhmim fragment in 1886-87), the Gospel of Mark (as the “memoirs of Peter” as in Papias), or the “Gospel of Jesus.”  In the latter case, the genitive in the phrase ἐν τοῖς ἀπομνημονεύμασιν αὐτοῦ is some kind of objective genitive – the Gospel that has Jesus as its object. 
>> 
>>   My question is not about the relative plausibility of any of these options per se (I think he’s referring to a Gospel of Peter and, personally, find the Mark option implausible), but about the claim that this is probably (or could be) an objective genitive.  An objective genitive, of course, is used with nouns that imply some kind of action: love, hate, vision, and so on.  Does απομνημονευματα count as a noun of action? 
> 
> I would not think so. On the other hand, I am rather dubious of the distinction made between "subjective" and "objective" genitives on the basis of whether the head noun is a noun of action. I think that any genitive of this sort attached to a noun like APOMNHMONEUMATA could mean either "notations of (made by) X" or "notations of (concerning) X." Of course, had the author taken pains to make a differentiation clear, s/he might have written APOMNHMONEUMATA GEGRAMMENA hUPO + gen. or APOMNHMONEUMATA PERI TOU/TWN ... But I really don't think there's any grammatical rule that will resolve the question whether he intended these memos to be "composed by him" or to be "concerning him." I just don't think the question can be resolved on a grammatical basis. Sorry. 




--- 
B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek 
B-Greek mailing list 
B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org 
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek 



More information about the B-Greek mailing list