[B-Greek] Justin and objective genitives

Brian Abasciano bvabasciano at gmail.com
Tue Mar 8 11:00:19 EST 2011


Mike,

Hopefully you didn’t think I was criticizing your comment. It was perfectly fine and appropriate. I was just making a little joke. I have immense respect for Carl’s knowledge of Greek and almost always find myself agreeing with him (though not always). Having his regular commenting on the list is a real treat. When I saw your pithy comment, I thought it would be funny to give voice to some of this with a pithy response.

Brian Abasciano


From: Michael Aubrey 
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 10:48 AM
To: Brian Abasciano ; b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org 
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Justin and objective genitives

I had started to provide Dr. Ehrman with an actual reply of my own, but I saw Carl's response before I got very far. 

No need for repetition.

But if the question isn't clear...here are a couple more voices of agreement:

Moises Silva's discussion of genitives in his delightful little book Interpreting Galatians says the essentially the same thing about διʼ ἀποκαλύψεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (DI' APOKALUPSEWS IHSOU XRISTOU) in Galatians 1:12:

"One could argue that the context itself seems to be leading us in different directions: the first part of 1:12a suggests a subjective genitive, while 1:16 supports an objective genitive. When faced by a difficult choice of this type, some interpreters look for a solution that allows them to bypass it. Accordingly, it has become increasingly popular to argue that genitives could be both subjective and objective. We are even told that this approach avoids false dichotomies and that it does more justice to the richness of Paul’s thought. Unfortunately, this solution confuses concept with grammar, and perhaps even theologizing with exegesis. It may well be true that both of the concepts (Christ is the revealer as well as the One revealed) are consonant with Pauline thought and are related. Moreover, since this very passage teaches both the divine origin of the gospel and the fact that it came to Paul when God revealed his Son, we could argue that either interpretation is viable and that the apostle was merely relating the nouns to each other in a general (indeed, vague) fashion. But it is important to appreciate that, if we do so, we are not really saying that the apostle, because of his rich thought, had both grammatical ideas in mind. Rather, we would be suggesting that he did not have any specific syntactical connection in view; that is, imprecision, rather than fullness, characterizes the expression."


Moisés Silva, Interpreting Galatians: Explorations in Exegetical Method, 67-68.


Silva also has a footnote a few pages earlier (page 65n2) here commenting:


"I owe to James Voelz the following observation: What is expressed in Greek through the genitive case is often expressed in English by simply juxtaposing two nouns, such as shoe sale, fire sale, garage sale. Note that it is simply our knowledge of the situational context that makes it perfectly clear to us that the first example is the equivalent of an objective genitive (a store is selling shoes); the second, something like a genitive of source (selling goods rescued from a fire); the third, genitive of place (selling goods in a garage). In other words, we are dealing with a very elementary and simple phenomenon."

http://www.amazon.com/Interpreting-Galatians-Explorations-Exegetical-Method/dp/080102305X

Silva's book is one of the few handbooks/introductions to exegetical method that I find tolerable--and thankfully, I also find it much, much more than merely "tolerable"!

Mike Aubrey
http://evepheso.wordpress.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Brian Abasciano <bvabasciano at gmail.com>
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Tue, March 8, 2011 7:09:02 AM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Justin and objective genitives

Mike said "Carl is right."

Isn't he usually?

Brian Abasciano

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