1Cor.11:13 Ἐν ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς κρίνατε· A classical reflexive?

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Stephen Carlson
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Re: 1Cor.11:13 Ἐν ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς κρίνατε· A classical reflexive

Post by Stephen Carlson »

MAubrey wrote:I take it back. There are some non-reflexive dative's elsewhere.

Sirach 8:14
μὴ δικάζου μετὰ κριτοῦ, κατὰ γὰρ τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ κρινοῦσιν αὐτῷ

Epistle of Barnabas 6.1
Τίς ὁ κρινόμενός μοι;

Matthew 5:40 (a beautiful reciprocal middle btw)
καὶ τῷ θέλοντί σοι κριθῆναι

It seems that if the object is benefactive/malfactive or reciprocal, a dative pronoun works very well, which isn't really surprising.

Still, that's neither here nor there for the topic at hand...sorry about that...
Thanks for looking for counterexamples: it is always a productive exercise, but here I think the verb frames are sufficiently different so as not to illuminate 1 Cor 11:13. In Sir 8:14, κρίνειν τινί has the meaning "prefer someone" (cf. BDAG κρίνω 1, NRSV's translation "will favor him"), which is inapt for 1 Cor 11:13 (it does not mean "prefer those among you(rselves)" in this context). In Barn 6:1 and Matt 5:40, the verb is middle/passive and means here "dispute with someone," especially legally, i.e, "sue someone" (BDAG κρίνω 5aβ), but κρίνατε is not middle in 1 Cor 11:13, nor does it appear to mean "dispute with those among you" in context.

I'm currently doing a major research project on 1 Cor 11:2-16 (hence I'm particularly interested the topic), and I have yet to see your interpretation in the literature. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but that doesn't mean it's self-evidently correct either.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Stephen Carlson
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Re: 1Cor.11:13 Ἐν ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς κρίνατε· A classical reflexive

Post by Stephen Carlson »

MAubrey wrote: It's just a non-referential 3rd person pronoun.
Mulling over this for a while, I'm not aware of any example or grammatical treatment of αὐτός that is non-referential. The traditional treatment is that αὐτός etc. is either intensive (as with Latin ipse), anaphoric (as with Latin eum), or asserts identicality (as with Latin idem). This, of course, understates of the complexity of its uses. Am I overlooking anything?
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Barry Hofstetter

Re: 1Cor.11:13 Ἐν ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς κρίνατε· A classical reflexive

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Stephen Carlson wrote:
MAubrey wrote: It's just a non-referential 3rd person pronoun.
Mulling over this for a while, I'm not aware of any example or grammatical treatment of αὐτός that is non-referential. The traditional treatment is that αὐτός etc. is either intensive (as with Latin ipse), anaphoric (as with Latin eum), or asserts identicality (as with Latin idem). This, of course, understates of the complexity of its uses. Am I overlooking anything?
All summary treatments understate the complexity of the language (or, as Ray Dillard was fond of saying, if you teach a beginning language, you have to lie a lot). Be that as it may, right or wrong I've always conceptualized αὐτός in the classical reflexive as a species of the intensive, which fits well with what you are saying here.
Stephen Hughes
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Re: 1Cor.11:13 Ἐν ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς κρίνατε· A classical reflexive

Post by Stephen Hughes »

FWIW, I thought Mike was referring to something like the demonstrative pronouns in John 13:11 and Acts 3:9, where the pronoun is required by the syntax, and so has only a formal rather than a semantic function in the constructions in which it is found.
John 13:11 wrote:ᾜδει γὰρ τὸν παραδιδόντα αὐτόν·
Acts 3:10 wrote:καὶ ἐπλήσθησαν θάμβους καὶ ἐκστάσεως ἐπὶ τῷ συμβεβηκότι αὐτῷ.
In those two cases, the demonstrative can't be taken as referring to either "this one who was betraying" or to "this thing that happened".

Although I don't necessarily agree or disagree with it, I thought the αὐτοῖς in 1 Corinthians 11:13 was a case where Mike thought the pronoun was formally used, without the freedom to be taken with the prepositional phrase Ἐν ὑμῖν.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
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