anarthrous noun in Romans 10:4

Jim West jwest at Highland.Net
Thu Feb 4 17:44:26 EST 1999


At 09:05 PM 2/4/99 -0600, you wrote:
>I am sorry if you get this message twice.  My mailer keeps trying to send
the message to bgreek without the hyphen.
>
>In Romans 10:4, NOMOU is anarthrous: TELOS GAR NOMOU CRISTOS EIS 
>DIKAIOSUNHN PANTI TWi PISTEUONTI.  Accordingly, one commentary says that 
>Paul is talking about law in general and not the Law of Moses.  Can a case 
>be made for NOMOU being definite? 

All of the commentaries I checked (Kasemann, Dunn, Wilckens, Alford) so take
it (i.e.- as definite).  The grammars (Blass-Debrunner, Robertson,
Moulton/Turner) dont even list Rom 10:4 in the index (so that it is not very
special, unique, or unusual).  Likewise the versions I checked (Danish,
French, German, Italian, and Hebrew) all have the definite article...

> I notice that none of the nouns here 
>have articles, yet CRISTOS is definite.  Can we assume that TELOS is 
>definite?  Would it be unusual for NOMOU, which modifies TELOS, to be 
>definite in this case?

Christ is the end of the Law.....   That is the plain meaning of the Greek
sentence.

>
>David R. Mills
>ESL Instructor
>Creighton University

Best,


Jim
+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Jim West, ThD
Quartz Hill School of Theology

jwest at highland.net
http://web.infoave.net/~jwest




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