[B-Greek] TADE in Revelation
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Mar 17 06:14:28 EST 2006
My reaction was to the original assertion, "The demonstrative hODE
had pretty much gone out of use AT THE TIME OF THE NT." What
disturbed me was the apparent implication that the GNT is a corpus
representative of the standard usage of Hellenistic Greek.
Unquestionably the GNT is composed in Hellenistic Greek of several
different levels but there's a sizable body of surviving Greek
literature outside of Biblical Greek, and the reference works you
cite here are fundamentally concerned with Biblical Greek. I am
perhaps overly sensitive to claims about Biblical Greek being fully
representative of Hellenistic Greek generally. I apologize if I came
across as being prickly.
On Mar 17, 2006, at 1:49 AM, Iver Larsen wrote:
>> Granted that TADE appears only 8x in Rev and other forms of hODE
>> only 2x in the GNT, it is not true that hODE is
>> obsolete in Hellenistic Greek. TADE as pointed forward to cited
>> material or a list and functioning more or less like
>> a colon in modern punctuation is standard Greek from pretty far
>> back and is found in Philo and Josephus and the
>> early church fathers. I don't doubt that TADE LEGEI in the LXX
>> commonly conveys Hebrew COH AMAR IHWH, but the common
>> usage reflects standard traditional Greek usage of TADE.
>>
>> Carl W. Conrad
>
>
> I made my other comment before receiving this one, but maybe I
> should comment on this, too.
>
> Since I have no resources to check usage outside of the LXX and the
> GNT, I was relying on statements like the following:
>
> BDF (§289) says "hODE is almost never used in the NT outside the
> formula TADE LEGEI (introductory as in classical)...and
> because it belongs to the literary and no longer to the living
> idiom, it is not always used correctly at that." BDF
> further says that the usage in Luke 10:39 appears to be dependent
> on the LXX which renders Hebrew hinneh by THiDE in
> Genesis. (My comment: The Hebrew discourse particle hinneh is
> rendered in many different ways. Genesis also renders
> vehinneh as KAI EUQUS in Genesis, which is interesting for Marcan
> studies, but that is a different topic.)
>
> BAGD under the entry for hODE cites Mayser as stating that it is
> "rare in both" (the inscriptions and the papyri, I
> presume).
>
> When I looked at the usage in the LXX again, I noticed that 78% of
> all occurrences of hODE were in the formula TADE
> LEGEI (356 out of 454). In the NT 8 out of 10 is also in the form
> TADE LEGEI which is the same percentage, although the
> overall usage is much less frequent for all forms of hODE in the NT
> compared to the LXX.
> So, it appears to me that
> 1) hODE has always been used mainly in this particular formula,
> like the modern colon as Carl puts it.
> 2) both hODE in general and TADE LEGEI in particular are
> significantly less frequent in Hellenistic Greek compared to
> LXX Greek (I cannot check Classical Greek)
>
> Iver Larsen
>
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Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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