[B-Greek] 2 Thess. 2:6-7--two proposals

frjsilver at optonline.net frjsilver at optonline.net
Thu Mar 1 20:09:02 EST 2007


Dear Friends --

Carl Conrad is spot on here.

Consider how hO LOGOS SARX EGENETO is variously rendered:  'was made flesh', 'became flesh', etc.

It's clear that GINOMAI is a *very* flexible verb.  It ranges from 'become' to 'happen' to 'made to be', and so its wide-ranging semantic field must be plowed in furrows of context without hard and fast minimums of meaning which might belong in some other row of seeds.

Latin, on the other hand, is rather rigid in this regard, and depends very heavily on inflections of _facere_ to express nuances of Greek GINOMAI, almost all of which*must* be understood and translated as passives.  For well or ill, there's an unmistakeable and almost unavoidable Latin influence on our translations into English of scriptural, liturgical, and virtually all the Christian texts of antiquity.  

Remaining aware of this Latinitis lurking in the background of most of our familiar English-language experience of these words, we have to resist it and rely only to the texts at hand without appealing --even subconsciously -- to intermediate translations or their influence. 

BTW:  Please don't think of me as accusing anyone of these faults --  they're merely my observations on the problem in the abstract.

KALE TESSARAKOSTE!

Father James Silver

Monk James
Orthodox Church in America

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl W. Conrad" 
Date: Thursday, March 1, 2007 7:36 pm
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] 2 Thess. 2:6-7--two proposals
To: Webb 
Cc: 'B-Greek' 

> 
> On Mar 1, 2007, at 6:23 PM, Webb wrote:
> 
> > Dear Carl,
> >
> > You gave EGEIRW as an example of a verb that can sometimes be 
> > construed as
> > either middle or passive. But the difference between EGEIRW 
> and 
> > GINOMAI is
> > that EGEIRW can be transitive, and GINOMAI cannot. HGERQH EK 
> MESOU 
> > could
> > mean either "got up out of the middle" or "was lifted out from 
> the 
> > middle".
> 
> HGERQH is, of course, the aorist of EGEIROMAI. Yes, there is an 
> active EGEIRW, but the primary verb really is the middle; the 
> active 
> form is causative. More often than not we see HGERQH used 
> without any 
> hUPO + genitive agent construction; some would prefer to 
> translate it 
> always as "was raised" and call it some such thing as a "divine 
> passive" (a designation I've always thought amusing). I would 
> prefer 
> to English HGERQH as "he rose." Although this verb is sometimes 
> used 
> in the active in the sense of "erect" a structure, it is most 
> commonly used of persons rising or awaking.
> 
> Nevertheless I think that there are frequent occasions when we 
> might 
> wish to understand GINOMAI without an agent-construction as 
> essentially passive, as in the petition of the LP: GENHQHTW TO 
> QELHMA SOU (Mt 6:10) -- I should note that I think GENHQHTW is 
> simply 
> an alternative form of GENESQW. We could understand this 
> petition as 
> "May your will come to be" -- but how is that supposed to happen 
> 
> unless someone obediently performs God's will? It makes good 
> sense, 
> therefore, to English the petition as "May your w1ll be done."
> 
> > Unless there was absolutely no other way the sentence could 
> make 
> > sense, I
> > can't see a reason to express GINOMAI EK MESOU as something 
> beyond 
> > (1) "gets
> > out of the way" or (2) "gets [under his own power] out of the 
> > situation".
> > And I think each of those readings makes good sense in and of 
> > itself in 2
> > Thess. 2:7. For example, looking at option (1):
> >
> > The lawless one is going to appear at some future point. 
> There's only
> > (MONOS) one thing holding him back: the restrainer (hO 
> KATECWN), 
> > who, at
> > some future point, will presumably stop restraining, and at 
> which 
> > point the
> > lawless one will appear. I reckon that the idea of "to stop 
> > restraining" can
> > be expressed equally well as "to get out of the way" (GINOMAI 
> EK 
> > MESOU).
> > What's wrong with that? Particularly in view of the fact that 
> the 
> > writer
> > personalizes the restrainer by calling him hO KATECWN, not 
> just TO 
> > KATECON,
> > the presumption is that this personal force has the option of 
> > restraining so
> > long, and then stopping. If "until he gets out of the way" 
> sounds 
> > like an
> > unlikely rendering of ARTI hEWS EK MESOU GENHTAI, I'd like to 
> hear 
> > your
> > reason for thinking so. Otherwise I can't see what would 
> induce me to
> > imagine another implied actor, who has the supposed role of 
> > removing the
> > restrainer from the place where he metaphorically stands 
> restraining.>
> > On the assumption that you've encountered the verb GINOMAI in 
> tens of
> > thousands of instances, I accept your statement it's not out 
> of the 
> > question
> > that GINOMAI can occasionally carry have an implicit passive 
> sense. 
> > So once
> > again, the question I'd have is, wouldn't that be the last 
> option, 
> > in the
> > case that a middle sense, "action performed by the subject and 
> 
> > involving the
> > subject", didn't seem possible?
> 
> We need to distinguish what we understand the Greek formulation 
> to 
> mean and how we choose to English the idea expressed in the 
> Greek 
> formulation. I think that in the context hEWS EK MESOU GENHTAI 
> does 
> mean -- in the Greek, "until he gets out of the center of 
> things." 
> That is expressed with maximal economy, and I don't think that 
> most 
> who want to English it would be satisfied with that formulation. 
> One 
> might use, "until he's gone" and perhaps that would be 
> sufficient, 
> BUT if the interpreter supposes that this exit of the restrainer 
> 
> comes about through some instrumentality or agency beyond the 
> "restrainer's" intention, the interpreter may prefer to English 
> the 
> formulation as "until he is removed." I wouldn't quarrel with 
> that; I 
> would simply emphasize that there is not a one-to-one 
> correspondence 
> between how we understand the semantic force of the Greek and 
> how we 
> choose to make it intelligible in English.
> 
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
> 1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
> cwconrad2 at mac.com
> WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Carl W. Conrad [mailto:cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu]
> > Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 2:01 PM
> > To: Webb
> > Cc: 'B-Greek'
> > Subject: Re: [B-Greek] 2 Thess. 2:6-7--two proposals
> >
> >
> > On Mar 1, 2007, at 3:02 PM, Webb wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Dear Oun,
> >> 1. Difference btw active vs passive -- may it have something 
> to do
> >> with the nature of 'middle' in Gk?
> >
> > What it really has to do with is the fact that the forms labeled
> > middle-passive and passive (QH) all, when intransitive, bear the
> > sense "enter into state X." The nearest English equivalent is 
> "get" +
> > predicate word (which may be a participle): GINOMAI is the
> > quintessential middle-passive verb that can quite readily be
> > Englished (usually) as "get" or "come to be" with a predicate word.
> >
> >> Not to me, it doesn't. It has to do with my understanding that
> >> GINOMAI is
> >> strictly an intransitive verb. It never EVER takes an object. 
> If a
> >> verb
> >> can't take an object, you can't turn it into a passive. In English,
> >> for
> >> example, the verb "to be" doesn't take an object. Like 
> GINOMAI, it
> >> can take
> >> a predicate nominative or a predicate adjective and whatnot, 
> but it
> >> can't
> >> take an object. If a verb (let's say X is a verb) is capable 
> of being
> >> transitive, then it is capable of taking an object. "I X this
> >> thing." For
> >> the most part, that also means that I can use the object as the
> >> subject, and
> >> throw the verb into the passive voice to express an equivalent
> >> statement:
> >> "This thing is Xed by me". But you can't say "I am ammed". 
> There 
> >> is no
> >> passive voice for the verb "to be", or for any strictly
> >> intransitive verb.
> >> So in 2 Thess. 2:7, whatever GENHTAI means, it can't mean that
> >> something
> >> else acts on the subject of the verb. Whatever action there 
> is, is
> >> carried
> >> out by the subject. From my limited knowledge of Greek, ARTI hEWS
> >> EK MESOU
> >> GENHTAI can't possibly mean "until he is taken out of the
> >> way" (pace KJV,
> >> NASB, NIV, NCV, NRSV, TEV).
> >
> > Of course GENHTAI can't mean that something else acts on the subject
> > of the verb -- but that may be implicit as it is always 
> implicit in a
> > MP form: GINETAI EK MESOU means "gets to be out-of-the-way, 
> out-of-
> > the-scene, off-the-table, out-of-this-world, out-of-this-
> life." Just
> > as EGEIRETAI means "enters into a waking (or upright) state" 
> it is
> > open to interpretation as "awakes" or "gets awakened." While I think
> > one ought to understand this ambivalence of the Greek MP form, I
> > don't really have any objection to understanding EK MESOU 
> GINETAI as
> > "gets removed" (passive) or "gets out of the way" (intransitive/
> > ergative: the subject may simply leave the center of action or 
> he/she> may be forcibly removed by an external agent.
> >
> > I have no quarrel with BDAG's entry on this passage.
> >
> > BDAG, s.v. GINOMAI: EK T. OURANWN G.
> > 6. to make a change of location in space, move
> > b. EK TINOS (Job 28:2): γ. EK MESOU be removed, Lat. e medio tolli
> > (cp. Ps.-Aeschin., Ep. 12, 6 EK MESOU GENOMENWN EKEINWN; Plut.,
> > Timol. 238 [5, 3]; Achilles Tat. 2, 27, 2) 2 Th 2:7 (HFulford, 
> ET 23,
> > 1912, 40f: 'leave the scene'). Of a voice fr. heaven: EK T.
> > OURANWN G. sound forth fr. heaven (2 Macc 2:21; cp. Da 4:31 Theod.)
> > Mk 1:11; Lk 3:22; 9:35; cp. vs. 36.
> >
> >
> >> 2. It should be 'And now you know what's ~ ', not 'And you know
> >> what's now
> >> ~'
> >> I've got a lot of translations in front of me, including Lattimore,
> >> who is
> >> not particularly influenced by the English bible translation
> >> tradition. No
> >> one them takes NUN with OIDATE. I'm inclined to trust them on this.
> 
> 
> 
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