Perhaps we were too deeply engrossed in the great John 8:58 debate! But you
have learned the secret: persist!
In John 16:9-11, we have a MEN-DE
>construction with three clauses:
>
>PERI hAMARTIAS MEN, hOTI OU PISTEUOUSIN EIS EME
>PERI DIKAIOSUNHS DE, hO PROS TON PATERA hUPAGW KAI OUKETI QEWREITE ME
>PERI DE KRISEWS, hOTI hO ARXWN TOU KOSMOU TOUTOU KEKRITAI.
>
>The English translations I have seen would be equally valid if
>MEN-DE were not there at all; e.g., the NRSV translates it this way:
>
>"about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness,
>because I am going to the father and you will see me no longer; about
>judgement, because the ruler of this world has been condemned".
>
>How does MEN-DE-DE affect the meaning of the verse? Would it change the
>meaning at all to just omit it, like this:
>
>PERI hAMARTIAS, hOTI OU PISTEUOUSIN EIS EME
>PERI DIKAIOSUNHS, hO PROS TON PATERA hUPAGW KAI OUKETI QEWREITE ME
>PERI KRISEWS, hOTI hO ARXWN TOU KOSMOU TOUTOU KEKRITAI.
Jonathan:
You may be looking for a more profound answer than this, but in fact, the
particles in Greek are often very difficult or impossible to carry over
into English without damaging natural English diction; this is just a
matter of the thought patterns that are habitual to the users of the two
languages. Greek wants to underscore rhetorical structure and nuances of
relationships of clauses to each other. In this instance MEN ... DE ... DE
... serves primarily to set off distinctly the three rhetorical clauses
introduced by PERI + genitive. English tends to do this orally with
rhetorical pauses generally indicated by the commas (remember that
punctuation is a relatively modern invention!). In prose I think we tend to
set off parallel clauses like this by marking them with parenthetical
letters or numbers: (a) respecting sin, because ... , (b) respecting
righteousness/justice, because ..., and (c) respecting judgment, because ...
I hope that helps. I've found that students learn in an early lesson to
translate MEN ... DE ... as "on the one hand ... on the other," because we
see this most commonly paired--but quite frequently we have more than one
DE balancing a MEN. What we really need to do is to understand the
structure and sense of the Greek in its own right and carry that sense over
into an English that has its own appropriate way of structuring that sense,
a way that may often be different from the Greek way. This sense of
idiomatic structures doesn't come overnight but only through continual
reading and re-reading and becoming accustomed to the natural rhythms of
Greek speech so that you THINK the thought of the Greek writer as you read
it rather than attempt to translate it piecemeal into comparable English
units.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/