re: Aorist Imperative form of Mark 1:3
DWILKINS@ucrac1.ucr.edu
Thu, 5 Sep 1996 9:52:53 -0700 (PDT)
Amen and Amen on everything, Carl. I realize now that Will Wager's "hyper-
translation" term is one that is useful for the classroom, a good way to
identify a hyperbole like "once for all". Unfortunately, my experience has
been that students tend to take such terms and explanations very literally,
and easily confuse contextual elements with grammatical. For the benefit of
the listers who may not know what I'm talking about, NT grammars in particular
(Dana & Mantey being one of the most common examples) tend to multiply cate-
gories of meaning for for tenses and cases, etc. based largely on the ways
they are interpreted in particular contexts. Most of us who studied Greek in
college or seminary dutifully learned these categories practically as gospel
truth. I still concede that they can be useful to aid us in communicating how
we interpret a particular grammatical construction in a given context, but in
reality these contextual nuances probably are just that, and not true features
of the grammatical contructions themselves. Moreover, when one learns a
"hypertranslation" term like "once for all" whose validity is true only in a
minority of contexts, it can do more harm than good unless the teacher or
self-taught student is very careful to view the term as hypertranslation.
Don Wilkins
UC Riverside