Re: 2 Thess. 6-7
DWILKINS@ucrac1.ucr.edu
Thu, 5 Sep 1996 10:31:30 -0700 (PDT)
HWGA! Ok Paul, perhaps I have misunderstood you on more than one level. I
thought you were saying that God would allow or cause the readers to know
so that (God's purpose) AUTON would be revealed at the proper time--I hope
I'm making that clear. Now you say that it is the readers' purpose for their
knowing TO KATECWN, and that is what made no sense to me at the beginning of
our discussion. The concept of having a purpose for doing something, if it is
to make any sense, is that by doing whatever one has a chance of accomplishing
one's purpose. In this passage, however, the readers ("you") have no control
at all over the timing of the revelationin the "purpose" clause, or am I to
think that you believe they do? (In which case I am still misunderstanding you,
obviously.) Compare "I eat well so that I may grow strong" with "I eat well so
that you may grow strong", or "I am working hard to make straight A's so that
Iraq will not invade Kuwait."
As to TO KATECWN and TO MUSTERION, you have clearly missed my point. There is
no grammatical connection between the two. You have again noted that both are
neuter as though they are connected by gender, and seem to be arguing that the
gender of TO KATECWN anticipates the gender of MUSTERION. This is vaguely
similar to the phenomenon of attraction of relative pronouns, but I know of no
rationale for your argument. If you want to argue that TO KATECWN is explained
in v. 7, that's fine, but you'll have to do it from context, not grammar. E.g.
you can say that Paul uses the neuter participle in v. 6, giving us a subtle
hint of the neuter MUSTERION in v. 7, and we can run that up the flag pole to
see how many people salute. But we can't turn to such-and-such a page in a
grammar and find proof of the connection based on gender a la some kind of
attraction. If I'm mistaken or am still misunderstanding you, I will acknow-
ledge it and offer my apology.
Don Wilkins
UC Riverside