Nochmals fragt der "Graeculus esuriens!" I'm reminded of a little stanza
used as the prefatory heading of a book on Socrates--I don't know who wrote
it (Goethe, "West-Oestliche Divan"?), but I always thought it pretty apt
for Socrates:
--"Meinst Du denn wirklich was Du sagst?"
--"Meinst Du denn wirklich was Du fragst?"
--"Wem kuemmert's was ich sag' und meine?
Denn alles meinen ist nur Frage."
Yes, I think there's plenty of reason to understand the genitive here as a
subjective genitive: it is not faith IN Christ but rather CHRIST's faith
that saves. By my recollection there have been two threads on B-Greek on
this subject in the course of the last year or two. It really is a pity
that our archives have gone down the tube. [I hope that James Tauber may
have been able at least to save to disks the archives that he had
maintained up to the point that he had to discontinue the web archive, so
that we can make use of them if and when we're ever able to get a new web
archive going.] At any rate, I'll retrieve what I can find on my own
hard-disk archive and try to make significant points of that thread
available at my own web site, if anyone's interested. My recollection of
that thread is that, (a) there's a former (perhaps current) subscriber to
the list who was doing a dissertation on this topic in Australia; (b) David
Moore and others pointed out a few passages where it is rather difficult to
sustain this understanding of "faith OF Jesus Christ." I also seem to
recall that one of the more useful services performed by Luke T. Johnson in
his NT Introduction text was to argue in favor of the subjective-genitive
interpretation.
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/