OUK ESTIN SOU ANHR
By way of concession I will admit that one commentator,
Godet, suggests that SOU is emphatic in this context.
Several of the other commentaries I had laying around,
H.A.W. Meyer, R.E. Brown, B.F. Westcott, and Leon Morris
failed to mention this subject. And of course no argument
can be made from silence. Godet makes the statement that
SOU is in the emphatic position but then proceeds to
waffle about the significance it has for exegesis of the
passage.
Morris, Brown and Meyer all had discussions about the
allegorical interpretations that have been applied to this
text.
Leon Morris in his book *Studies in the Fourth Gospel* has
a chapter on variation as a feature of John's style. He
includes variation in word order as one of the things John
regularly does to break up what might otherwise be boring
repetition. The word order variation I pointed out
previously: SOU TO ONOMA in 17: 6 but TO ONOMA SOU
in17:26, might be explained in this way.
This information might be used to argue either side of this
issue. On the one hand I might argue that the John 17
examples are evidence that the author was not concerned
with the order of these words. That the emphatic position
of the possessive genitive did not exist as part of the
working grammar of the author. On the other hand the
construction under consideration in John 4:18 is not
repeated in the immediate context, so John had no
stylistic reason to change the word order from the more
statistically probable OUK ESTIN ANHR SOU.
My main point in all of this is that the statistical
probability of a grammatical construction does not
automatically translate into semantically significant
information. Several other factors need to be weighed
before we can determine whether a construction is
emphatic. Probability alone is not an adequate indicator of
this.
Clay Bartholomew
Three Tree Point