Let me see if I understand you properly. I think that Carlton (and I) are
reading it like this:
1. They came to life AND they reigned with Christ for a thousand years.
And I think that Paul is assuming that the META CRISTOU applies to both
EZHSAN and EBASILEUSAN, producing this reading:
2. They lived and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.
Is this accurate? This second reading permits, but does not require, the
possibility that the saints had been alive before then. But the context
makes it unlikely: if they lived for a thousand years, wouldn't this be the
same thousand years during which Satan was imprisoned? Were they dead before
that or not? If they "lived and reigned" with Christ for a thousand years,
did they stop living after that? The second reading makes it a lot harder to
understand the context around it.
I know the majority is not always right, but I also notice that most
translations I have in English, German, or French follow the first reading.
The exceptions are King James and Luther, which both take EZHSAN as "lived"
in verse 4 and "lived again" in verse 5. To me, the parallelism between
EZHSAN and EZHSAN is at least as compelling as the proposed parallelism
between EZHSAN and EBALISEUSAN, and it also favors an ingressive reading of
each.
Jonathan
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Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie
POET Software, 3207 Gibson Road, Durham, N.C., 27703 http://www.poet.com
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