From: Akulas@aol.com
Date: Thu Nov 30 1995 - 23:55:44 EST
Dr. Conrad,
Thank you for your "ever so brief" comments on this to one who missed the
earlier discussion, and for forwarding my letter which I inadvertently sent
to you instead of the list.
I want you to know that I personally have no doctrinal axe to grind on this.
In fact, I had for a long time accepted that IOUNIAN was indeed the acc. of
IOUNIA and that we therefore had a female apostle, and was perfectly at peace
with that....all up until just this past week (how's that for coincidence?),
when for various reasons I found myself looking at it again. To be honest, I
would still like it to be feminine; I find the idea quite refreshing.
I can see your point. Why would anyone go hunting for a masculine form
behind IOUNIAN? But for whatever prejudicial and just plain bad reasons,
people have indeed gone hunting, and found what they were looking for. Now,
we might be disgusted at that, and probably rightly so. And the masculine
form thus obtained might (and does) have the appearance of being
manufactured.
But still, I can't shake the fact that it IS viable. There very well could
be a masculine form behind the word.....in fact, the more I think about it,
the more possible it seems.
So here we are, like it or not, with two viable possibilities. We don't have
the nominative of the word and we don't have an article with it, and the
context doesn't inform us. And so there's no way to insist on its being one
way or the other.
You know better than I that if you have a situation where it could very well
be either this or that, then to be conclusive the only thing you can do is
rule out one or the other. So then, if you wish to affirm that the word is
feminine, I would think that it is on you to show that it is NOT masculine.
BTW, I didn't mean to leave the impression of quoting grammars as
authorities. Rereading it, I see how much it looked that way, but I wasn't
quoting them to prove anything about the Junias/Junia question other than
that greek masculine proper names sts. had shortened forms, and that such a
shortened form often would have taken the feminine-looking -AN ending in the
accusative.
Tim Mize
6802 Willoughby Ct
Indianapolis IN, 46214
akulas@aol.com
"Junias/Junia" -- Isn't this the name of a currently running broadway play
starring Julie Andrews?
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