From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 18 1995 - 14:36:11 EST
At 7:39 PM 12/17/95, Kenneth Litwak wrote:
> I spent time this weekend translating Matt 5 and came across a couple
>of issues in the Beattitudes I'd like to ask about, partly because
>school's out and I don't have a detailed commentary on the Greek of
>Matthew avaiable. In several beattidues, autoi appears. Normally,
>I would translate autoi with a verb as emphatic, "they themselves",
>but I'm not aware of any translation which does so. Why not? Also,
>several verses use autwn with a form of eimi. I'm a little puzzled
>about precisely how to understand this construction. Eimi
>requires a nominative subject and object. If I take the verb as
>including the subject, I have something like "The kingdom of God
>it is of them/for them/something". Autwn can't be the subject or object
>because it's genitive. Clearly, however, it seems to me that
>translations such as "theirs is the kingdom of God" are imprecise at
>the very least. How should this be rendered if we are going for
>literal accuracy? Thanks.
Two points here, Ken:
(1) AUTOS,-H,-O has three distinct uses: (1) in attributive position = "the
same xxx"; (2) in predicative position = "himself, herself, itself"; (3)
simple 3rd person pronoun, originally used thus only in the oblique cases,
but not uncommonly even in the nominative in Koine. In the beatititudes, it
is indeed just a simple 3rd person pronoun in the genitive, and "theirs" or
"of them" is appropriate.
(2) The usage of the genitive in these sentences is what I learned and
teach as "the predicate genitive." I just checked BDF which doesn't discuss
it as such but simply includes it under the heading of "adnominal
genitive." With EINAI or GINESQAI this genitive indicates the person or
group that the subject is characteristic of (wherefore I've also heard this
genitive usage called "genitive of characteristic"). The subject in all of
these beatitudes is, of course, hH BASILEIA TOU QEOU/TWN OURANWN.
It may be the word-order that bothers you, but the most "normal" (dangerous
adjective, that) word-order in Greek for a so-called "noun sentence" is
Predicate Word - Verb - Subject, and if the predicate word is a
genitive-case form, it too will go in that initial position. So there
really isn't anything very extraordinary about the construction of "AUTWN
ESTIN hH BASILEIA ..."
Hope this helps, c
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/
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