From: Theresa J List (fcvandvi@juno.com)
Date: Mon Jun 24 1996 - 20:48:05 EDT
> My own humble theological view, openly confessed herewith, is that God
used ordinary
>Hellenistic Greek in its broad range of variation from the crude and
>occasionally ungrammatical Greek of Mark and the author of Revelation
>to
>the sophisticated narrative of Luke and fascinating rhetoric of
>Hebrews.
>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/
I'm not inferring from your aside here any particular opinion of yours
concerning the following, but here's is, I hope!, some food for
thought/discussion:
IS the medium the message? Or, to be less reductionist, are the
"crudities" of these books that make one feel as if a sixth grader could
write smoother Greek INTENTIONAL crudities? If one were to "smooth out"
the Greek and compare the "smoothed" Greek to the text's Greek, what
distinctions in understanding would there be, or rather, what
distinctions that were there in the intentionally "crude" Greek would
one lose? I'm NOT suggesting we "smooth out" Scripture (!), rather that
the "rough" text is not due to minimal literacy but rather to
intentionality.
Dr. Bruce Schuckard (whose opinion on the intentionality of Revelation's
or Mark's "crudity" is unknown to me) wrote his dissertation on the
"misquotations" (My word, not his) of the OT references in the book of
John. The dissertation was very thorough at disarming ASSUMPTIONS
about them either being misquoted or from manuscripts of which we no
longer have copies and focusing on the INTENTIONALITY of the quotations
to elucidate on a point. This along with some Masters' work on
Revelation opened my mind to ask just how "Crude" the texts really were.
God's Peace and Godspeed!
Deaconess Theresa List
Hispanic missionary @ large
MN S district, LC-MS
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