From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu May 08 1997 - 12:50:22 EDT
At 11:09 AM -0500 5/8/97, Larry & Beth Hartman wrote:
> Could anyone explain to me why some translations use the phrase "gave
>some to be ..." in Ephesians 4:11 whenthe word "some" doesn't occur
>here? When I attempt to translate I get something like this, "he gave
>from the apostles...from the.....from the..." If I am correct (porb.
>not) this is an instrumental genitives used here. The various offices
>of the Body being instruments. According to what I gather out of
>context the thing being given is "gvwsis" and "pistews" through the
>work of the offices in the Church. Anyone care to comment on this?
I'm not sure what "instrumental genitive" is supposed to mean, unless it's
the construction of the genitive with DIA to indicate the means or
intermediate party involved in carrying out an action. The words translated
"some" here are accusatives, TOUS MEN ... TOUS DE ... TOUS DE ... TOUS DE
(4 sets in all). This is ordinary idiom of both classical and Hellenistic
Greek: when the article is used with these particles, MEN and DE, it
becomes a distributive pronoun meaning "one, another, another" (if, e.g.
TON MEN, TON DE) or plural "some, others, others" (TOUS MEN, TOUS DE, TOUS
DE ...). I frankly don't understand the last sentence above, as it doesn't
bear any relationship, so far as I can discern, to the Greek of Eph 4:11.
Nor can I see anything to quarrel about in the traditional rendering of the
verse, wherein TOUS MEN, TOUS DE, etc., are direct objects of EDWKEN and
then the words APOSTOLOUS, PROFHTAS, etc. are predicate accusatives in
agreement with those direct objects.
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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