From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 10 1997 - 07:15:20 EST
At 3:19 AM -0600 12/10/97, John Reece wrote:
>Rolf
>
>Thank you for your response to the query about 1 Thess. 5:23. The
>possibility that that PNEUMA, YUCH and SWMA may refer to the church as a
>whole rather than each individual member is intriguing.
>
>I'm still not quite clear about the grammer of 5:23b. Please check me on
>the following diagram, about which I am uncertain and desire correction:
>
>hOLOKLHRON = subject
> hUMWN = modifier of subject
> TO PNEUMA KAI hH YUCH KAI TO SWMA = appositional modifier of subject
>
>THRHQEIH = verb
> AMEMPTWS = adverb
>
>Translation: The whole [singular] of you [plural] - the spirit, the
>soul, and the body - be kept blameless...
>
>Let's hear from grammarians about this.
I rather think Rolf was understanding the grammar differently here: the
three nouns linked by conjunctions collectively as a subject, hUMWN
qualifying that collective subject; hOLOKLHRON is an adjective, not a noun,
and so cannot be a subject; rather, as Rolf noted, it is predicative,
working practically like an adverb with the verb, thus:
"May your (plural) spirit, soul, and body be kept as a whole blamelessly at
the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Rolf asked about classical analogues to this collective usage of the nouns.
The line of Sophocles that comes immediately to my mind is a little bit
different; it is Oedipus to Tiresias in the OT:
TUFLOS TA T'WTA TON TE NOUN TA T'OMMAT' EI
"You are blind in ears and mind and eyes as well."
To be sure, this is not exactly the same. Here TA WTA, TON NOUN, TA OMMATA
are all accusatives of specification with TUFLOS and, of course, the
statement is addressed to a single individual, but it strikes me that it
could be reformulated with a verb TUFLOW in the passive and the three nouns
as a collective subject without violating ordinary Greek syntax thus:
TA T'WTA SOU hO TE NOUS TA T'OMMATA TETUFLWTAI
"Your ears and mind and eyes have been made blind."
In fact the neuter nouns make this the easier to construe with a singular
verb; it seems to me that the very fact that neuter plurals are conceived
as a collectivity and used with a verb in the singular helps to explain the
construction in 1 Th 5:23b.
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