From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 08 1998 - 08:26:00 EST
At 11:40 PM -0600 1/7/98, William Dicks wrote:
>In Rom. 4:18 we have the translation from NASB "In hope against hope"
>for PAR ELPIDA EP ELPIDI. Out of my 4 resources BAGD and Thayer suggest
>that EP ELPIDI is a kind of dative of support. Translated it could then
>read "In hope, on the basis of (or supported by) hope." Most
>translations, in fact all those that I am using regularly, suggest the
>translation of "against hope" in some form. The only translation that
>gives it the way that BAGD and Thayer suggested is Wuest's Expanded
>Translation. Is there any real evidence that the translation could be
>"against", or should it definitely be something like "supported by?"
>
After seeing the most recent exchange between Messers Robie and Dicks on
this, I think it needs to be noted that there are two DIFFERENT
prepositional phrases here and that it is only EP' ELPIDI that would be
understood as "in hope" or "on the basis of hope"--and quite reasonably so.
But PAR' ELPIDA is a common instance of PARA + accusative in the sense of
"in opposition to," "counter to." Here I think the ordinary English for the
two prepositional phrases in combination would be "in hope against hope,"
i.e. "despite the fact that the situation would seem hopeless ..." The
common older Attic phrase PARA PROSDOKIAN means "counter to expectation."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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