From: Jonathan Robie (jonathan@texcel.no)
Date: Sat Jan 17 1998 - 22:25:22 EST
At 02:51 PM 1/15/98 -0600, Richard Lindeman wrote:
>>As the verb in question here is a second aorist active indicative,
>>it cannot be a "timeless aorist" but must be a genuine aorist
>>denoting an event, now finished, in the past.
>
>If language were always spoken "by the rules" then I might be inclined to
>agree with you. However, it is the other way around. We form the rules
>by the way that language is spoken and those rules are then always in flux
>and completely dependent upon the ways that people happen to speak the
>language. Therefore...
[SNIP!]
I've seen this kind of argument several times here on B-Greek, and it is
based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the "rules" in a Greek
grammar are. When we were in school, we were given "grammars" that told us
how to write the kind of English essay that comes back from the teacher
with at least a little space between the red marks. These grammars
contained prescriptive rules that told us not to carelessly split
infinitives, etc., and many of these rules did not reflect the way we, as
native speakers of English, thought the language was spoken. This is
different from a descriptive grammar, one which explains the meaning of
English as spoken by native speakers.
Both prescriptive and descriptive grammars contain rules. In a descriptive
grammar, the rules are based on observing the actual use of language. Our
New Testament grammars are descriptive grammars, written to help people
understand how Greek is used in the New Testament, not to help people write
flawless New Testament Greek. If the rules in a New Testament grammar do
not match actual New Testament usage, the grammar is wrong, or at least
inadequate for certain passages. In a New Testament grammar, the rules are
derived from the language usage, and not the other way around.
That's why people search the New Testament with tools like Gramcord or
Accordance to see if the usage in the New Testament matches the rules that
they are proposing.
Jonathan
___________________________________________________________________________
Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com
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