From: Micheal Palmer (mwpalmer@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Feb 10 1998 - 00:58:43 EST
At 4:15 PM -0500 2/9/98, Jim West wrote:
>At 02:21 PM 2/9/98 -0600, you wrote:
>
>>The tone and tenor of this is more or less pantheistic, unless one would
>>prefer to call it panentheistic. And I think that the author of Acts knows
>>the poem.
>>
>
>I agree that the author knows the poem- but I tend to think that it is far
>more Stoic than Carl or Mary would think.
>
>But, leaving that aside, the passive is a much more natural and logical
>reading than the middle. The middle, it seems to me, is forced.
>
>Jim
Well, it's forced if you read the middle as reflexive ("move ourselves").
The middle can often be read simply as intransitive, however:
"In whom we live, and move, and have being."
This intransitive sense is a common function of the middle voice when used
with a verb that would otherwise be transitive. That is, one of the uses of
the middle voice can be to give an intransitive sense to a verb that could
be understood as transitive in the active or passive voice. Read in this
way, the middle here quite natural, and certainly not forced.
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Micheal W. Palmer mwpalmer@earthlink.net
Religion & Philosophy
Meredith College
Visit the Greek Language and Linguistics Gateway at
http://home.earthlink.net/~mwpalmer/
You can also access my online bibliography of Greek Linguistics at
http://home.earthlink.net/~mwpalmer/greek.linguistics.bibliography/bibliography.
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