From: Micheal Palmer (mwpalmer@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Jun 02 1998 - 00:53:34 EDT
At 6:01 PM -0400 5/29/98, WEStrass@aol.com wrote:
>In 1Cor. 13:10 hOTAV DE ELQHi TO TELION
>"...but when the perfect comes, ..." (NAS)
>
>I know TO TELION is a neuter substantive, "the perfect" or "the complete".
>
>Since it is in the neuter, must it then refer to a perfect "thing"?
>Rather than a person (ie, Christ), group of people (ie, his church), or a
>concept (ie, love)?
While this thread has already run its course, and Bill has already thanked
those who responded, I was just reading through those responses and
realized that one issue relevant to Bill's question had not been addressed.
While English speakers who have studied some Greek tend to think of the
word "thing" as designating a concept that ought to be neuter, a relevant
Greek word for "thing" was actually masculine: LOGOS. The fact that TELEION
is neuter should not lead us to the conclusion that it refers to a perfect
"thing" since a Greek speaker would probably not have thought of "thing" as
neuter. Of course, the gender of the word TELEION does not *rule out* the
possiblity of it refering to a perfect "thing". It just means that a Greek
speaker would not automatically assume that it did.
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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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