From: Wieland Willker (willker@chemie.uni-bremen.de)
Date: Thu Apr 06 2000 - 05:41:11 EDT
<x-charset iso-8859-1>Robertson's Word-pictures:
A difficult sentence. It is not clear whether it is an affirmation or a
question. The Latin and Syriac versions treat it as affirmative. Westcott
and Hort follow Meyer and take it as interrogative. The Greek fathers take
it as an exclamation. It seems clear that the adverbial Akkusativ THN ARCHN
cannot mean "from the beginning" like AP ARCH (15:27) or EX ARCH (16:4).
The LXX has THN ARCHN for "at the beginning" or "at the first" (Ge 43:20).
There are examples in Greek, chiefly negative, where THN ARCHN means "at
all," "essentially," "primarily." Vincent and Bernard so take it here,
"Primarily what I am telling you." Jesus avoids the term Messiah with its
political connotations. He stands by his high claims already made.
Best wishes
Wieland
---------------
mailto:willker@chemie.uni-bremen.de
http://www.uni-bremen.de/~wie
--- B-Greek home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu] To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-329W@franklin.oit.unc.edu To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu</x-charset>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:41:04 EDT