From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 26 2000 - 00:16:00 EDT
At 2:29 AM +0000 10/26/00, Mark Wilson wrote:
>1 John 4:2b
>
>PAN PNEUMA hO hOMOLOGEI IHSOUN
>CRISTON EN SARKI ELHLUQOTA EK TOU QEOU ESTIN
>
>A commentary I am reading translates this:
>
>"every spirit that confesses Jesus as Christ having come in the flesh is of
>God"
>
>My question is regarding the insertion of "as."
>
>On what grammatical grounds is this a valid option?
Are you sure it wasn't "that confesses Jesus Christ as having come in the
flesh"? That would not be uncommon, as it's a translator's ploy that
preserves the structure of the Greek, where IHSOUN CRISTON is the subject
of the participial predicate EN SARKI ELHLUQOTA. Normally this would be
Englished idiomatically as "confesses that Jesus Christ has come in (the)
flesh"--but making it "as having come in the flesh" construes that
participial phrase as predicative to hOMOLOGEI IHSOUN CRISTON, just as if
it were hEILONTO hOI AQHNAIOI TON PERIKLEA STRATHGON, "The Athenians chose
Pericles AS Strategos."
On the other hand, I can see little or no justification for the version
you've cited--"Jesus AS Christ having come ..." I think it is theoretically
possible, but really only theoretically, because the usage of a participle
or participial phrase as the predicate in indirect discourse is a very
common, standard syntactic structure. Reading is as "Jesus AS Christ having
come" would be understanding CRISTON as predicative with ELHLUQOTA, and
again, I have to say I don't think that's impossible; I just think that
IHSOUS CRISTOS relatively early ceased to be a noun-epithet phrase and came
to be viewed more as two parts of a proper name--and I would think that's
how we ought to understand IHSOUN CRISTON functioning here, as the noun
subject of the participial phrase which functions as predicate in the
indirect discourse which itself functions as the object of hOMOLOGEI.
--
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
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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