To which Carl Conrad responded:
>Micheal, I don't know whether or not what I have here is something that
>really bears upon your point or not; I sort of THINK I've seen something
>like your construction from Josephus in Ephesians or Hebrews, but I'd be
>hard put to find it, and I'm not sure my memory is correct at that. What I
>am very much inclined to think, however, is that this is an affectation of
>LATIN style that may have been carried over into Josephus' Greek. I don't
>read Latin prose very often, but I think I've seen this sort of thing in
>Cicero not infrequently; I don't have anything of Latin with me at home but
>the Oxford Book of Latin verse, but here are some instances from Propertius
>and Ovid:
>
[Three Latin examples deleted]
>Now consider the passage in Josephus:
>
>> TELEUTHSANTOS DE TOU BASILEWS AGRIPPA, KAQWS EN *THi* PRO TAUTHS
>> APHGGELKAMEN *BIBLIWi*...
>
>My reading of this would see the THi here not as a simple definite article
>but rather as a demonstrative pronoun incorporating the relative
>pronoun--I'd hesitate to suggest it, but in fact hO, hH, TO was used in
>older Ionic Greek as a relative pronoun. I'd say that what we have here has
>to be understood as
>
> KAQWS EN hHi PRO TAUTHS APHGGELKAMEN BIBLIWi
>
>Thus understood it would be a pretty close analogue to the structure I've
>shown in Propertius and Ovid in the Latin: relative pronoun (THi = EKEINHI
>hHN) and the antecedent noun (BIBLIWi) frame the clause in which the verb
>APHGGELKAMEN is enclosed. The structure we might have expected would of
>course be EN THi BIBLIWi hHN PRO TAUTHS APHGGELKAMEN ...
If Carl is right here, then what I cited from Josephus is in fact NOT a
discontinuous constituent at all. That would mean that Josephus does not
provide counter evidence here to my claim in _Levels of Constituent
Structure_ (which would, of course, be nice for me). But since it CAN be
read the way I proposed in my last note to B-Greek, it leaves me with the
uncomfortable feeling that such radically discontinuous constituents were
possible in the Hellenistic Period. Of course, finding a few outside the
New Testament would not overturn my proposal that such extreme examples do
not appear in the New Testament, since a small number of any odd
construction are to be expected in any language as a function of lapses of
memory, confusion, etc.
I had not thought of possible influence from Latin, Carl. Thanks for the
suggestion.
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Micheal W. Palmer
Religion & Philosophy
Meredith College
mwpalmer@earthlink.net
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