rhutchin wrote:I guess only Carl saw that this was actually Phil 1:29.
Anyway, Paul could have said simply: ὅτι ὑμῖν ἐχαρίσθη οὐ μόνον πιστεύειν ἀλλὰ καὶ πάσχειν
Yet he adds the three phrases.
τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ
τὸ εἰς αὐτὸν
τὸ ὑπὲρ αὐτοῦ
So, why does Paul begin each phrase with τὸ? Is there a grammatical rule involved here? If not, then what does τὸ do that would make a writer, like Paul, write it this way?
Roger Hutchinson
Once again I'll cite the text in question:
Phil 1:29 ὅτι ὑμῖν ἐχαρίσθη τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ, οὐ μόνον τὸ εἰς αὐτὸν πιστεύειν ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ ὑπὲρ αὐτοῦ πάσχειν,
We appear to be going around in circles. I thought I had set forth my understanding of this text adequately, but it's evident that neither Roger nor David understands the way I account for the text, and David's account of it makes no sense to me (I simply can make no sense of τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ as a phrase meaningful by itself and serving as the subject of ὑμῖν ἐχαρίσθη.
I think I haven't adequately explained what I meant by saying that this was an anacoluthon. "Malformed sentence" isn't a very felicitous expression. I never said or suggested that there was an
ellipsis in the text, but I do believe that Paul revised his sentence as he was in the process of formulating it. I believe that Paul intended originally to attach πάσχειν to τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ so that the simple sentence would be ὑμῖν ἐχαρίσθη τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ πάσχειν. I surmise that from the reformulated phrasing at the end of the text: τὸ ὑπὲρ αὐτοῦ πάσχειν. But I think that, before penning or dictating πάσχειν to complete the substantivized phrase (τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ πάσχειν), he decided to heighten the rhetorical force of this thought; he decided that "suffering for Christ" is not just "a privilege granted to believers" but rather a privilege going one better than the privilege already given believers, namely the privilege to "believing in Christ." I think that this way of reading the text would be assisted by punctuating the sentence with a dash after τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ; that would make it clearer to the reader that this is in fact an anacoluthon. It would appear thus:
ὅτι ὑμῖν ἐχαρίσθη τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ-- οὐ μόνον τὸ εἰς αὐτὸν πιστεύειν ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ ὑπὲρ αὐτοῦ πάσχειν.
I think that this is the kind of textual difficulty that we see frequently in email exchanges when we compose quickly and either do not go back and re-read what we have written or do not adequaely re-read it to assure that the text flows clearly and says exactly what we intended. I think it's a lot easier to go back and correct our mistakes when we are typing on a keyboard and can quickly delete what's amiss and rephrase what we meant to say so that it expresses as clearly and precisely as possible what we intended. For one writing on papyrus that would be much more difficult than it is for us -- but I know it's true of myself that I don't re-read carefully enough what I've composed in these forum messages or in my own email, and I see it in what others have written with considerable frequency.
That's the only way I can make sense of the text in our editions. Perhaps someone can help me to see how the substantivized prepositional phrase τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ makes sense by itself as the subject of ὑμῖν ἐχαρίσθη. I'm apparently too dense to be able to figure that out.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)