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by Stephen Hughes » August 21st, 2016, 11:14 pm
The only way that scripture has of looking at a body that I feel is close to my own understanding of how one is structured is Ezekial 37 - the dry bones. I find that both of the other ways of conceptualising a human body need to be understood analytically, viz. the references in the Gospels - with reversed order of the possesive and the name of the body part in the genitive - suggest that the person is the entirity, and these examples in Paul about a body being composed of individual parts that have to work together.
When versions translate literally, or creatively or fall back on their "in the tradition of the xxx version" clause to merely copy a previous version, then there is a possible indication that our knowledge of the Greek may need supplementing.
I assume (at the risk of ass-u-me-ing) that when you gentlemen suggest that loosening the reigns of grammar gives a clear enough sense of the passage you are referring to the word order. That, at least for me, makes things so a lot clearer. Allowing the horse's head to look backwards - effectively the reversal of πάσης ἁφῆς and ἐπιχορηγίας we achieve the sense of "what each joint supplies", which is readily comprehensible.
The obvious question that needs to be asked is where in the spectrum of the English word "supply" does ἐπιχορηγία fit?
One of my lines of thinking is that the difference between χορηγία and ἐπιχορηγία is that the first is "supply" and the second is "supply the difference of what is lacking", or at least "supplement some thing more". The examples in second Peter may makes that distinction. In the phrase εἴ τις διακονεῖ, ὡς ἐξ ἰσχύος ὡς χορηγεῖ ὁ θεός· (4:11), God supplies the strength from scratch. In chapter one, however, there are already some things and something else is added. In Καὶ αὐτὸ τοῦτο δέ, σπουδὴν πᾶσαν παρεισενέγκαντες, ἐπιχορηγήσατε ἐν τῇ πίστει ὑμῶν τὴν ἀρετήν, ἐν δὲ τῇ ἀρετῇ τὴν γνῶσιν, (1:5) there is already faith, and they add moral virtue, then the next step of growth in their Christian life is a deeper theological education. Things are added. Leaving the examples, my thinking is that if there was only one joint in a body, then it might be χορηγία, but since each one is contributing, and no one of them is supplying all, then each one contributes a little bit to what is already been contributed by the others so its contribution is supplementary or additional, only partially supplying what us needed to attain what is needed for the functioning of the whole body, so ἐπιχορηγία is used. But that still doesn't explain the word order.
Another line of thinking is about the nature of "supply", or more precisely, what nature of things are supplied. It seems that intangible things are the usual object of this verb; spirit, strength or virtue. If it is taken back to benefaction in the Athenian political system, then that means money. In one way, money is an abstraction of man-power or resources - an intangible representation of past (and these days future) labour. "Supply" doesn't seem to mean supply of individual brick to a public building, or individual leather strips to cushion the wooden thole-pins on a vessel, it is supplying the intangible potentiality for the whole. That reasoning splits into two, however. Is it then that the little joints supply the working to the whole - that would revolutionise or democratise the concept of supply, or is it that the joints are procured from the supply, as bricks or strips of leather would have been from the benefactor's contribution? Both lend themselves to plausibility, so who or what supplies what is still not unequivocably settled by this line of reasoning, if ἐπιχορηγία means "supply".
I don't think one particular sense is more clearer than the other. "Joints which supply", or "joints which are there as part of (God's) supply of parts to the body" both sort of seem plausible.
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Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)