1 John 1

Forum rules
Please quote the Greek text you are discussing directly in your post if it is reasonably short - do not ask people to look it up. This is not a beginner's forum, competence in Greek is assumed.
Post Reply
Mason Barge
Posts: 18
Joined: August 16th, 2014, 1:52 pm

1 John 1

Post by Mason Barge »

I was just looking at the Codex Siniaticus and was wondering if anybody could tell me how authoritative are the accents (and breathing marks, just out of curiosity) that were, apparently, added in later copies. Were they present in any earlier manuscripts? Or are they the product of educated guesswork?

Specifically, I am wondering if it might be something other than totally insane to argue that the initial Ὅ was intended as a nominative personal pronoun, rather than a relative pronoun. I do appreciate that it would not agree with the gender of the following demonstrative pronouns, but the Prologue of 1 John is, in the words of J. L. Houlden, a "lapse into grammatical impossibilities" already.
Barry Hofstetter
Posts: 2159
Joined: May 6th, 2011, 1:48 pm

Re: 1 John 1

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Mason Barge wrote:I was just looking at the Codex Siniaticus and was wondering if anybody could tell me how authoritative are the accents (and breathing marks, just out of curiosity) that were, apparently, added in later copies. Were they present in any earlier manuscripts? Or are they the product of educated guesswork?

Specifically, I am wondering if it might be something other than totally insane to argue that the initial Ὅ was intended as a nominative personal pronoun, rather than a relative pronoun. I do appreciate that it would not agree with the gender of the following demonstrative pronouns, but the Prologue of 1 John is, in the words of J. L. Houlden, a "lapse into grammatical impossibilities" already.
It was Aristophanes of Byzantium (third century B.C.) who introduced accents and breathing marks as an aid to correctly pronouncing Attic Greek at time when Greek was in the processing of shifting from a tonal based accent system to stress and losing its initial "h" sound. Use of them does not start showing up in the papyri until the third century A.D. The early NT manuscripts do not have them (and it's a sure bet the originals didn't). However, when they were added, they were well known and reflected the understanding of people who habitually thought, spoke and wrote in the language.

1Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν, ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς...

With all due respect Houlden, I don't see any grammatical impossibilities in 1 John at all. What we do see are very intriguing stylistic usages which are designed, I think, to reinforce the concepts John intended to communicate, and this includes, among other things, occasional ambiguities with regard to the antecedents of pronouns. This first verse is just such an example. However, to your question, I see at least two considerations:

1) The parallelism between the clauses indicates that we read the first ὅ the same as the others.

2) Here, it would have to be the masculine nominative singular of the article (the relative pronoun would have been ὅς), and use of the masculine article as a bare subject is extremely rare throughout Greek literature. They would normally have used a pronoun instead. The relative masculine pronoun might certainly have been used here if John had intended any such thing. The use of the neuter relative pronoun is, I think, designed to make the reader wonder exactly what the reference is, and the break in the sense between vs. 1 and 2 is rhetorically quite effective in moving the reader toward what the actual content of the pronoun is.
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
Ph.D. Student U of FL
Instructor of Latin
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
Eeli Kaikkonen
Posts: 611
Joined: June 2nd, 2011, 7:49 am
Location: Finland
Contact:

Re: 1 John 1

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

Mason Barge in another thread wrote:I'm afraid there has been a bit of miscommunication, what with people sending me to basic online textbooks. I'm in my 5th semester of study! I can read through 1 John - perhaps with recourse to a lexicon four or five times.

My statement was meant as a somewhat humorous indication of my struggle with a passage that is notoriously difficult. As Raymond Brown put it, "As the opening words of a literary work, '[the initial four verses of 1 John] can only be described as, formally at least, bordering upon incoherence.'"

No, I don't sit and scratch my head over the lexical definition of pronouns. As you say, reading them is intuitive.

I do wish someone with thorough knowledge of the New Testament would answer the question I asked.
If you already have answers like "bordering upon incoherence" and "lapse into grammatical impossibilities" by those how know Greek relatively well, I don't think we here can suddenly say it's normal and easy to understand Greek.
Barry wrote: With all due respect Houlden, I don't see any grammatical impossibilities
In the descriptive world nothing is impossible. But still native Koine speakers may have seen this grammar quite odd and maybe unique. After all, if anything goes in grammar, "functional equivalence" translations wouldn't exist - they wouldn't be needed if any grammar is good and easy to understand. If "literal" translations use English which is not good English, there exists "not good English". And there exists not good Koine, too. But literal translations are understandable and possible, aren't they? Difficult or non-idiomatic Koine is also understandable and possible.

About the passage at hand...

Ὃ ἦν ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν, ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν,
περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς
— καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἐφανερώθη, καὶ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ μαρτυροῦμεν καὶ ἀπαγγέλλομεν ὑμῖν τὴν ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον ἥτις ἦν πρὸς τὸν πατέρα καὶ ἐφανερώθη ἡμῖν—
ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν,

I find it easier to reduce it to some core phrases (I just select some grammatically important phrases, you may select a bit differently, and it's rewarding to do it on your own):

Ὃ ἦν ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν,
περὶ τοῦ λόγου
— καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἐφανερώθη, καὶ ἀπαγγέλλομεν ὑμῖν τὴν ζωὴν —
ὃ ἑωράκαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν

Now it's easier to see that the fourth line continues grammatically from the first line. The third line is clearly an interlude which breaks the sentence and is marked as such in the SBLGNT. So we have

Ὃ ἦν ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα
καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν,
περὶ τοῦ λόγου,
ὃ ἑωράκαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν

I don't find it grammatically especially difficult except "περὶ τοῦ λόγου" in the midst of two ὃ clauses. If we take the rest,

Ὃ ἦν ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα
καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν,
ὃ ἑωράκαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν,

is there any actual problem with that? In this context "That which" is equivalent for "Ὃ" in English. What difficult is there?
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: 1 John 1

Post by cwconrad »

With regard to the opening of 1 John, it evidently appears disconcerting to those advancing to a secondary level of reading NT Greek to be told that this exemplary instance of Johannine literature is "easy reading." For the most part, the first letter of John really is easy reading, but the opening sequence may be jarring to an English-speaking student expecting a word-order that is not so very foreign to the word-order patterns of English. It opens with three relative object-clauses in sequence and the verb governing these object clauses doesn't appear until verse 3. Of course, once this initial hurdle has been passed, the sailing through the rest of 1 John is pretty smooth. But the very beginning of this letter is more like Shakespeare or Milton than Dr. Seuss. We do expect ordinary Greek to be pretty much like Dr. Seuss, don't we? :D
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Michael Theophilos
Posts: 6
Joined: April 26th, 2013, 5:42 pm

Re: 1 John 1

Post by Michael Theophilos »

Barry Hofstetter wrote: Use of them does not start showing up in the papyri until the third century A.D. The early NT manuscripts do not have them (and it's a sure bet the originals didn't).
There is evidence that accents do appear in Greek papyri earlier than the third century CE. For example - παγκπατής (P.Oxy 2432.5 [1c BCE / 1c CE]) http://163.1.169.40/gsdl/collect/POxy/i ... .hires.jpg; - ποιέι (P.Oxy 2430.79(a)-(d).12 [2nd c CE] http://163.1.169.40/gsdl/collect/POxy/i ... .hires.jpg - εμόσει (P.Oxy 1174.vii.17 [2nd c CE]. Also see P.Oxy 854, 1082, 1091, 1175, 1604, 2313, 2369, 2432, 2508 and many more. See further Jennifer Moore-Blunt, "Problems of Accentuation in Greek Papyri" Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, No. 29 (1978), pp. 137-163.
Post Reply

Return to “New Testament”