by cwconrad » January 10th, 2013, 8:39 am
I've read your self-introduction with interest, partly because what you've written reminds me of myself and my intellectual proclivities of half a century ago or so when I was perhaps closer to your age now. Now much older myself, although not necessarily wiser, I can tell you what's happened to those proclivities in me, although your experience may well be very different from mine.
All my life I have been a passionate student of ancient Greek language and literature and am still learning to make more sense of some elements of the language that I didn't understand so well earlier. I have my doubts about the oft-expressed claim, one which you have also voiced, that Greek is much more precise in its distinctions and nuances. That may be true about the Greek verb with its expansive range of available precise inflectional distinctions of mood, tense, voice, etc. -- although even here recent threads in this forum have brought to light the perilous ambivalence of middle-passive voice forms and the highly controversial subject of verbal aspect in the tense-aspect system of Greek. The syntax of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives is often enough hard to explain even when the meaning of a phrase is pretty well understood -- we not infrequently refer to the "aporetic genitive" as a subcategory of adnominal genitive in Dan Wallace's GGBB whose name aptly betrays the grammarian's embarrassing inability to offer a satisfactory account of how the genitive works in such-and-such a particular text. The fact is that languages are different from each other rather than "better" than each other. I rather doubt that there are formulations of thought in Greek that cannot be converted into perfectly intelligible expressions in English, even if some significant aesthetic features of style or metaphoric idiom require radical transformation in the hermeneutical process.
With regard to theology, I must confess that my youthful profound application to it has has faded considerably with the passage of years, the more so in my later years. I realize that my experience is not that common, but the fact is that I've come to believe that there are questions to which all answers are speculative and hypothetical and that, for me at least, the more profitable matters to reflect upon are humane and moral problems rather than divine ones -- or that it is more profitable to pursue divinity in the human interrelationships of persons than in abstractions transcending human experience.
I won't pursue these matters any further here or in the public forums and subforums of Biblical Greek. But you will note that we really do avoid theological discussion in our subforums and that such matters as what the preposition διὰ + acc. can mean or how it can be translated are not likely to find answers in broad general terms but rather with reference to particular texts and contexts.
At any rate, I will offer you my own warm welcome to the BG Forum.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)