Re: Grammatical Tense, LEGW,

From: Philip L. Graber (pgraber@emory.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 25 1995 - 17:38:33 EDT


On Wed, 25 Oct 1995, Kenneth Litwak wrote:

> I am also wondering, while I'm writing this, if those more
> knowledgeable than I in Greek lit. in general would attach significance to
> 1. the use of de. In 7:24-30, Gundry, in his (may I say "masterful", at
> least impressive) commentary on Mark makes much of the occurences of
> adversative de in this passage. I'm not sure I'd put that much weight on
> this particle. It seems to me to just be how Greek sentences are linked
> together, and is of little or no significance. I would grant that to alla,
> but not to de.

Just to compare the synoptics, Mark uses KAI as a clause-level connective
far more than Matthew and Luke. In Mt and Lk DE seems to indicate
"thematic development" (as Stephen Levinsohn calls it), but Mk uses DE so
frequently that this does not seem to be the case in Mk. I seem to recall
that numerous commentators speculate that perhaps Mk uses KAI like Hebrew
uses the conjunction WAW. In any case, the relative infrequency of DE in
Mk seems to make its use significant when it does occur. Now John is
another story altogether regarding conjunctions. Randall Buth has a paper
on John's use of conjunctions in *Linguistics and New Testament
Interpretation* ed. by David Alan Black.

Philip Graber Graduate Division of Religion
Graduate Student in New Testament 211 Bishops Hall, Emory University
pgraber@emory.edu Atlanta, GA 30322 USA



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