Eph.5:27

From: Stephen Clock (sclock@soonet.ca)
Date: Thu Mar 28 1996 - 13:19:24 EST


In Ephesians 5:27 Paul wrote "...that He (Christ) might present it(or her,
ie. the church) to Himself a glorious church"

Nestles has AUTOS, emphasizing Christ the subject, whereas the Received Text
has AUTHN referring to the church as the object. In the received text then,
we find a double accusative which effectively strengthens the description of
the church. That is, "that He might present it to Himself, a glorious
church". The Nestles text could be taken as "that He might present to
Himself a glorious church".

"a glorious church" is ENDOXON THN EKKLHSIAN, and ENDOXON is clearly an
irregular adjective, feminine singular accusative.

The question is that since ENDOXON appears to have a predicate position in
relation to EKKLHSIAN, that perhaps "which is" ought to be supplied (ie.
translate the predicate adjective in a predicate statement) - thus: "that He
might present to Himself a church which is glorious". Is this legit or not?
The real difficulty comes when we tried to classify these substantives. Is
there any such animal as a predicate accusative?

Looking back on the examples of predicate and attributive adjectives in my
Greek texts, I only found instances using the Nominative Case. Maybe this
is a clue to what we're doing wrong?

Steve Clock

Northland Bible College
Goulais River, Ontario
P0S 1E0



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