Re: Regarding Gal 2:20 reply to Carlton Winbery

From: George Blaisdell (maqhth@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Apr 10 1999 - 11:39:16 EDT


Jim Denley Writes:

>My original post began:

>>Regarding the use of THi in "EN PISTEI ZW THi
>>TOU hUIOU TOU QEOU.

>>Greek articles are not simply definite articles.
>They have demonstrative use as well, often
>pressing us in English to use a
>relative pronoun...

>The question I'm asking is whether an article used
>in this fashion on occasion is "relative pronoun-like"
>in its rules. If there are occasions where this is
>true, then it only requires gender and
>number from its antecedent and its case describes
>its syntactical place in the sentence.

>I hope this clears up, if nothing else,
>the line of reasoning behind my
>original comments.
                                                                    
>We got a lot of gum for a quarter.

We sure did! And your post clearly shows that you asked a better
question than any of us [leastwise moi] tried to answer!! :-)

I am now wondering if the fact that the prep phrase EN PISTEI has an
anarthrous noun might grammatically lead to the use of the article
following the action verb ZW, instead of what we in English might
expect to he a relative pronoun.

If we were to rearrange the same Greek words to our English 'comfort
zone', we would then have:

ZW EN TWi PISTEI TOU hUIOU TOU QEOU.

And perhaps it COULD have been written in the Greek this way, but was
instead written differently for a reason that involves Greek word
order and its purpose here, which in turn may have syntactical
significance.

Might the construction used, centering as it does the article TWi,
thereby 'showcase' it with emphasis, and thus PISTEI, as the central
idea of this word sequence?

And I have no idea how or if its case might be altered according to
syntactical purpose or placement.

GeorgeGeorge Blaisdell
Roslyn, WA

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