Re: John 7:39

From: Wayne Leman (wleman@mcn.net)
Date: Mon Apr 17 2000 - 00:39:07 EDT


<x-charset iso-8859-1>>As always, I appreciate the helpful replies.
>
>Part of my question related to the anarthrous PNEUMA, and was well
>addressed.
>
>The other part of my ?? was the term "not yet". These translations all add
>"been given":

>
>My question is, is there any linguistic reason, or is it entirely
>extrapolation based on presumption?

Bill, I think there is good linguistic evidence for making explicit what is
semantically implicit in the Greek syntax. Shall we say, it's a given (so to
speak, of course)? The preceding clause says the Spirit was to be received
by those who believed. The following clause does what many languages,
including English, conveniently do, namely drop out what is linguistically
unnecessary but which can be semantically retrieved from the preceding
context. Linguists often call this "gapping". The complement of "receive" is
"give", so it is not simply presumption to supply "given" in the clause in
question, but perfectly good language analysis, making explicit in the
translation what is already there in the meaning of the original text. There
are various technical terms in Greek studies which refer to syntactic
phenomena such as these. I'm not as familiar with all the Greek studies
terminology as I am with the linguistic studies terminological counterpart,
but ellipsis might be one of these for Greek studies.

Happy Easter!

I need to say that this early because I am about to fly several states to
the east to become a grandfather for the first time on Maudy Thursday.
Hurray for new life, especially at Easter time!

Wayne

---
Wayne Leman
Bible translation site: http://bibletranslation.lookscool.com/

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