[b-greek] Re: EGEIRW in perfect in 1Cor 15

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 24 2000 - 17:30:30 EST


At 3:13 PM -0600 11/24/00, Steven Craig Miller wrote:
>To: Carl W. Conrad, et al.,
>
>While thinking on this issue, I've come across the following. First, I was
>somewhat intrigued to find that Benton has translated: HGERQH DE FARAW (at
>Gen 41:4 LXX) as "and Pharao awoke," since HGERQH is obviously passive.
>This led me to start reading again what the grammarians had to say about
>the passive. And Guy L. Cooper, in his "Attic Greek Prose Syntax" (1998),
>notes:
>
><< Classical Greek is perfectly capable of expressing strictly passive
>sentences, i.e. thoughts in which the subject receives the action of the
>verb. But in many other passages of Classical Greek[,] sentences with
>passive verbs portray the subject as not strictly passive but rather
>receiving, accepting, or admitting the action into its (the subject's)
>proper sphere. This suggests a middle or intransitive force in the verb >>
>(52.6.0; 1:583 [comma added -SCM]).
>
>There appears to be strong evidence for verbs with an aorist passive ending
>in -(Q)HN functioning as middles in Attic Greek. This hasn't totally
>convinced me that EGEIROMAI at 1 Cor 15 must be middle/reflexive rather
>than passive, but I do wonder if perhaps, "a Greek speaker" (so to speak),
>in the use of this middle/passive form might not resolve whether or not it
>was middle or passage? Could this be a problem of translation more than one
>of Greek syntax? In our attempts to translate EGEIROMAI into English, we
>might be tempted to translate it as a middle or as a passive, but Paul as
>he was writing 1 Corinthians didn't need to resolve the issue in his mind,
>did he? What do you think?

Yes, that's exactly what I think (but then, I've been say it ad nauseam)--I
think it's very much like subjective and objective genitive, which is a
translator's problem. I think a considerable portion of the problems we
have with Greek come from wanting to think that Greek is structured the way
we want to TRANSLATE it into English.

--

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/

---
B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [jwrobie@mindspring.com]
To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-327Q@franklin.oit.unc.edu
To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu




This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:36:42 EDT