[b-greek] "Syntactical Chiasmus"

From: virgil newkirk (virgilsalvage1@email.msn.com)
Date: Sun Jan 28 2001 - 18:17:23 EST


Hello Wayne and all,

    Wayne, on June 28,2001 at 13:46 when you said,

    Steven, *if* Philemon 5 and Matt. 7:6 were intended to be understood
chiastically, from that I would still not consider chiasmus to be a natural
syntactic form of Greek. I would, instead, regard the syntactic forms as
being borrowed from Hebrew and imposed upon the Greek of the NT by its
Jewish writers. I have read some on the issue of chiasmus in these two
verses and at this point I buy the scholarly arguments (Dr. Black, et al)
that chiasmus was intended. There are a huge number of Semiticisms in the
Greek of the NT. It would, therefore, not surprise me in the least, to see
some Semitic syntactic borrowing, as well as the Semitic lexical and
idiomatic borrowings that we are usually more aware of. The NT is a very
Hebraic document, even though it was not written in the lingua franca of its
day, rather than a Semitic language.


       Wayne, am I understanding you correctly that the bringing into
another language, forms that are not natural to that language, is something
that was legitimately and successfully done by the New Testament writers in
a number of places in the New Testament? If this is true, isn't this
borrowing of forms something that can legitimately be done as we struggle to
bring into many different target languages what is emphatically "said" in
the Greek text? If sometimes we don't bring over into our language "the
form" something was stated in....don't we run the risk of losing reference,
impact or emphasis? Now I am not suggesting this for every instance.
However, sometimes, as you stated clearly in the above mentioned
reference....there is syntactical...lexical..and idiomatic borrowing brought
directly into another language. It would seem to me this would be an
important freedom we should sometimes have permission for as we attempt to
put into our language what we ascertain to be what the Greek text actually
"says." What think and say Ye?

    Virgil Newkirk
    Salt Lake City, Utah



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