[b-greek] Re: go AND make

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 11 2001 - 06:51:28 EST


At 4:49 PM -0800 3/9/01, dixonps@juno.com wrote:
>On Fri, 9 Mar 2001 11:45:31 -0600 "Carl W. Conrad"
>> On the other hand, I really doubt that the KJV translators were much
>> (if at all) less sophisticated in their understanding of the Greek they
>> were translating than moderns. They may have been working with an
>> inferior Greek text in terms of the witnesses on which it was based,
>> but I suspect that they knew their Greek far better than most of us
>> today know it (who deal with it regularly, that is) and I am absolutely
>> sure that they formulated the meaning in far, far better English of their
>> era than most of us can do in our own era.
>
>If your suspicions are right that adverbial participial phrases falling
>after the verb tend more to be explanatory, and if the KJ translators
>found the same to denote antecedent action, as in Acts 19:2, would you
>be willing to say modern translators may be more sophisticated (more
>because of the accumulated wealth of knowledge and information) than the
>KJ translators, at least in this area?

>> The KJ has, "Have ye received the Holy Spirit since ye believed?" Here
>> the aorist participle does follow the main verb, ELABETE PISTEUSANTES.

Paul, I may be wrong, but I frankly believe that KJV's "since" here has the
sense of "because" rather than "more recently than." I may be liberal in
some ways, Paul, but I don't honestly think that most of our translators
today are as deeply erudite in Greek as were the KJV translators; I think
linguists may have a better handle on how best to describe some features of
the language, but the KJV translators belong to the Renaissance and had
very likely read and re-read Greek texts of all eras and understood the
idiom more directly and throughly than we today can honestly hope to do. My
point previously is that they may have had an inferior recension of the GNT
to work with, but I don't think any of really knows the language better
than they knew it. I think we tend to be rather puny at our best when
compared to those VIRI DOCTI ATQUE ERUDITI.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/

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