At 5:58 AM -0600 1/24/97, Jonathan Robie wrote: >OK, I'm moving on to the next chapter! In Ephesians 2:1, hUMAS is accusative: > >Eph 2:1 (GNT) KAI hUMAS ONTAS NEKROUS TOIS PARAPTWMASIN KAI TAIS hAMARTIAIS >hUMWN > >What is the force of this accusative? Is it an accusative of respect? >Wallace claims that the accusative of respect "is rare enough in the NT that >this should be employed as a last resort--that is, only after other >categories are exhausted," but I don't see what else it could be. Jonathan: check the archives for the early part of the "Accusative Absolute" chain and you'll see a discussion of this passage. I have not tried to hide my feelings about the style of this tractate/letter: to call it loose is an understatement. I think that 2:1-5 (+ ...) is an anacoluthon; the writer begins in 2:1 with that accusative phrase you have cited, intending even then, I believe, to complete it with what we finally find in 2:5: KAI ONTAS hHMAS NEKROUS EN TOIS PARAPTWMASIN SUNEZWOPOIHSEN TWi CRISTWi ... --but before he gets around to completing his sentence, he flexes his rhetorical muscles and adds a rough half dozen additional clauses/phrases in a sort of Faulknerian "free-association" pattern (I'm thinking of The Sound and the Fury) and then, since he realizes that the original object has been left way behind, he repeats it--BUT--this time he includes himself among those who were dead in their sins but made alive with Christ, putting down hHMAS--"us" in place of the original hUMAS, "you." It seems to me that the identity of the opening phrases in 2:1 and 2:5 in all respects apart from the accusative personal pronoun makes it clear that SUNEZWOPOIHSEN TWi CRISTWi is the intended verb taking that accusative as a direct object. There will, no doubt, still be those who want to call it an "accusative absolute" simply because its verb is so far removed and they want to tag every word in terms of its clearest syntactical link. But the whole sequence of 2:1-2:5 makes it abundantly clear what's going on. The accusative of respect, at least in traditional grammatical terminology, tends to be used of accusatives qualifying adjectives or verbs denoting a state to denote a thing in respect to which the verb or adjective is limited (Smyth, #1601); Wallace seems to be using the term in an idiosyncratic sense including limiting functions of an accusative noun that can't be explained otherwise. But Ephesians 2:1 hUMAS ONTAS KTL. is not an accusative of respect. Carl W. Conrad Department of Classics, Washington University One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130 (314) 935-4018 cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/