People have been supportive of your inquiry here. You posted your ideas to test whether you had given it a fair assessment.jdhadwin wrote:I'm going to get some help privately and learn a bit more before I post publicly again
You are a learner who sees the beauty, balance and interconectedness of the knowledge that you are acquiring - rather than learning by seeing a whole lot of unrelated and seemingly contradictory. Your reasoning was sound according to the knowledge of Greek that you had. People who know more Greek than you have pointed out that difference in usage between ὑπέρ with the genitive and ὑπέρ with the accusative, that is something that you will need to work into your own mental model of Greek. It is like the mental quandary that someone might have if you were learning about traffic flow for the first time and someone said, "Traffic flows east on Beijing Road, west on Nanjing Road and both east and west on Shanghai Road." To not get freaked out about possible accidents and chaotic traffic jams on Shanghai Road, one needs to have another type of ordering, such as median strips or lane-line markings.
When you have worked the "same preposition different case doesn't cause a traffic jam" logic into your language model for Greek, you should post your ideas again. You don't NEED to have enough knowledge to make sure you're not going to look foolish, though some people prefer to make less errors. People who come with a stance of "here is my argument knock it down of your able", do not thrive here, and nor do those who are unable formulate questions within a traditional grammatical framework. In effect the forum is not so open and inclusive. As a participant, you need to learn those two skills in addition to learning Greek - how to be perceived as a certain type of non-combatant participant, and how to express ideas in terms of the traditional grammar system. Those things are both strengths and weaknesses of the forum. The sensitivity that you notice among some older members is also reflected in the fact that other older members do not continue to participate in such a restrictive environment. Unrestricted engagements tend to become heated - without the opportunity to torture, impale or torch those who disagree with their interpretation of scripture, they resort to winning arguments. Greek (the appeal to the original text in the original language) is a trump-card that many people like to use. While words in Greek or arguments using it may sound good to the masses, most people here know enough Greek to either disagree or to to say. "Yeah,and so?". That is the culture and mentality of B-Greek. So it is a fine line we newbies walk here - I have different ways of viewing the workings of language that just don't make sense, and you have used theological understanding in an argument.
Now...
I haven't had time to do jig-saws for quite a while, but lets assume that we've both at some point in our lives done some of the really big ones, (or had an uncle or grandmother who has).
How do you start? With edges and pieces with easily identifiable patterns or colours. Where do you end? With pieces that have all about the same colour, and you have a handful that are put in without much significance to the overall picture, and are simply put in because they fit.
Moving on from the jig-saw analogy now, prepositions in general are the words which have the least definite "meaning", and even if they were left out all together, you could pretty well guess what they would be. If you didn't scurry for the dictionary when you see a preposition, but rather, on the basis of you experience in life, knowledge of the world, ideas about religion, etc. thought of all the things that the preposition could be, that might be a good start. The assumption being that the addition of a preposition clarifies which of the meanings (a reasonable person not trying to sound too crazy - when Ockham's razor leads to a room with 3 doors - would consider) is meant here. Prepositions will clarify which of the doors are meant to be opened.
Have a look at your example, Ἐπεὶ τί ποιήσουσιν οἱ βαπτιζόμενοι ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν; Εἰ ὅλως νεκροὶ οὐκ ἐγείρονται, τί καὶ βαπτίζονται ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν;
For the interpretation that the that holds that οἱ βαπτιζόμενοι ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν refers to the same people - οἱ βαπτιζόμενοι are the οἱ νεκροί (those who stay dead as opposed to those who hope for the resurrection) ie, the third person plurals, the groups whose theme runs right through this passage mentioned first in verse 12
, we could consider what other preposition could have been used, if ὑπὲρ (c.gen.) were not.1 Corinthians 15:12 wrote:Εἰ δὲ χριστὸς κηρύσσεται ὅτι ἐκ νεκρῶν ἐγήγερται, πῶς λέγουσίν τινες ἐν ὑμῖν ὅτι ἀνάστασις νεκρῶν οὐκ ἔστιν;
Two questions:
Is the preposition ὑπὲρ (c.gen.) ever used of self interest?
Is the preposition ever used with a middle-passive form?