Grounding status of participle in 1 Peter 3:7

[Stephen Carlson]

Personally, I found Steve’s work (and Levinsohn’s) extremely helpful in my own text-critical work, especially for evaluating textual variants that relate to discourse functions.

Could you give a specific example or two?

The presence of the article in Gal 2:6 comes to mind, as does inclusion of δέ in 2:16. There are others. The gory details are all in my book.

[serunge]

So Steve, assuming that your reading of the text is valid in all its particulars, what difference does it make? Should we draw different conclusions from the more traditional grammatical and syntactical reading of the text? If so, what?

You ask a good question, Barry. I would say it does not make as much of a difference as some proponents of discourse analysis would lead you to believe. I do not spend much time in commentaries these days, but I spot-checked the outlines and found the division Mitch proposes is common. In reading closely through the WBC comments here, the author views 2:18-3:7 as about household ethics, citing the direct address forms and repetition of the participle in 2:18 and 3:1 as evidence. But what was missing was any reference to how the dependency relationships among the verbal clauses would have further strengthened his claim, and have offered a better connection of 3:7 to what precedes besides the relation of husband and wife. He has a clear connection, but one that would not differentiate the structuring here with what seems to be a different grouping in Eph 5:18 ff. There v. 22 has no verb at all (dependent on v. 21 which in turn is dependent on v. 18) versus the imperative at 5:25.

So to return to your question, what I am doing is not about arriving at a different reading than most, but about showing how I got there both for precision and to rule out potentially competing alternatives. I don't think the outcomes will be radically different than traditional approaches in most cases, but how they were arrived at will be much more transparent and thus better able to address competing alternatives. If I am claiming a conclusion that no one else has ever claimed before, then I am probably wrong.

[Barry Hofstetter]

Steven, this is quite close to the value that I see in discourse analysis. To me, it is another perspective on getting a handle on the text. It's a way of making objective what people who have a fluent or near-fluent control of the text often see intuitively.