I have no quarrel with any of this detailed analysis, but I can't refrain from asking the question, Cui bono? Seems to me that anyone who understands all these terminological distinctions wouldn't need the analysis and that one who does not understand them won't be helped by them toward understanding the text any better. That is the standard objection raised against the grammar/translation pedagogy. On the other hand, this thorough parsing analysis of each form, if applied to a database of all GNT words, might be immensely useful for search and comparison of the whole database (provided there's a consensus on all the terminology in use, of course).Stephen Carlson wrote:Continuing the top-down approach, after segmenting the text, looking at how the segments function in terms of discourse, and looking at the focus structure within each segment, it is now good to look in more detail at the verbs.
Jonathan has done the parsings:
Unfortunately, there is no indicative in sight in Gal 1:1-5, so tense is out, but we can still look at aspect and mood.Jonathan Robie wrote:
- ἐγειρ-αντος (ἐγείρω, raise) - Participle, Singular aorist active: genitive (m)
- δ-όντος (δίδωμι, give) - Participle, Singular aorist active: genitive (m)
- ἐξέληται = ἐκ:ἑλ-ηται (ἐξαιρέω, take away from) - 3rd person singular; aorist subjunctive; mediopassive
- ἐν:ἑστ-ῶτος (ἐνίστημι, here: be present in) - Participle, Singular perfect active: genitive (m)
Aorist active participle of ἐγείρω (ἐγείρειν, ἐγεῖραι. The Aktionsart (lexical aspect, actionality, situation type, what have you) of the predication is an achievement (a change of state) and the aorist stem indicates that the aspect is perfective, meaning that it is viewed as complete.Gal 1:1f wrote:τοῦ ἐγείραντος αὐτὸν ἐκ νεκρῶν who raised him from the dead
Though the participle does not indicate time per se, a complete action is generally in the past, as is the case here.
The voice is "active" and the diathesis is transitive. One participant (God the Father) caused a change of state (becoming raised) in another participant (Jesus Christ). Like most transitives, there is a strong distinction between subject and object, as agent and patient respectively.
Aorist participle of δίδωμι (δίδοναι, δοῦναι). As before, we have an achievement, and the perfective aspect of the aorist stem indicates that it is viewed as complete.Gal 1:4a wrote:τοῦ δόντος ἑαυτὸν ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν who gave himself for our sins
Though the voice is "active", the reflexive pronoun ἑαυτόν means that the diathesis is a direct reflexive: one participant is both the agent and the patient. Although the middle is often viewed as a reflexive voice, it is important to keep in mind that the prototypical sense of the reflexive is not really handled by the middle but by the reflexive pronoun used with an active verb. The middle is used with indirect reflexives (e.g., autobenefactives, where the subject is conceived to benefit from the action) or weak reflexives (e.g., submissives, where the subject is viewed as letting, rather than causing, the action to happen to itself).
Aorist subjunctive of *ἐξαίρέω (ἐξαιρεῖσθαι, ἐξελέσθαι). Another achievement viewed as complete, but the subjunctive with ὅπως indicates that the action is viewed as complete in a kind of future, posterior to Jesus Christ's giving himself in the preview clause.Gal 1:4b wrote:ὅπως ἐξέληται ἡμᾶς ἐκ τοῦ αἰῶνος τοῦ ἐνεστῶτος πονηροῦ in order that he rescue us from the present evil age
Here, the voice is middle, and the aorist middle naturally fits an autobenefactive sense (take away for oneself), but often these undergo a lexical specialization, so always necessary to keep looking up these middles in the lexicon until one becomes accustomed to its sense. Here, it means rescue. (This is why I buck the tide and prefer to lemmatize the active and middle separately in such cases.)
We also have ἐνεστῶτος as a perfect participle of ἐνίστημι. This old perfect has a stative sense, present. In fact, ἐνεστῶτος is the Greek grammatical term for the present.
One question: The term "diathesis" here seems to be used not for "voice" but for transitivity/intransitivity. I haven't seen the term used that way, but then, I don't know the literature; has this usage of the term become standard, and if so, where?