John 1.8 - distinguishing subjects and complements, and borrowing verbs from earlier sentences.

[Sebastian Satkurunath]

I finished 1 John! No doubt missing a lot of subtleties, but still, I think I can allow myself a brief bask in a warm glow of accomplishment.

Now on with the gospel... I am finding a very specific challenge with the first eighteen verses in that the NRSV translation is sufficiently etched on my brain that it's especially difficult to ignore, but I'm trying to put it to one side and just concentrate on what I think the Greek says.

7 οὗτος ἦλθεν εἰς μαρτυρίαν, ἵνα μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ τοῦ φωτός, ἵνα πάντες πιστεύσωσιν δι’ αὐτοῦ.
8 οὐκ ἦν ἐκεῖνος τὸ φῶς, ἀλλ’ ἵνα μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ τοῦ φωτός.

I'm having two difficulties with verse 8, which I would naïvely translate as "The light was not this man, but in order that he might testify concerning the light"

Problem the first - based on both all the existing translations with which I'm familiar, and the unlikelihood of the light testifying concerning itself*, I think I've got the subject and complement backwards, but I also had the understanding that you could distinguish between them by the subject having the article and the complement lacking it. So what's the difference between οὐκ ἦν ἐκεῖνος τὸ φῶς and καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος such that the former can be 'this man was not the light', but the latter can't be 'and (a) God was the Word'?

Problem the second - the second clause clearly needs to be an indirect object of some verb in order to make sense, but which verb? Is it the ἦν from earlier in the sentence, which I think could work in the sense of "he existed in order to...", but would make translations such as the ESV and NRSV (came to) and the KJV (was sent to) feel as though they'd changed the meaning somewhat (although the "his function was to" in Nicholas King's translation feels closer). Or can it actually be using the ἦλθεν from the previous verse? (Or even, for the KJV translators, the ἀπεσταλμένος from two verses ago?) Is this allowed, or do sentences have to be self-contained? Or am I approaching this in the wrong way by looking for a verb explicitly in the text - can ἵνα + subjunctive do more of the heavy lifting here in terms of implying what it's the purpose of?

Thanks

Sebastian

*no reference to Jn 8.13-19 intended

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

If you are unsure about the syntax, you can try

https://syntacticus.org/sentence/proiel ... k-nt:21874 (you can't jump to a verse here, you have to search for a Greek word)

or

https://ibiblio.org/bgreek/resources/sy ... es/reader/

or

http://opentext.org/texts/NT/John/view/ ... h1.v0.html

I don't know how trustworthy these are in individual cases.

[Sebastian Satkurunath]

Thanks for those links. I can definitely see them being helpful in the future, but unless I'm being dense (which is very possible), I don't think they help my current confusion.

I'm less interested in the question of which of "εκιονος" and "το φως" is subject and complement, and more, how do we know, so I can apply the same logic in unfamiliar text.

Similarly, I understand how all the words in the second clause relate to one another, and that it's subordinate to the first clause, but what I can't get my head around is the nature of the relationship between the two clauses.

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

Ellipsis, i.e. leaving out some syntactically needed word(s) to form a complete sentence, is pretty common in Koine. Here it's easily explained because the exact word isn't important and the thought of the blank can be found in vicinity. Most naturally it's some of those what you already suggested.

However, my stance is that the attempt to find an exact word for an ellipsis is often misguided. If the original writer (or speaker) didn't see it necessary to use a word, it was because it was self evident (like "to be" which is probably the most common ellipsis) or it wasn't important. A vague idea or even a group of vague ideas is enough. Why then we, modern readers, are perplexed about ellipsis and why exegetes always seem to try to find the word "in the writers mind"? IMO it's because we don't have ellipsis as heavily used in our mother tongues, and we don't handle Greek as we handle the languages which we speak. Exegetes often fall into a trap of defining everything as exactly as possible even though normal communication (which the Biblical languages are) doesn't require it. The original text, language or communication isn't the problem; our thriving for scientific exactness is.

Aiming for a modern language translation may be the other cause for this task. Naturally, if we translate to a language which wouldn't use an ellipsis in some place we need a word to fill in the blank. This may lead to false sense of this process being necessary for understanding, especially if the highest goal of learning the language -- or the best way to measure the skill -- is to create a translation (which it shouldn't be).

[Sebastian Satkurunath]

Oh, that's given me a bit of a lightbulb moment - thank you!

Whilst I'm very much at a sufficiently early stage of learning that attempting to read without translating at all would just have me hitting a brick wall, it hadn't occurred to me that leaving it as rather wooden not rule following but still sense making in English phrasing would actually leave me closer to the thought-shapes of the writers than crafting elegant prose. So I might try doing that.

[Stephen Carlson]

Why then we, modern readers, are perplexed about ellipsis and why exegetes always seem to try to find the word "in the writers mind"?

The same bad habit of mind permeates the generative linguistics literature on ellipsis. They think that ellipsis is building some syntactic structure and then throwing it away, and they're very interested in what was built and thrown away.