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This is where we come to delve into the biblical text. Theology is not our foremost thought, but we realize it is something that will be dealt with in nearly every conversation. Feel free to use the original languages to make your point (meaning Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic). This is an exegetical discussion area, so please limit topics to purely biblical ones.

This is not the section for debates between theists and atheists. While a theistic viewpoint is not required for discussion in this area, discussion does presuppose a respect for the integrity of the Biblical text (or the willingness to accept such a presupposition for discussion purposes) and a respect for the integrity of the faith of others and a lack of an agenda to undermine the faith of others.

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An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts

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  • John Reece
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    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of Chapter V, "The Aramaic Subordinate Clause" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    An examination of the instances which have been adduced for the mistranslation of this ambiguous Aramaic particle in the Gospels leads to the observation of three classes: (1) there are a few instances where, along with one translation of the dᵉ, there is an alternative translation or interpretation in the form of a Synoptic variant; (2) in a number of other examples an alternative rendering or interpretation of the underlying Aramaic exists in the form of a textual variant, either in Greek manuscripts or in one or more ancient versions; (3) the third class consists of the remainder of examples which have neither Synoptic nor textual attestation for the alternative rendering which consideration of the Aramaic dᵉ suggests. Examples are discussed under the usual headings, the first two classes, to which naturally more weight is to be attached, being given first..

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
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    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Beginning of Chapter V, "The Aramaic Subordinate Clause" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    CHAPTER V

    THE ARAMAIC SUBORDINATE CLAUSE

    THE ד CLAUSE

    The translation and mistranslation of the ambiguous Aramaic particle dᵉ is one of the best known of Gospel Aramaisms. Burney has given an account of the meaning of the participle: it is a relative, the sign of the genitive, and a conjunction; it may be equivalent to ὅτι, 'because', or ὅτι recitativum, or ἵνα; it may also have the force of ὅτε or ὥστε, the latter use not noted by Burney. In view of so wide an ambiguity, the particle was almost bound to give rise to misunderstanding or to different interpretations in any rendering into Greek.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
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    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Conclusion of "The Paratactic Construction" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

    Black's study of the paratactic construction in the Gospels is more intensive, extensive, and exhaustive than I care to transcribe. I therefore will omit much if not most of it; likewise henceforth with regard to other sections.
    ....

    Three important points emerge generally from this study of parataxis [the linking of clauses or phrases together without utilizing conjunctions that mark subordinate relationships] in the Gospels and Acts:

    1. Considerable importance must be attached to the observation that, in the parables, where we have the best examples in the Words of Jesus of continuous narrative, parataxis, except in Mark, is the exception, the idiomatic Greek hypotactic construction almost the rule. We have not always literal translations of Aramaic therefore in the Words of Jesus as they have been translated from the Evangelists, but in this respect at any rate, literary compositions.

    2. The high proportion, nevertheless, of instances of parataxis in the Gospels and Acts cannot be set down as unliterary Greek only; Aramaic influence must have been a contributory factor.

    3. The less literary paratactic construction, regular in Aramaic, preponderates in the Bezan text. It cannot be explained away as 'Latinism', but must be recognized as a feature of the more primitive text. The unliterary paratactic construction is, however, by no means confined to D; in not a few instance it occurs in WH were D has hypotaxis [the subordinate relationship of clauses (ὑποτάσσω, "place under") ― the opposite of parataxis]. No single manuscript has a complete monopoly on the construction.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
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    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Paratactic Construction" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    A detailed study of the relative frequency of καί and δέ co-ordinating independent clauses has been undertaken by R. A. Martin for the Book of Acts: 'Syntactical Evidence of Aramaic Sources in Acts i-xv' in New Testament Studies, xi, pp. 38-59. On the basis of this and similar evidence for Luke-Acts, Mr. Martin has concluded (p. 59):
    'It is apparent from the above study that the style of Luke-Acts is not consistent with respect to the use of καί and δέ; the use of prepositions; and the separation of the article from its substantive. Further, in some of the subsections of Acts i-xv and Luke i and ii the usage, on the one hand, is strikingly parallel to that of the translation Greek of the Old Testament, and, on the other, differs significantly from the other subsections of Act i-xv, Luke i and ii, the subsections of Acts xvi-xxviii and of original Greek writings such as Plutarch, Polybius, Epictetus, Josephus and the papyri.

    The most natural explanation for this phenomenon is that Semitic sources can be detected as lying behind those subsections of Luke i and ii and Acts i-xv which have the greatest preponderance of translation Greek frequencies for these three syntactical phenomena.'

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Paratactic Construction" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    So far as the Fourth Gospel is concerned, the perpetually recurring paratactic καί ["and"] is certainly an overstraining of Greek literary usage. Milligan thought it 'impossible to deny that the use of καί in the LXX for the Hebrew וְ influenced the Johannine usage'. Lagrange, who was very cautious in questions of Aramaic influence in the Gospels, was of the opinion that, in view of the slight trace of LXX influence in John, the source of the Johannine paratactic καί was Aramaic.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
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    Continued from the last post above ↑

    The following is the beginning paragraph of "The Paratactic Construction" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    The Paratactic Construction

    Parataxis [the linking of clauses or phrases together without utilizing conjunctions that mark subordinate relationships] is much more frequent in Aramaic than it is in Greek. In less literary Greek and in the papyri the construction is not uncommon, and this alone has been regarded as a sufficient justification for its frequency in the Gospels. In the first edition of his Einleitung Wellhausen attributed the over-use of simple parataxis in the Gospels to the influence of Aramaic; but in the second edition it is stated, 'the predominance of parataxis, not only in the sayings of Jesus, but also in the Marcan narrative, is in general no sure sign of Semitic conception'. This agrees in the main with Deissmann and Moulton; the latter states more positively, '. . . in itself the phenomenon proves nothing more than would a string of "ands" in an English rustic's story―elementary culture, and not the hampering presence of a foreign idiom that is being perpetually translated into its most literal equivalent'. C. F. Burney took a different view, especially with regard to the excessive use of the construction in the Fourth Gospel; he argued against Deissmann and Moulton that unliterary works or business documents and letters from Egyptian papyri are not in pari materia with St. John's Gospel, and he assigned Johannine parataxis, along with the related asyndeton construction, to the influence of an Aramaic original.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
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    Final paragraph of "The Distribution of Asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    Except in Mark, the construction is most frequent in the Bezan text. The latter in Mark has, in this respect, been harmonized with Matthew and Luke, the 'rough and crude' asyndeton construction being removed by the insertion of the connecting particles in the parallels in the first and third Gospels.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Distribution of Asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    In the Fourth Gospel, where the construction has been examined by Burney, it again predominates in the sayings and speeches of Jesus, which form, however, the greater part of the work. A modification of Burney's hypothesis may be the best explanation of the excessive use of asyndeton in John: John may not be as a whole a translation of an Aramaic original, but, in the sayings and speeches of Jesus, as in the Synoptics, may contain translations of an Aramaic tradition, edited and rewritten by the author of the Gospel of Mark.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Distribution of Asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    That asyndeton should so preponderate in the Words of Jesus and be virtually absent in the longer narrative portions of the Synoptics, except in Mark's Gospel and in certain Jewish Greek formulae chiefly in Matthew, points to the conclusion that a sayings-tradition, cast in translation Greek and reflecting faithfully the Aramaic construction, has been utilized by the Evangelists. The examples outside the Words of Jesus do not necessarily imply Aramaic sources: they are no more numerous than are found in the Shepherd of Hermas and for the most part of the same type. Their greater frequency in Mark, however, as compared with the other two Synoptic Gospels, may point to an Aramaic narrative tradition about Jesus.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Distribution of Asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    Asyndeton in Matthew and Luke, with the exception of Matthew's λέγει, λέγουσι, ἔθη in narrative, occurs almost exclusively in the sayings and parables of Jesus. With the exception of the two examples in the Magnificat (which is generally believed to have been modeled on a Semitic poem or to be a rendering of a Semitic original), it is not without significance that three or four longer passages from Luke, containing a number of asyndeta together, come from Q (in chapters vi, xi, xvii); the fourth (chapter xviii) is in a parable from Luke's special source. All the Lucan cases (the Magnificat excepted) are in sayings of Jesus. To appreciate the significance of the result, it must again be borne in mind that in the Synoptics narrative greatly outweighs the reported saying and parables of Jesus; the largest proportion of the latter is contained in Q, which in Matthew is about one-sixth of the whole Gospel and in Luke is even less.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Distribution of Asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    A comparison of the instances in Mark with the parallels in Matthew and Luke shows that 'the smoother and more connected forms of the sentences in Matthew and Luke were altered from the rough and crude forms in Mark'. In view of the preponderance of asyndeton in Aramaic, it seems likely that, as in John, the explanation of the 'rough and crude' Marcan asyndeton is either that Mark wrote Jewish Greek as deeply influenced in this respect as the Greek of the Shepherd of Hermas, or else that he is translating Aramaic sources or employing such translations. It is probable that he did both: where Mark is reporting the words of Jesus, not as single isolated sayings but in a group of collected saying, he is most probably incorporating in his Gospel the translation Greek of a sayings-tradition: Mark xiii. 6-9, where asyndeton occurs no less than 4 times in 7 connected sentences, is an instance of translation Greek.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Distribution of Asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    Individual cases may be defended as Greek; the asyndeton in Paul's speech at Miletus (Acts xx. 17 f.), where there is no possibility of Semitic sources (though Semitic influence is not thereby excluded), is rhetorically effective. But when all allowances have been made for Greek uses of the construction, there remains in both the Gospels and Acts a very substantial number of non-Greek asyndeta.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Distribution of Asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

    I am omitting a paragraph that introduces a list of more than a hundred occurrences of asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts.
    .... The construction is more frequent in Mark ....

    In the Matthaean parable of the Tares (xiii), to select one typical example in illustration from the Bezan text, no less than three asyndeta are found in verses 28 and 29: ὁ δὲ ἔφη αὐτοῖς, ἐχθρὸς ἄνθρωπος τοῦτο ἐποίησεν. λέγουσιν αὐτῷ οἱ δοῦλοι, θέλεις ἀπελθόντες συλλέξωμεν αὐτά; λέγει αὐτοῖς οὔ (Bא, οἱ δὲ δοῦλοι αὐτῷ λέγουσι, θέλεις οὖν ἀπελθόντες συλλέξωμεν αὐτά; ὁ δὲ θησίν οὔ). The best manuscript authorities have no connecting particle after ἄφετε in verse 30, but such an asyndeton is not unnatural with commands in Greek. Verse 28b has the Aramaic order (verb first), λέγουσιν αὐτῷ οἱ δοῦλοι. In verse 30, Epiphanius read δέσμας δέσμας (D, δέσμας; WH εἰς δέσμας), an Aramaic distributive.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Distribution of Asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    In the synoptics asyndeton generally does not occur so frequently as in the Fourth Gospel. Blass drew attention to it in the passage Matthew v. 3-17 from the Sermon on the Mount, 'not only where there is no connection of thought, but also in spite of such connection'. Hawkins noted that it occurred more frequently in Mark than in Matthew and Luke, and Lagrange pointed out that it preponderated in the saying of Jesus in Mark: '. . . l'asyndeton se trouve surtout dans le language parlé et très spécialement dans le language de Jésus'.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above ↑

    Continuation of "The Distribution of Asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
    The Aramaic asyndeton λέγει, λέγουσι, occurs in all four Gospels, and Burney has discussed fully its incidence in John. He gives in addition 16 instances of asyndeton λέγει in Matthew; there are more than 4 more in the Bezan text, .... and one in the Vatican Codex, .... , where WH, which Burney is following, adopts the reading of אD, ἔφη. Burney gives no examples of asyndeton λέγουσι for Matthew; the following [3] additional examples are found: .... Mark has no instances of λέγει and one only of λέγουσι (viii. 19), but he has several examples of asyndeton ἔφη, .... Asyndeton ἔφη appears most frequently in Matthew: .... The Bא text of Luke has two instances of λέγει, ..... , but none of λέγουσι.

    Note: Henceforth, for the most part, I will be replacing Black's tedious-to-transcribe verse citations with elisions. If anyone really needs to view such, perhaps a used copy may be found online or in a used book store. There is always available via local public libraries in the U.S.A. the services of the Interlibrary Loan Service.

    Asyndeton: The absence of conjunctions linking coordinate words or phrases (ἀσύνδετον, "not bound together").
    Casus Pendens: Latin "hanging case". Term used most often of the nominative absolute, especially the pendent nominative, which is thought of as suspended or "hanging" apart from its clause.
    Hyperbaton: The separation of words that naturally belong together, for emphasis or the movement of a word or clause from its normal and expected place (ὑπερβατόν, "transposed"). For instance, in Matthew 3:10 ἤδη is separated from its verb.


    Definitions above are taken from Pocket Dictionary for the Study of New Testament Greek ― Defines over 1700 terms of Grammar, Word Study, Textual Criticism, Exegetical Method, and New Testament Criticism (InterVarsity Press, 2001), by Matthew S. DeMoss.


    To be continued...

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