As I asked the last time this whole thing came up--maybe 3 weeks ago? Why does no one who is arguing for the "a god" translation go back to the early church fathers who knew Greek? Is this verse ever used as an argument in any of their treatises (both for and against Arianism)? They KNEW Greek, they spoke it, thought in it, breathed it-if you will. As far as I can tell from my somewhat limited reading (but more than the last time the question came up!), neither side used John 1 as an argument. It was a non-starter, grammatically.
I am open to being shown wrong, but in view of our more limited knowledge of Greek, we should show a bit of humility before their silence in using the supposed "indefiniteness" of QEOS as an argument. Maybe we should concentrate on reading Greek, and not trying to proof text our own theological viewpoint, especially if our knowledge of Greek is limited to a year or three of college/seminary Greek (and only NT Koine at that!).
Frustratedly,
James
(yes, I have an advanced degree in Classics...)
A blog of theological opinions (from theologoumenon, “a theological opinion”)
Thursday, October 05, 2006
John 1:1 - What The Fathers Didn't Say
In the latest thread on John 1:1 (a subject that comes up with monotonous regularity on B-Greek), James Spinti (who works for Eisenbrauns) wrote the following post:
I observed this thread at b-greek. 'If only we had natural speakers to instruct us' scholars of dead languages sometimes lament. In the case of Koine Greek, much more attention sould be given to the ancient Sahidic Coptic version. It was produced by ones that grew up with Koine as an international language, they really did think it and breath it. The Coptic version is very precise in it's rendering of John 1:1. This is explained on various blogs including my own http://bibliasahidica.blogspot.com/
ReplyDelete