ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

By the end of this post, you’ll have a decent idea of what I do and don’t consider worthwhile. And you probably won’t be surprised. I mean you’re one of the few, the proud, who, for some reason, find my incessant grammatical ramblings strangely entertaining. You weirdos. Why did you subscribe to the RSS feed of a blog that spends its time talking about things like Adjective Classes anyway?

But I really wish that Denny Burk would blog about Greek grammar. His dissertation was on Greek grammar. But he never talks about it. There are a number of scholars who have published on Greek grammar, whose blogs bored me to death because all they talk about it dumb cultural/political stuff. I get enough dumb stuff like that reading the news – you think US politics are crazy. Trying Canadian. They’re probably going to attempt to overthrow the government again at the end of the summer. And the way they debate on Parliament floor? My goodness. It makes US Congress look like a dinner party!

But seriously, why don’t scholars/students, who would very likely have something to contribute on interesting topics like Greek, never discuss it?

Oh wait. Right.

You don’t get 500 Google Reader subscribers when you talk about grammar all the time. You need to discuss theo-cultural/political subjects ([update: or nothing at all) if you want people to read your blog, especially if its remotely controversial.

Anyway, its frustrating. I can think of maybe five (six?) blogs including my own that regularly and consistently discuss Greek in a relatively intelligent manner as their main blogging subject.* I really wish there were more. There are plenty of blogs focused mainly on Hebrew. Why so few Greek ones? Sometimes its kind of lonely out here.

Maybe I need to start mentioning Britney Spears & Paris Hilton more. Hmmm, maybe not. I don’t want those readers anyway.

* I also know of a few dozen blogs that discuss Greek sporatically in an intelligent manner (I like those ones, I try comment on them when they discuss Greek), two blogs that discuss Greek consistently in a moronic manner (I’ve never commented on either of them), a good 50+ blogs that discuss Greek sporatically at a comfortable student level (don’t comment on those), and a disturbing number of blogs that use Greek to support their pet doctrines that just make me want to bang my head against the desk (definitely don’t comment on those).

In light of the comments, particularly those of Rod Decker, I thought I’d give clearer explanation of why I don’t care for these two words appearing together.

My frustration with this particular collocation of words stems from the historical concerns. Generally when we hear the phrase “Aspect Therm,” it is in relation to what is thought to be its opposite: “Aktionsart Theory.” And generally the following definitions are involved: Aspect is the subjective choice of how the author wanted to describe the action and Aktionsart objectively conveys how the action actually took place.

This is all well and good and generally I have no problem with this distinction (mostly). My problems begin when people start using the two terms as representing two eras in the study of Koine/Hellenistic Greek.

Dr. Decker rightly makes it clear that there is a difference between the two eras in his comment on the previous post:

As to past grammarians, one thing that all study of aspect in NT circles in the last 50 years has agreed upon (starting from McKay in the 1960s, Porter, Fanning, Campbell, Olson, etc.) is that the older grammars have conflated aspect and Aktionsart. The two can and must be distinguished, but the terms were used interchangeably prior to the mid-20th C., even though there are some “cracks” beginning to appear around the turn of the century in grammarians like Burton and Robertson.

This is true, though I would emphasize that they only conflated terminology. That is, I am convinced the old grammarians knew that they were talking about subjective authorial choice on one page  (Aspect) and objectively how the action occurred on another (Aktionsart) even if they only used one word. I’ve argued this point HERE (see especially Moule’s interpretation of Moulton’s discussion of Aktionsart).

So then, my problem begins when people read a present day distinction (1989 and following) between Aspect and Aktionsart back in to the old grammarians as if Robertson or Moulton or Blass were not conflating terminology and following the recent distinction between Aktionsart and Aspect.

This is often how Porter writes (and is why I consider the historical survey of his monograph to be a failure):

One of the most important of these grammarians was Karl Brugmann, who elucidated the theory of Aktionsart. . . . This theory was adapted for New Testament study first by Friedrich Blass in his grammar, which, expanded by Albert Debrunner, has been translated into English and continues to be the most widely-cited New Testament Greek reference grammar, and then by James Hope Moulton, the first to introduce Aktionsart terminology into New Testament study. Aktionsart theory made a distinctive contribution to Greek grammatical study in that it frees the tense-forms from strict reference to time, especially promoting the recognition by most grammarians that non-indicative verb forms did not refer to time. However, this theory also had severe limitations. The first was in its attempt to objectify a conception of how events transpire, and then to equate these conceptions with particular grammatical forms.

Stanley E. Porter, Handbook to Exegesis of the New Testament (NTTS 25; Leiden: Brill, 1997), 116.

Here, Porter himself errs in applying the present day distinction between Aspect and Aktionsart, even though the grammars make it rather clear that their authors had both objective action and authorial subjective choice in mind at different times in their grammatical discussions (cf. the post referenced above).

And the result is that students are making this and even worse historical errors (cf. HERE, where the author confuses Aktionsart with a pre-Winer(!) view of the tenses) in their understanding the history of Greek grammar. More and more students and professors (again, this RBL review) are under the false impression that the old grammars aren’t relevant any more.

To state it frankly, that’s bull.

I really hate that term: Aspect Theory.

When people use it they make it sound as if Greek is the only language that has aspect. All languages have aspect. Its not this novel thing.

I really hate that term.

Last night I read an article/essay/chapter in After Pentecost: Language and Biblical Interpretation. Its a great book, but this chapter by Van Leeuwen caught me off guard.

I’m somewhat tempted to blog through the essay. At this point, all I can say is that I cannot believe that someone who participated in translating the NLT could know so little about the methods and theory of translation used and taught by organizations like Wycliffe. Honestly. It amazes me. My wife is taking a class on translation right now and I sat in on it last week, just to visit and that particular class session, in of itself, contradicted an entire section of Van Leeuwen’s argument against meaning based translation.

Beyond that, the chapter is so full of red-herrings, misunderstandings, and inaccuracies that I simply don’t know what to do with it. In reading the essay, I can’t help but get the impression that Van Leeuwen thinks that Wycliffe translators are completely naive in their views of how language works and how meaning is conveyed or that they simply haven’t put any kind of thought into such issues (or perhaps a combination of both). The result is that in a number of cases, Van Leeuwen provides very helpful discussions about meaning and how communication works as if he’s critiquing meaning based translation methods. But he’s not. Several examples he provides are regularly used illustrations in introductory classes provided at SIL schools.

All this to say, I’m not entirely sure what the point of his chapter was. All the translators that I know personally would agree with much of what he said about language in general, but consider such issues reasons for using a functional/meaning based method of traslation, rather than, as Van Leeuwen believes, arguments against such translations methods.

Perhaps instead of talking about poor translations, we should talk about poorly translated verses. When we criticize a translation we don’t criticize the whole thing but rather a bunch of verses that we don’t like. So why don’t we talk like that?

The ESV is a bad translation because…

The NLT is a bad translation because…

No. There are poorly translated verses in the ESV. There are poorly translated verses in the NLT (sorry Keith). All translations have them, but we tend toward mass judgments against a whole book rather than a single verse. Textual critics look at units of variation one by one, users of translations should too. No textual critic makes a judgment on a manuscript based on a single error.

Until you’ve gone verse by verse through an entire translation, don’t call it “bad” or “poor.”

I want to come back to the issue of Aspect & Tense now. Let’s look at the debated issues:

Tense/Proximity

There are a couple things to be said on this. For one, the concept of remoteness and proximity as used by Porter, Decker, and Campbell are rarely used in linguistics. And indeed, as far as I can tell the use of such terminology for what we seen in the Greek verb is definitely not main stream description. Most linguists prefer the tense terminology. And the vast majority of linguistic literature that uses the these two terms remoteness and proximity use them in reference to demonstratives, not verbs (just do a google search for remote proximate linguistics; you’ll see). This fact makes me more uncomfortable with calling the aorist and imperfect forms “remote” than even the criticisms put forward by people like Randall Buth or Moises Silva.

The (Plu)Perfect Form

The issue of the perfect is really a subset of this debate because Campbell is really the one who has separated himself more than anyone else.* He doesn’t like the term stative and then because he sees parallel usage between the imperfective aspect and the Perfect form in direct and indirect discourse. This leads him to the conclusion that its imperfective in Aspect. To differentiate it from the present form, he proposes the term “heightened proximity,” which he describes as a sort of narrowing in on the action in view (see page 195ff. of Verbal Aspect).

Now what gets me about this explanation is this. What happens when you narrow closely in on a given action. Might it perhaps begin to look like a state? We find is that Campbell’s explanation of the perfect is less different than supposed.

But there’s also another problem. I’ve already said that discussion of remoteness and proximity are quite rare in linguistic literature. And when we move to Campbell’s proposal of heightened remoteness & heightened proximity, the linguistic literature seems to be non-existent. As far as I can tell, Campbell’s terminological proposal is completely unique in linguistic and grammatical discussions as a whole regardless of language.*** Campbell doesn’t help is case when hiss larger book (see the reference above), gives absolutely no citation of any literature that uses such terminology. That makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Its never a good idea to go around creating new categories unless there is extremely clear evidence in the language. And the fact that we have such a stalemate in this debate suggests that the evidence is far from clear!

Moving Beyond the Stalemate

Now I don’t really care what terminology is used. I can use the remoteness/proximate terminology just as easily as tense terminology. I don’t see them as that distinct. So here are some suggestions:

• Until scholars begin to work harder at understanding the other side’s use of terms, we’re only going to cause more confusions for the non-specialist.
• It shouldn’t require a PHD in linguistics to understand what you write (and in the case of Porter’s dissertation, it shouldn’t take a magnifying glass either – I would have 1,000 pages).
• If you don’t write for the non-specialist, your work is destined for the wastebasket because the majority of NT scholars don’t have the time to invest in translating it into normal English.
• Creating new terminology doesn’t help the problem unless that terminology is obviously self-explanatory.**

[Update] Be sure to read Dr. Campbell’s comment on the post.

* Porter maybe relatively unique is his explanation of the Perfect as Stative among NT scholars, but his basic description is not that different from anyone elses, at least not in my opinion.

** In terms of Aspect terminology, I think we need to move beyond Aspect and Aktionsart to the language proposed by Carlota Smith (The Parameter of Aspect): Viewpoint Aspect and Situation Aspect. For one, using these terms will prevent future students from applying modern definitions of Aktionsart to early 20th century grammarians. It also makes explicit that distinction between “subjective” and “objective” action that we hear so much about.

*** This refers to terminology only. His definitions *are helpful*, though I probably would have described them differently.

I have it set up so that Google sends me an e-mail whenever someone writes a blog post about Greek and the New Testament. It has at times been beneficial and I’ve found a few excellent posts discussing some aspect of the language or exegesis of the text.

But the majority of “hits” that I come across are pretty worthless. Some of them are either long treaties trying to bolster the author’s pet doctrine with the Greek language. Others are more inspirational with only a quick passing reference to a particular “juicy” grammatical or lexical tidbit.

Of the daily e-mails there’s probably only one each week that’s actually worth reading through.

These are times when F. F. Bruce’s recommendation to not write about theology until you’ve been studying the language for 20 years seems incredibly valid. Although, I say that with the recognition that its not at all practical for pastors.

I would venture to suggest that in colleges, seminaries, and graduate schools where Greek is taught, there needs to be a greater emphasis on how language, meaning and communication function in general before students move on toward “learning”* Greek. Even a basic understanding of such things would help infinitely.

Until then, someone should start editing the internet.

Okay, end of rant.

*I put “learning” in quotes because Greek isn’t taught; its grammar is taught. There’s a difference.

I’ve ranted about frustrations before, but one thing I really can’t stand are descriptions of Greek pronunciation that have very little value until you actually hear the sound!

A good example of this is Caragounis’ description of the pronunciation of Koine, complete with a chart. Before I begin to criticize him, though, let me say two things:

1) He’s right about the pronunciation. There is no valid reason in my opinion to continue using the Erasmian pronunciation of the language and as my wife studies Greek for her Greek class each day, I only become more frustrated by the fact that they’re making her speak (yes, the class is emphasizing auditory learning as well) Greek using those atrocious sounds! Let the language have its dignity! Please!

2) He’s also right about the historical necessity of knowing Koine as part the stream of history that is the Greek language. While some would question this. They’re wrong. If they want to continue in this opinion, then they can just forget about using the great grammars like those of Moulton and Robertson, because those two great scholars reference classical, koine, medieval, and modern Greek regularly throughout their grammars. Greek is Greek is Greek.

Okay, now about pronunciation descriptions:

Its particularly frustrating when I read people trying to describe with a voiced velar fricative (IPA: [ɣ]) sounds like. I thought this when I was reading Caragounis:

Capitol: Γ, Small: γ, Historical Greek Pronunciation: y, gh (w), as in yet (when followed by e and i-sounds). Before all other positions: Try pronouncing as “go,” but deeper from the throat: “gho”. The result should be similar to ‘w’ in “woe”, but harder and more guttural (The Development of Greek and the New Testament, 352).

I can tell you a couple things. First, no student is going to know what a gutteral is. Secondly, the gamma is not gutteral. Its velar. You put your tongue on the front of that soft patch on the roof of your mouth. Third what in the world does “but harder” mean???

My suggestion? (Greek teacher listen) Take a week. Breeze through the necessary sections of the international phonetic alphabet. Then after that, tell your students that gamma is a voiced velar fricative.

I had the most terrible search today!

“moises silva liberal”

Now I don’t mind the term liberal depending on how its used, but generally when its applied to scholars, its used in a condemning way – like the way Jim West uses the term Fundie.

If that’s the case and I fear that it is, this is a terrible slander of one of my favorite scholars.

Please, do not label people like that. The question is not whether Silva is liberal or conservative, but whether he does his homework in his academic work. And you know what, He DOES. Silva is a brilliant scholar in both the Old and New Testaments – one of the few leading scholars with excellent training in linguistics. His work in textual criticism, semantics, Greek grammar, exegesis and hermeneutics has all been excellent.

(I have a feeling that my title will catch Esteban’s attention…)

There are several ways that translations render this verse. Here are a couple of them:

HCSB: And He put everything under His feet and appointed Him as head over everything for the church

NCV: God put everything under his power and made him the head over everything for the church

These are two popular renderings a good number of other translations have them (such as the [T]NIV & NRSV). The problem is that they are all wrong – very wrong.

Why?

Its the verb “appoint” and “made” in the two translations. The verb is δίδωμι. This is an issue in lexicons too (BDAG gives 15 definitions). There are times when either of these two words fit well with an instance of δίδωμι. But this isn’t one of them. When such a translation is possible the grammatical constituents of the clause very different. Like the English word, “give,” when δίδωμι has that particular meaning, it also takes an Agent (either a Nominative NP [Noun Phrase] or Pro-drop), Theme (Accusative NP), and recipient (Dative NP). That is, there is always some one who gives, something, to someone else. In linguistics these are called semantic roles required by a verb. And δίδωμι is consistent in this regard.

When there is an Accusative NP and Dative NP, δίδωμι always means to give. When translations make choices like this, they are ignoring the grammar of Greek. I’m not asking for syntactic transliteration. Just that the semantics are fairly represented. The two translations above take the Dative NP as a dative of advantage. Such a meaning unknown among occurrences of δίδωμι with an NP Acc, & NP Dat. If there’s a Dative NP is must be the recipient. I challenge anyone to give me an example otherwise where there is both an Acc NP & a Dat NP – and it has to be obvious if it could “go either way,” then it probably isn’t an example and actually probably can’t go either way. And for that reason, this verse is in accurate. God is not appointing his head for the church’s advantage or benefit, he is giving Christ the head, to the church.

Okay, rant over now.

By the way, the ESV & NET get it right.