Jaguar Prince

I have Smyth under my eyes, pp. 293-294. There isn't a single line on relative clauses. All it talks about is the position of adjectives when they are attributive. There are three cases in Greek. In order of frequency, they are

A ho sophos aner: the wise man
B ho aner ho sophos: the man, the wise one (=the wise man)
C aner ho sophos : man, the wise one (=the wise man)

en tei okiai tei charmidou tei para to Holumpieion

In the house of Charmides by the Olympieum

John 20:2

ton allon matheten oun ephilei ho Iesous
ton matheten ton allon oun epilei ho Iesous
matheten ton allon oun ephilei ho Iesous

Are all perfectly equivalent sequences in Greek but the first construction is by far the most frequent. They all mean the same thing:

the other disciple whom Jesus loved

To add or not to add a comma is a choice which has nothing to do with the question of the position of the adjective in Greek.

To claim that because ho aner sophos is predicative in Greek (=the man is wise) the relative clause in John 20:2 must be understood as predicative is completely irrelevant and utterly confusing. Predicative sentences typically contain a copula (=the verb "to be") and this is not the case here. Besides, Greek has two positions for predicative adjectives: you can say either

sophos ho aner or

ho aner sophos =the man is wise

The order in which relative clauses appear in Greek (and in every other language I know except Chinese) is just like that: you have an antecedent and then a relative pronoun. Because the relative pronoun comes after the noun it modifies doesn't mean the relative clause is necessarily appositional.

Jag :devil3:

PS:
"pros ton allon mathêtên ton hon ephilei ho Iêsous" should be translated (if it is good Greek at all!) as "the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved". But SC claims this is what my version should look like. I think SC is mistaken.

Jaguar Prince

I don't think it is necessary for me to dig for new Greek papyri in the sands of Egypt or in the basement of Yale University .

Elementary knowledge of English shows that "whom Jesus loved" cannot be an unrestrictive/appositional relative clause:

She runs to the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved.

Omit the relative clause to know whether it is restrictive or appositional, as we were taught in primary school. Behold, you obtain an monstrosity:

She runs to Peter and to the other disciple.

Add the relative clause and scrap the comma. Lo! it all makes perfect sense:

She runs to Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved.

The-other-disciple-whom-Jesus-loved is a semantic block.

Re-read my post, please. There are many other questions your reply leaves unanswered. And let me state here that your first contribution was based on a faulty argument throughout.

We now have two competing and equally authoritative versions for what John 20:2 should have imperatively looked like to be rendered as the innocent and straightforward "the other disciple whom Jesus loved":

TON ALLON TON MATHETON HOUS EPHILEI HO IESOUS

TON ALLON MATHETON TON OUN EPHILEI HO IESOUS.

This looks more and more like a variant of the story of the guy who had ordinary fever and diarrhea and consulted different doctors. He was diagnosed with a different disease and prescribed different drugs by each great specialist...

Jag :devil3:

andrewcriddle

In John 20:2 'the other disciple' may be a back reference to John 18: 15-16 which mentions another disciple associated with Peter.

In this case 'the one whom Jesus loved' in 20:2 would be intended to explain who the other disciple previously associated with Peter in John 18 15-16 really was.

Andrew Criddle

Jaguar Prince

First let me apologize for the mistakes in transcribing the Greek sentences: I confused oun (then) with hon (whom) and the accusative of mathetes is matheten, not matheton. Maybe some people will make a big fuss about these errors, but they are on the whole less grievous than claiming that a Greek grammar rule about the position of adjectives has any bearing on the meaning of relative clauses.

The question was never one of attributive vs. predicative but one of restrictive vs unrestrictive (appositional) relative clauses, and the truth is that Greek, like English, doesn't tell you for sure whether a given relative clause is one or the other. In English, the only way is to add a comma, but ancient Greeks didn't have any punctuation.

I've been challenged to offer examples of exceptions to the rule stated by our distinguished Greek scholar SC. Well, let me say that there is no such rule in the first place, but I can give a whole list of NT sentences in which we find grammatical constructs absolutely similar to the one in John 20:2 and where all translators have opted for a restrictive relative clause, which according to SC is a mistake.

I will show just one such example here, 2 Cor 7:7

And not by his (=Titus) coming only
but by the consolation wherewith he was comforted in you

Greek has: alla kai en tei paraklesei ei paraklethe eph humin

http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/c/1111721943-5317.html#7

According to SC, this sequence should have imperatively been rendered as

but by the consolation, the one wherewith he was comforted in you

Because? because the article was not repeated before the relative pronoun...

But lo and behold! not a single translator has had recourse to such a circumlocution.

http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/versions/1111722205-1493.html#7

They translated it as if it had looked like:

alla kai en tei paralesei tei ei paraklethe eph umin (added word in bold)

the clumsy form in which SC claims all antecedents of restrictive relative clauses should appear. The trouble is that to my (limited) knowledge such a repetition of the article before the relative clause is unheard of. I've checked all my Greek grammars, specially Moulton and Wallace and wasn't able to find anything resembling:

ton allon matheten ton on ephilei o Iesous

Anyway, as I said above there is no rule in Greek grammar to distinguish restrictive from unrestrictive relative clauses. Only the context can tell one which is the case.

I'm not saying I'm more competent than SC or any other person who has some knowledge of Greek here. No, I'm just saying that on this particular point I seem to be right rather than wrong.

PS: other examples of restrictive relative clauses exhibiting the same pattern as John 20:2 are Mark 14,71, John 1:26, Matt 24,50, John 4:14, Mark 12:10, 1 Cor 10:16, 1 John 3:24.

There is another beautiful example in GGBB by Wallace on page 336: ho oikos hon Iakobos oikodomesen epese, which Wallace translates as "The house that Jack buit fell down", restrictive relative clause as in John 20:2.

My own more or less fanciful version of what John 20:2 should have looked like to be rendered as "the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved" is

ton allon matheten on kai ephilei o Iesous

a pattern similar to that of John 21,20 with kai meaning "even" (explicative)

But even that is not unambiguous imho.

Jaguar Prince

Peter sees the disciple whom Jesus was loving following (them)
the one who had leaned on his breast at the meal

Here we have in Greek a pattern which conforms to S.Carlson's Rule. Therefore we must (IMHO this is not obligatory at all*) translate the relative clause (os kai anepesen...) as an unrestrictive one, which means adding a comma and "the one" in English.

The amusing beauty of this is that we now have another good reason to claim that there were indeed two beloved disciples, since in the quote above the author of the fourth gospel is at pains to remind us that the beloved disciple "he" is talking about is not the one who ran to the tomb with Peter on Easter Sunday, but the one who was leaning on Jesus' breast at the so-called Last Supper, viz. Mary the Magdalen.

Obviously, this reminder is a painful one for Peter since at that meal he was obliged to ask the beloved disciple, a female, a favor (ask Jesus who the traitor is...), which shows that the author of the fourth gospel never misses an opportunity to debase the stony man who was proclaimed the First Apostle by the church of Rome.

Proleptically let me simply say that since stark nakedness was taboo among Jews there is no problem at all with Mary the Magdalen being on the boat with the other male disciples in John 21 (=the guys weren't naked), that there were female apostles (Paul refers to one of them and even says that she was preaching the gospel before him) and that when females became "enlightened" (I'm using a modern term here) they were considered as males. Not as biological males, of course, but as spiritual males. In fact, in those heroic times, masculinity had two meanings: the gonads and the spirit (Xtians conflated the two: gonads are spiritual ).

The beauty of the fourth Gospel is that it neither promotes feminism nor phallocracy, but shows the way to a transformation of the "flesh" leading to a complete transcendence of biological gender (=gnosticism?). In view of the real message of the gospel, there shouldn't have been any need to disguise the identity of the two beloved disciples since they were neither male nor female, but church authorities were so deeply hostile to the idea of apparent females playing the star roles in the ministry of Jesus and ordinary audiences so morbidly addicted to phallocracy-things haven't changed that much in our times, alas-that the authors of the fourth gospel had to use mysterious titles to veil the identity of the two key disciples and to refer to them by using masculine pronouns.

And now have a good throaty laugh, o 'learned' men!

Ridete, doctissimi amici!

Jag :devil3: :love: :Cheeky:

*Greek has no rules to differentiate restrictive and unrestrictive relative clauses (English basically only has the comma).

S.C.Carlson

Smyth § 1165, p. 294, states: "A relative or temporal clause may be treated as an attributed: Σόλων á¼?μίσει τοὺς οἷος οὗτος ἀνθÏ?ώπους Solon detested men like this man here. D. 8.46." {Transliteration: Solon emisei tous hoios houtos anthropous.}

The relative clause of the Smyth example, highlighted in blue, is in position A. The relative clause in John 20:2, on the other hand, is not in any of positions A, B, and C. (Note: B is out since there is no repeated article in John 20:2.)

That's because allon, the word you're moving around, is in attributive position. The key to your proposal, however, depends on whether the relative clause hon ephileo ho Iesous is in the attributive position. It remains in the predicate position in all three examples.

To be precise, Greek did not use the comma to distinguish restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. It is an English-language punctuation convention (which other European languages don't even follow). At any rate, the proper rendering in English needs the comma: "the other disciple, whom Jesus loved."

We're talking about the predicate position for a modifier, not predicative sentences.

The more common approach is to sandwich an attributive relative clause between the initial article and the noun, but examples of the post-nominal attributive position exist. For example, Didymus the Blind's Commentary on Psalms 22-26:10 has: οá½?κ ἄλλο κÏ?αταίωμα ἔχουσιν οἱ φοβούμενοι τὸν θεὸν á¼¢ αá½?τὸν τὸν ὃ φοβοὺνται { ouk allo krataioma echousin hoi phoboumenoi ton theon e auton ton ho phobountai }, which I would take mean: "The terrified do not have God or Him whom they fear as another support."

In this example, the relative clause "whom they fear" is attributive and the article τὸν { ton } preceding the clause puts it into the attributive position.

To get "the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved", a weak demonstrative pronoun, not a definite article, would be employed.

(By the way, word-for-word translations between Greek and English are fraught with danger, because, well, Greek is not English. Some grammatical constructions work very differently, and the definite article is often particularly hazardous among the Indo-European languages because the definited article was not inherited from the IE mother tongue but reinvented in different daughter languages in different ways. Personally, I found that understanding the Greek definite article was one of the hardest areas to get right, because I had to forget all the English-language assumptions for the article.)

Stephen

Jaguar Prince

I'm drinking Paros wine a votre santé, agapetos.

S.C.Carlson

No problem, I knew what you meant.

They didn't need commas to distinguish this either, because one could tell depending on which position the modifier is found in. (But see below for some specialized constructs, not relevant to John 20:2, that are ambiguous.)

Great! I love clear counter-examples. Even better, I love those that hold up.

For those a little confused by the transliteration (ei should be hei), the Greek text is: ... ἀλλὰ καὶ á¼?ν τῇ παÏ?ακλήσει á¾— παÏ?εκλήθη á¼?φ' ὑμῖν.

This is not a clear counter-example. For example, the Rheims New Testament explicitly rendered, using commas, the relative clause as non-restrictive: "And not by coming only, but also by the consolation, wherewith he was comforted in you."

Here, the clause is in the predicate position and should be non-restrictive: "7 not only by his coming but also by his comfort, with which he was comforted about you." The second his in English is appropriate since Greek often drops the possessive pronoun when the possessor is clear from the context (Smith, § 1121, 1199 N.), and Paul is prone to ellipses in "not only ... but also" constructions.

I don't know what you mean by "imperatively" here (there's no verb) and I don't know why non-restrictive clauses have to be rendered with "the one wherewith."

I just cited a translator who did explicitly employ a non-restrictive relative. Due to the highly redundant nature of Paul's prose here, it is not surprising that most modern translations have simplified their renditions, particularly since there's hardly a whit's worth of difference in meaning for the restrictive and non-restrictive clauses here. A translation is not a grammatical commentary.

I just cited an example from Didymus the blind previously, and the repetition of the article is certainly less common than the main attributive position, which is between the article and the noun.

Well, others have already dealt with that.

Mark 14:71: "I don't know this man, whom you speak of" -- Not a problem; there's no other man Peter is denying. 1 Cor 10:16 "The cup of the blessing, which we bless, ..." -- also not a problem.

In John 4:14 and 1 John 3:24, the relative pronoun is a genitive used partitively, so it always goes in the predicate position (Smith § 1171) -- a specialized usage that does not apply to John 20:2.

John 1:26, Matt 24:50, and Mark 12:10 are all indefinite (with no article at all), so the post-nominal position can be either attributive or predicate depending on context. This case is fairly common, so it may be why you thought there was no general rule. This case, of course, does not apply to John 20:2.

While we're listing the known exceptions (which are discussed in the pages of Smyth I had cited), there are also specialized usages of the predicate position with adjectives of place and certain specific pronouns. None of these, however, apply to John 20:2.

That's an English saying back-translated into Greek. It is not native Greek. All seven occurrences of ho oikos hon ... in TLG are non-restrictive.

Stephen

Chili

The keen insight of Peter was the rock of faith on which Jesus would built his church. By recognizing that Jesus was the Messiah the faith of Peter must diminish and be annihilated because it is foolish to wait for the messiah if you are talking to him. If the betrayal by Judas was the end of Judaism the persuasion of Thomas with the exclamation "my Lord and my God" was needed to defrock Peter since we cannot have faith where there is no doubt (Peter and Thomas were twins in faith and doubt) and that was the reason why Peter was naked on their next fishing trip . . . and caught nothing all night to prove that Peter was stripped of all faith and therefore naked.

Peter's problem was that he was fishing on the wrong side of the boat where Judaism had been emptied and was told to cast his nets on the right side of his mind where the fish would be large and easy to catch. Upon seeing this Peter put on his cloak of faith once again and dove headfirst into the celestial sea to start building his new inspired Church. "Enlightenment" is the light of life and since the woman is the light of man it is impossible for enlightened females to be women, or light would have to be the light of light without a life to illuminate (at the risk of being flushed for showing that "woman" has no identity of her own).

Just go back to Gen.1 where the water was 'separated' from the land to be able to 'water the garden' and then go to Gen. 2 where woman was taken from man so she 'could' water the garden. Then to Rev.21:1 where the sea (woman) "was no longer" because she was assumed into the land (called the New Heaven and the New Earth) to give 'form' to the land (structure instead of chaos in the mind of man). Our gender identity is an illusion but not our sex identity which is the fruition of assignment . . . that allows the cosmic Christ to exist for woman wherein they are able to transcend their own sex identity as female. To wit: brothers and sisters in Jesus but 'one' in Christ.

When hu-man is crucified and woman returns to be under the care of 'her man' the opposites are gone and there is no room for any -isms left. Rome crowns her queen of heaven and earth in the Coronation to show that she is the light of our life 'as' given to us by Lord God (she the color of our heaven and mansion in the sky; Rev.22:5). It is nice to be generous but the problem is that the woman represents our right brain and not our left. Our left brain 'generates' our humanity outside Eden where life is an illusion to enhance our womanity in the right brain where life is real (and thus from where she can be the light of our life). That is how the idea of life is created in the left brain but is 'encultured' in our right brain therefore called wo[mb of] man.

The woman of the TOL saw that the TOK was good for gaining wisdom, beauty and food, from where she [the woman] plays the tune to make Magdalene dance by which we are charmed into manhood as males. To try and reverse this would leave us without as song . . . and therefore no dance to admire with no further reason to sing and soon there is no song [Magdalene] left in our life (as the 'left hand' of the woman, Magdalene is the illusion called valor and so much more . . . but at best only a lesser god spelled with a small g).

I should add that Magdalene is our dream to live and thus without a vivid Eve we are dreamers without a dream.

S.C.Carlson

IHMO, the participle "following" is attributive (and placed in the relative clause for emphasis, see Smyth § 2542), and both relative clauses are in the predicate, e.g.: "Peter turned and saw that the disciple following (him) was the one whom Jesus loved, the one who leaned on his breast at the meal and said," etc.

I'm not convinced that the beloved disciple is a female since it is special pleading to claim her gender was suppressed. However, I agree with you to the extent that there is a detectable anti-Petrine undercurrent in the Gospel of John.

Stephen