judge

According to the COE the eastern peshitta has come to us word for word from the hands of the apostles themselves. Of course there is no way to test whether this is true or not.

But the very first verse of Johns gosepl does contain what appears to be a deliberate grammatical error


Flm 0wh Yhwty0 ty4rb
BRESHIT AYTOHI HWA MILTHA
In the Beginning was the Miltha (word).

AYTOHI HWA MILTHA, or two masculine verbs linked to a feminine noun!

It seems that referring to the word of God in masculine terms does not really convey all the attributes of God associated with the word or miltha, so a deliberate grammatical error is introduced.
I know this is not quite what you may be looking for (or perhaps it is)

jbernier

I am not an expert in Revelation but I have read that Revelation appears to have been written in deliberately bad Greek. Either way, not sure why it matters that much. Syntax is not the only level of linguistic analysis or even the most important when it comes to exegesis; semantics and pragmatics are also very important. Indeed, I would argue that the study of syntax should be largely subsumed into the study of pragmatics in textual analysis. Having said and moving beyond that, the quality of a text's grammar does not necessarily affect the truth value of the statements contained therein.

Amaleq13

Do you recall how that was determined?

Magdlyn

Yes, and one wonders what could possibly be the motivation for that.

I think the author was quite intoxicated, tripping on magic mushrooms, which could cause poor grammar and spelling to say the least.

Mathetes

My impressions as a medium-level Greek reader (I am no scholar, and I have not made any kind of systematic study of this):

- The worst Greek is, probably, in the gospel of Mark. He jumps from one verb tense to another many times in the middle of a sentence, confuses cases, and is generally grammatically clumsy. I have my pet theory that Mark could not really speak much Greek. Of course, this could be explained just by the fact that it had been redacted/interpolated many times.

- Matthew and Luke (and Acts) are pretty correct and fluid. They correct Mark's bad grammar a number of times.

- Gospel and letters of John seem similar in style, and the Greek is surprisingly uncomplicated (but not incorrect). Maybe John was trying to be clear, expecting that his audience may not be very literate in Greek. John is very easy to read when you are learning.

- Paul and Hebrews are correct Greek. They sound different, and even Paul sounds different at times, calm or neurotic depending on the passage, but this may be his personality and not his command of Greek.

- Peter's letters are written in a complex and elaborate Greek, using complicated subordinate clauses and participles, in long sentences. Grammatically he is probably the most complex author in the NT. I have no doubt that no ignorant Galilean fisherman wrote them.

- Revelation is simple in language (a bit like John - although the style is different from John), but I would not say, as other posters here, that it is incorrect. I do not recall being surprised by grammatical problems the way I was when reading Mark.

As I said, these are just impressions, without any kind of "source criticism" having been conducted here.

jbernier

No, I cannot. It has been quite awhile since I read this. Also, it was before I started studying Greek so I did not follow much of the argumentation.

SwoleMan

I'm satisfied with your answers.

The reason for asking is because I'm debating an inerrantist. It's probably fairly meaningless, though.

Toto

You can google "revelation" plus "bad greek" and find a lot of discussion, e.g.

Ibiblio post and other posts in that thread.

At one time, the entire New Testament was regarded as having been written in "bad Greek" - because classical scholars read it without realizing that they were in fact reading Koine Greek. It was only after Koine Greek was reconstructed and recognized as a language in its own right that scholars raised their opinion of NT writing.

And there are those who use the allegedly bad grammar in Revelation to argue that it must have been translated in a hurry from the Aramaic or Hebrew.

There is a book with the intriguing title Anti-language in the Apocalypse of John By John E. Hurtgen.