"By the Spirit" or "in the spirit"?

Here's how four standard contemporary versions render 1 Pet 3:18:

being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit (ESV). 

having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit (NASB). 

He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit (NRSV). 

He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit (NIV).

Here's a notable exception:

being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit (NKJV).

Of course, that's a revision of the classic 17C version. 

Since I don't sit on translation committees, I don't know why they generally render the phrase that way, but here's what two commentators say, which may reflect the thinking of translation committees:

Jobes says that given the parallel syntax, the two datives should be rendered the same way (240). Fobes agrees. 

Since the instrumental construction ("by") is not consistent for both, that, in turn, selects for a locative construction ("in"). Hence, as Forbes goes on to say:

Christ was put to death in the realm of the flesh but made alive in the realm of the Spirit (123).

By further implication:

It is unclear whether "Spirit" should be capitalized or not. Having rejected the instrumental sense for pneumati and opted for a locative of sphere (i.e., mode/realm of existence), the parallel with sarki probably favors a lower case "spirit" (123).

Jobes is a fine Greek scholar. An expert on the LXX. Likewise, the EGGNT series (to which Forbes contributes) is specifically designed to interact with the finer points of the Greek text. But it seems to me that there are two basic problems with their analysis:

i) Both Jobes and Forbes agree that "made alive" alludes to the Resurrection. However, to say that Christ was raised in the "realm" or "mode" of the Spirit is an obscure and frankly misleading way to describe a physical resurrection.

ii) There's also an issue regarding translation theory. The fact that the Greek construction is parallel doesn't mean the English construction should be parallel–for the obvious reason that Greek and English aren't the same.

One Greek dative can have two different senses (locative, instrumental), where as it takes two different English prepositions to express each sense. Therefore, a Greek writer can use the same word to express two different relations. He doesn't have to sacrifice verbal symmetry to differentiate the sense. 

But verbal symmetry doesn't require semantic symmetry, precisely because the Greek is already flexible in that regard. A Greek writer could intend a locative sense in the first clause, but an instrumental sense in the second clause. He can do that without resorting to two different constructions–and for stylistic reasons, he might prefer the elegance of using the same construction in both instances, even though each carries a different nuance. 

To take a comparison: English translators are confronted with a tough choice in Jn 3:3. For John, this is likely a double entendre. The same word can both mean "again" (or "anew") and "above." Both senses fit the context. Both senses are probably intended. 

But we lack an English synonym with the same semantic range. Therefore, a translator must make an arbitrary judgment call. At best, he can give the alternate rendering in a footnote. By contrast, John wasn't confronted with that false dichotomy. 

iii) For theological reasons, I think we should render the phrase "made alive by the Spirit." Christ was raised from the dead by divine agency. That's widely attested in NT theology. 

Grammar nazis

I'll make a few quick observations about the grammar nazis. 

i) A certain percentage of the population does suffer from a degree of illiteracy. Due to ignorance, they make grammatical blunders. It reflects the state of public education and pop culture. To that extent, grammar nazis sometimes identify genuine problems.

ii) But oftentimes, people make mistakes, not because they don't know the difference between "there" and "their" or "its" and "it's" (to take two stock examples), but because they are writing fast, and their mind gets ahead of their fingers. 

ii) Moreover, grammar nazis are self-incriminating. That's because they lack a basic understanding of how language works. "Proper grammar" is ultimately based on predominant usage. If enough people make the same grammatical mistake, that becomes idiomatic English. Sheer usage makes incorrect grammar correct. Today's solecism may be tomorrow's idiom, for language evolves, and usage drives grammar. Grammar is ultimately descriptive, not prescriptive. It follows, not leads. Grammar is a social convention, and conventions change. Get used to it. 

iii) By the same token, the spoken word is the basis of the written word. The written word cannot long resist how most people actually speak. 

iv) "Proper grammar" is relative to social class, ethnicity, and region. Grammar is sensitive to dialectical variations. It depends on who you are, where you are, and who you're with. 

v) Likewise, slang pumps fresh blood into the language. Some slang is quickly dated, but other slang becomes standard usage. 

vi) The "rules" of formal written English can be stylistically uncouth. If, say, "proper" grammar requires you to use "that" three or four times in one sentence, the repetition is monotonous and confusing. 

Likewise, forbidding contractions or split infinitives can lead to rhythmically awkward sentence construction. Same thing with the "rule" that you should never use a long word when a short word will do. But a writer with a good ear may use a longer synonym to give the sentence a nice cadence. Or he may choose a longer word to rhyme with another word in the sentence. Redundancy can serve the same purpose. Omitted a word or adding an extra word to make the sentence roll off the tongue. 

Grammar nazis sacrifice euphony for arbitrary rules. They produce stilted sentences. 

What Has Gone Wrong in Commentary Writing on Romans?

This is a rather slanted way to judge commentaries, but makes a useful point:

http://stanleyeporter.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/what-has-gone-wrong-in-commentary-writing-on-romans/

What's the subject?

The following portion of an interaction on John 20:31 may be helpful for students of Biblical Greek. It deals with issues related to distinguishing subjects from predicate nominatives, the role of word order in Greek syntax, and the relationship between sentences and propositions.

Evan May
Although not much should be made of it, I came across in my reading of Carson on the Gospel of John what appears to be a Greek blunder:

"This impression is confirmed by the firm syntactic evidence that the first purpose clause in 20:31 should be rendered 'that you may believe that the Christ, the Son of God, is Jesus.' Thus, the fundamental question the fourth gospel addresses is not 'Who is Jesus?' but 'Who is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God?'" (An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 270)

In other words, Carson is contesting the traditional rendering ("that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God"), arguing that ὁ χριστὸς is the subject of the sentence on the basis that it is articular, while Ἰησοῦς is anarthrous (ἵνα πιστεύητε ὅτι Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ). While it is true that generally if one noun is articular and another noun anarthrous in an equative clause then the articular noun is the subject, proper nouns (such as Ἰησοῦς) are just as definite as articular nouns. In fact, they should generally be given preference as the subject in the "pecking order." And in John 20:31 the case is decisive because Ἰησοῦς precedes ὁ χριστὸς in word order and should be taken as the subject (in situations that are ambiguous due to equally prominent elements, word order is the deciding factor).

Of course, this isn't 100% positive, but it is much more likely that the text should be understood as traditionally rendered. In any case, it is confusing that Carson would say that there is "firm syntactic evidence" for his proposed rendering, since the evidence seems to point in exactly the opposite direction.


Ken B
Evan,

Your post is interesting, and I'd like to offer a couple of ideas for consideration. If we follow Carson's logic in determining the subject of the sentence, that ὁ χριστὸς is the subject because it has the article, we might not also say that ὁ υἱὸς is the subject, as it is also articular? Thus the sentence could be translated, "...in order that you may believe that the son, the Christ of God, is Jesus." How does Dr. Carson determine which of the 2 articular nouns is the subject?
On that note I found an interesting little tidbit of Greek grammar. This document, entitled "What's the subject?" by Rodney Decker Th.D. (never heard of him until now) deals with how to determine the subject of a sentence when the copulative verb "eimi" is used, and gives some hierarchical rules for determining the subject. According to Dr. Decker, if one of the nouns is a proper name (i.e. Ἰησοῦς ), and the other is a common noun, (which ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς both are) then the proper name is the subject of the sentence. (See "The Hierarchical of Rules" on page one, rule 2a.. Rule 2b states that the noun with the article is the subject, and it would seem that that 2a trumps 2b, as Decker states that the higher rule trumps the lower, but he then goes on to say that 2a and 2b have equal ranking. That's a little confusing, but 2a is 2a and not 2b for a reason. If 2a does indeed trump 2b, Carson is mistaken. {Note: considering a scholar of Carson's status, I say this with a measure of fear and trembling. Decker may in fact be wrong. However, see also the footnote on page 271 of the "Intro." Gordon Fee takes issue with Carson on this point.})

In the end, I don't really think it matters. Whether I translate ἵνα πιστεύητε ὅτι Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ as "...in order that you may believe that the Jesus is the Christ, the son of God." or whether I swap the nouns separated by ἐστιν (which is perfectly legitimate in Koine) and say "...the Christ, the son of God, is Jesus." either translation makes little difference in terms of who He is. Jesus is the Christ, the son of the God. (And in fact I kinda like the word order as it's written in the original.)

Just something to chew on.

P.S. You say in your post "(in situations that are ambiguous due to equally prominent elements, word order is the deciding factor)." I'd never heard that concerning word order. What's your source for that; I'd like to do some more research into that. Thanks.

Evan May
Hey Ken,

Thanks for linking to the Decker resource. I agree with his hierarchy. Decker is a respected name in Greek linguistics. In fact, Carson is the editor of the series in which Decker's dissertation on temporal deixis is published (he wrote the foreword).

About whether ὁ υἱὸς could be the subject, I suppose that Carson would say that the most natural way to take ὁ υἱὸς is as a nominative in apposition to ὁ χριστὸς, the subject (due to word order). I agree that ὁ υἱὸς is in apposition to ὁ χριστὸς, but disagree that ὁ χριστὸς is the subject.

About the role of word order in determining the subject in ambiguous situations, see Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, p. 42ff (see also his discussion of the semantically similar object-complement construction on p. 181ff). In fact, looking in Wallace, he explicitly takes issue with Carson's proposal on p. 46-47. Apparently, Carson's evidence was based in an article by E.V.N. Goetchius which had methodological flaws (see Wallace, p. 47n34).

I agree that the difference is not very significant at the level of the sentence itself, but Carson is basing his argument concerning the purpose of John (that his aim is to evangelize Jewish unbelievers about the identity of the Messiah) on this questionable grammatical point.

I said in my first post that "not much should be made of it," and I stand by that. This possible mistake should not be over-exaggerated, and I agree with you about disagreeing with Carson only with "fear and trembling." But it seems that he may have been shortsighted here.

Ken B
Evan,

I am interested in all this talk about word order. My Greek professor, who was no slouch by any measure, talked about word order generally only in terms of emphasis. His point (as I recall) was based on the fact that Koine is a language that syntactically didn't really depend on word order. In Koine we don't need to say, "The boy went to the store to get apples" with subject-predicate-preposition-direct object in that order. We can just as easily say, "Apples the store to get went the boy" (kinda sounds like Yoda!) recognizing that it is the case endings of the words that determine parts of speech (go start translating just about anywhere in Hebrews for illustrative purposes). So in the sentence above the emphasis would be either on "apples" as it falls first in the sentence, or on the "boy" because it falls last in the sentence. In Koine, word order can emphasize, but in other respects is not really critical. Now I hear from you about word order determining subjects and nouns in apposition and probably more of which I am not aware. Sounds like I need to update my Greek a little.

More on the point of our discussion, I also recall my Greek professor stating that nouns in association with the verb of being carry essentially equal weight. When John says in 1 John ὁ θεὸς φῶς ἐστιν we can say, "God is light" or "Light is God." That last sentence might make us squirm a little because we don't want to say that God is photons, but theologically all John is saying is that God is the essence of truth (John did not have photons in mind). Thus (to clarify what I said in my last post) when I look at John 20:31 in that light whether I say Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ or ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς makes no difference. Of course that would turn Dr. Carson's mountain into a mole hill philologically.

Let me know what you think.

Evan May
Hey Ken,

It is true that Greek, being a more highly inflected language than English, is not as dependent upon word order to present syntactical constructions as English is. Sometimes in beginning Greek Grammar courses, however, professors want to get this point across and over-emphasize it to the effect that word order has no bearing on meaning. Obviously there are permissible and impermissible constructions in the structures of the Greek language (see Michael Palmer's book, Levels of Constituent Structure in Biblical Greek). And there are obvious cases when word order affects meaning (such as the difference between an attributive adjective or a predicate adjective construction).

As to whether word order is an issue of "emphasis," yes and no. That, like everything else, depends upon the context. Linguists have surveyed Koine Greek for "marked" and "unmarked" was of expressing a thought (the general, or "unmarked" way of stating something in Greek is Verb-Subject-Object). When an author expresses a statement in "marked" fashion, generally prominence is given to the constituent that has been relocated. But "prominence" is usually defined in a way that is less semantically-loaded than "emphasis." Emphasis is a feature of the context that can be highlighted, though not created, by prominence. A helpful resource in this regard is Steven Runge's Discourse Grammar.

As to your question about whether a subject and predicate nominative combined by a copula creates a numerical identity between the subject and PN, I'd just note that there are at least two kinds of identity statements. There are convertible propositions and subset propositions. If I say, for instance, that "Superman is Clark Kent," then that is a convertible proposition. There is a numerical identity between "Superman" and "Clark Kent," and it would be just as permissible to say, "Clark Kent is Superman." But if I say "Clark Kent is human," then I obviously do not mean that Clark Kent is co-extensive with the human race. It wouldn't be correct to convert it to "Human is Clark Kent." This is a subset proposition (Clark Kent is a subset o the human race).

Now, Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ χριστὸς is clearly a convertible proposition. Jesus is the Christ, and yet it is just as appropriate to say that the Christ is Jesus. Jesus and the Christ are numerically identical. But although these two statements convey the same idea/proposition, they are not the same statement. And in the context of a ἵνα purpose clause in which the author wants to add knowledge to his readers ("that you may know"), whether Ἰησοῦς or ὁ χριστὸς is the subject is a meaningful question.

So I agree with Carson that it matters what we determine to be the subject here. I just disagree (at least tentatively) with what he has identified as the subject.

Blessings,
Evan


Ken B
Evan,

With you, I disagree with Carson's identity of the subject in John 20:31. I think his point of departure grammatically is a little weak, and we're not alone in that analysis. However, if Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ χριστὸς is truly a convertible proposition, if they are numerically identical as you say (and I think they are) then word order here really is moot. Jesus is the Christ and the Christ is Jesus, the presence of the ἵνα clause not withstanding. In English, if I say that "I want you to know that Jesus is the Christ," or "I want you to know that the Christ is Jesus" I am saying exactly the same thing. What do you see that makes this philological construct different in the Greek of John 20:31? I read Carson's line of argumentation on John's emphasis on ὁ χριστὸς, and I understand what he's saying, but grammatically I don't think you can make the argument at all because Ἰησοῦς is being equated with ὁ χριστὸς linguistically. To frame this another way, if John had wanted to emphasize Ἰησοῦς or ὁ χριστὸς, he had the tools to construct a sentence to do that more emphatically. He did not. Instead, he uses the simply construction Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ χριστὸς in which Ἰησοῦς and ὁ χριστὸς are interchangeable terms; word order makes no real difference. Indeed, perhaps it is by this close connection that John emphasizes that Jesus is the Christ.

Looking forward to your thoughts. Ken


Evan May
Hey Ken,

I think it's helpful to distinguish sentences from propositions. A certain proposition or idea can be asserted by means of several different sentences. For example, while no proposition can be semantically reduced to a question, a proposition can be expressed formally in an interrogative sentence (we call these rhetorical questions). "What can separate us from the love of Christ?" is formally a question, but that's really just the outward dressing for the proposition, "Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ."

So while a convertible proposition like "Jesus is the Christ" is conveying the same idea as "The Christ is Jesus" (namely, that there is a numerical identity relationship between "Jesus" and "the Christ"), it remains that these are distinct sentences. Another way to say this is that "Jesus is the Christ" is not the same sentence as "the Christ is Jesus," even though they convey the same idea.

The distinction between these two sentences (with their differing subjects and predicate nominatives) becomes significant when, as Carson does, we reconstruct the basic question that John is answering by means of his ἵνα purpose clause. That is, is the basic question "Who is Jesus?" or "Who is the Christ?" Another way to frame it is like this: Did John's audience know who Jesus was, but needed to be informed about his messianic identity? Or, as Carson contends, did John's audience know about the promised Messiah (Jewish unbelievers), but needed to be informed that the Messiah has come and he is, in fact, Jesus of Nazareth? Hopefully that makes sense.

ἐν Χριστῷ,
Evan