A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

GRAMMAR OF THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH

BY A. T. ROBERTSON, M.A., D.D., LL.D., LITT.D. Professor of Interpretation of the New Testament in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Louisville, Ky.

Digitized by Ted Hildebrandt at Gordon College, Wenham, MA March 2006

@Exomen de> to>n qhsauro>n tou?ton e]n o[straki e]c h[mw?n. — 2 COR. 4:7

THIRD EDITION HODDER & STOUGHTON LONDON : : : MCMXIX

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Composition, Electrotyping, and Presswork: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

TO THE MEMORY OF

John A. Broadus SCHOLAR

TEACHER

PREACHER

PREFACE IT is with mingled feelings of gratitude and regret that I let this book go to the public. I am grateful for God's sustaining grace through so many years of intense work and am fully conscious of the inevitable imperfections that still remain. For a dozen years this Grammar has been the chief task of my life. I have given to it sedulously what time was mine outside of my teaching. But it was twenty-six years ago that my great predecessor in the chair of New Testament Interpretation proposed to his young assistant that they together get out a revised edition of Winer. The manifest demand for a new grammar of the New Testament is voiced by Thayer, the translator of the American edition of Winer's Grammar, in his article on "Language of the New Testament" in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. I actually began the work and prepared the sheets for the first hundred pages, but I soon became convinced that it was not possible to revise Winer's Grammar as it ought to be done without making a new grammar on a new plan. So much progress had been made in comparative philology and historical grammar since Winer wrote his great book that it seemed useless to go on with it. Then Dr. Broadus said to me that he was out of it by reason of his age, and that it was my task. He reluctantly gave it up and pressed me to go on. From that day it was in my thoughts and plans and I was gathering material for the great undertaking. If Schmiedel had pushed through his work, I might have stopped. By the time that Dr. James Hope Moulton announced his new grammar, I was too deep into the enterprise to draw back. And so I have held to the titanic task somehow till the end has come. There were many discouragements and I was often tempted to give it up at all costs. No one who has not done similar work can understand the amount of research, the mass of detail and the reflection required in a book of this nature. The mere physical effort of writing was a joy of expression in comparison with the rest. The title of Cauer's brilliant book, Grammatica Militans (now in the third edition), aptly describes the spirit of the grammarian who to-day attacks the vii

viii A GRAMMAR OF THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT problems of the language of the New Testament in the light of historical research. From one point of view a grammar of the Greek New Testament is an impossible task, if one has to be a specialist in the whole Greek language, in Latin, in Sanskrit, in Hebrew and the other Semitic tongues, in Church History, in the Talmud, in English, in psychology, in exegesis.1 I certainly lay no claim to omniscience. I am a linguist by profession and by love also, but I am not a specialist in the Semitic tongues, though I have a working knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic, but not of Syriac and Arabic. The Coptic and the Sanskrit I can use. The Latin and the Greek, the French and German and Anglo-Saxon complete my modest linguistic equipment. I have, besides, a smattering of Assyrian, Dutch, Gothic and Italian. I have explained how I inherited the task of this Grammar from Broadus: He was a disciple of Gessner Harrison, of the University of Virginia, who was the first scholar in America to make use of Bopp's Vergleichende Grammatik. Broadus' views of grammar were thus for long considered queer by the students who came to him trained in the traditional grammars and unused to the historical method; but he held to his position to the end. This Grammar aims to keep in touch at salient points with the results of comparative philology and historical grammar as the true linguistic science. In theory one should be allowed to assume all this in a grammar of the Greek N. T., but in fact that cannot be done unless the book is confined in use to a few technical scholars. I have tried not to inject too much of general grammar into the work, but one hardly knows what is best when the demands are so varied. So many men now get no Greek except in the theological seminary that one has to interpret for them the language of modern philology. I have simply sought in a modest way to keep the Greek of the N. T. out in the middle of the linguistic stream as far as it is proper to do so. In actual class use some teachers will skip certain chapters. Alfred Gudemann,2 of Munich, says of American classical scholars: "Not a single contribution marking genuine progress, no work on an extensive scale, opening up a new perspective or breaking entirely new ground, nothing, in fact, of the slightest scientific value can be placed to their credit." That is a serious charge, to be sure, but then originality is a relative matter. The 1 2

Cf. Dr. James Moffatt's remarks in The Expositor, Oct., 1910, p. 383 f. The Cl. Rev., .June, 1909, p. 116.

PREFACE

ix

true scholar is only too glad to stand upon the shoulders of his predecessors and give full credit at every turn. Who could make any progress in human knowledge but for the ceaseless toil of those1 who have gone before? Prof. Paul Shorey,2 of the University of Chicago, has a sharp answer to Prof. Gudemann. He speaks of "the need of rescuing scholarship itself from the German yoke." He does not mean "German pedantry and superfluous accuracy in insignificant research — but . . . in all seriousness from German inaccuracy." He continues about "the disease of German scholarship" that "insists on 'sweat-boxing' the evidence and straining after 'vigorous and rigorous' demonstration of things that do not admit of proof." There probably are German scholars guilty of this grammatical vice (are American and British scholars wholly free?). But I wish to record my conviction that my own work, such as it is, would have been impossible but for the painstaking and scientific investigation of the Germans at every turn. The republic of letters is cosmopolitan. In common with all modern linguists I have leaned upon Brugmann and Delbrtick as masters in linguistic learning. I cannot here recite my indebtedness to all the scholars whose books and writings have helped me. But, besides Broadus, I must mention Gildersleeve as the American Hellenist whose wit and wisdom have helped me over many a hard place. Gildersleeve has spent much of his life in puncturing grammatical bubbles blown by other grammarians. He exercises a sort of grammatical censorship. "At least whole grammars have been constructed about one emptiness."3 It is possible to be "grammar mad," to use The Independent's phrase.4 It is easy to scout all grammar and say: "Grammar to the Wolves."5 Browning sings in A Grammarian's Funeral: "He settled Hoti's business — let it be! Properly based Oun Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, Dead from the waist down." 1

F. H. Colson, in an article entitled "The Grammatical Chapters in Quintilian," I, 4–8 (The Cl. Quarterly, Jan., 1914, p. 33), says: "The five chapters which Quintilian devotes to ‘Grammatica’ are in many ways the most valuable discussion of the subject which we possess," though he divides "grammatica" into "grammar" and "literature," and (p. 37) "the whole of this chapter is largely directed to meet the objection that grammar is ‘tenuis et jejuna.’" 2 The Cl. Weekly, May 27, 1911, p. 229. 3 4 Gildersleeve, Am. Jour. of Philol., July, 1909, p. 229. 1911, 717. 5 Article by F. A. W. Henderson, Blackwood for May, 1906.

x

A GRAMMAR OF THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

Perhaps those who pity the grammarian do not know that he finds joy in his task and is sustained by the conviction that his work is necessary. Prof. C. F. Smith (The Classical Weekly, 1912, p. 150) tells of the joy of the professor of Greek at Bonn when he received a copy of the first volume of Gildersleeve's Syntax of Classical Greek. The professor brought it to the Seminar and "clasped and hugged it as though it were a most precious darling (Liebling)." Dr. A. M. Fairbairn1 once said: "No man can be a theologian who is not a philologian. He who is no grammarian is no divine." Let Alexander McLaren serve as a good illustration of that dictum. His matchless discourses are the fruit of the most exact scholarship and spiritual enthusiasm. I venture to quote another defence of the study of Greek which will, I trust, yet come back to its true place in modern education. Prof. G. A. Williams, of Kalamazoo College, says2: "Greek yet remains the very best means we have for plowing up and wrinkling the human brain and developing its gray matter, and wrinkles and gray matter are still the most valuable assets a student can set down on the credit side of his ledger." Dr. J. H. Moulton has shown that it is possible to make grammar interesting, as Gildersleeve had done before him. Moulton protests3 against the notion that grammar is dull: "And yet there is no subject which can be made more interesting than grammar, a science which deals not with dead rocks or mindless vegetables, but with the ever changing expression of human thought." I wish to acknowledge here my very great indebtedness to Dr. Moulton for his brilliant use of the Egyptian papyri in proof of the fact that the New Testament was written in the vernacular koinhn u[per&?on to