Well, which is it: A or THE?
Over on AYOR the other day, cozart, the Sage, and I were making arguments about the nature of Church and among them the authority of the Church came up. The argument then started to swing in the direction of Sola Scriptura vs the Church.
Well, I pulled out a Catholic Apologetics favorite, 1 Tim. 3:15, which reads something along the lines of:
if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in THE household of God, which is THE church of the living God, THE pillar and buttress of truth.
THE is my capitalization for emphasis.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, cozart tells me I’ve got a busted translation, and so he quotes it as:
if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, A pillar and buttress of truth.
This is from the ESV. Notice how the last THE in my translation turned into an A in cozart’s translation?
The definitiveness of my argument was now in jeopardy. Major suckage. You got to hate it when definitiveness gets called into question.
Interestingly enough, every other translations I looked at - NIV, NASB, NRSV, NJB - treated the passage in the same translative vein of how I presented the particular passage.
But the Sage came into the discussion and made a seemingly authoritative argument for middle ground for the time being but with a definite lean towards the ESV while he went to check it out. Well, I just couldn’t stand by and let someone else do all the dirty work for me. So, I hit the forums, the blogs, and few emails asking people to look at this for me.
This is the first response I’ve got back
So, while I’m on my AYOR hiatus, y’all read over this, perhaps debate with Jimmy some, and have me something a little more firm when I get back to the boards!!
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Duh! I totally forgot to ask my Greek professor about this in both Greek classes this week. I’ll try to remember next week.
I’ll give my tentative response here, however, rather than on the link blog, as the discussion had rabbit-trailed over into an attack on sola scriptura, and as the lone Protestant there I didn’t want to get gang raped on that
While Jimmy is correct about the absence of an article not necessarily indicating indefiniteness (his explanation perfectly agreed with mine on AYOR), I do not think his end conclusion necessarily follows. There is no rule in either Greek or English grammar that a series of noun phrases has to be “consistently” definite or indefinite. They can be mixed freely, and are all the time. For example, I could say, “This is the blog of Spencer, the husband of Desparate Housewife, a fine example of manhood.” Does it in any way follow that because I made “blog” and “husband” definite that “example” must be definite? Of course not. In fact it would not be true. You’re a wonderful guy, but no way are you “the” example of manhood
Comment by the Foolish Sage — 4/15/2005 @ 11:18 pm
I think his argument though is that if Paul would have wanted a THE, THE, A then he would have used the THE article to communicate explicit definitiveness and non-definitiveness. Otherwise, we’re left simply to assume we know what Paul is talking about from the surrounding context - which makes the definitive via apposition argument the strongest argument in light of the context.
Just because it COULD be THE, THE, A does not mean it is correct to translate it as such… it needs to be contextually coherent, not strictly accurate. …which is why I’d really like to hear why the ESV folks did it that way. But right now, I’m thinking the ESV has broken this verse.
Comment by AnotherCoward — 4/15/2005 @ 11:53 pm