Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Ben C. Smith wrote:I think that would be the same thing, yes. A word meaning "to wish" would ordinarily spark an infinitive clause; for example, Matthew 5.40 has καὶ τῷ θέλοντί σοι κριθῆναι ("to the one who wishes to judge/sue you").

Here is how I understand it at this point.... (To be honest, I have grown so accustomed to this later Greek (or Latinized) use of ἵνα that I am having to dig back to my classical Greek roots a bit and remember how these constructions started, not what they became.) What introducing the ἵνα does is to act as if wishing (or saying, commanding, and so on) worked in the same way as nonverbal actions. For example, if I say that I am working (a nonverbal action) in order that (ἵνα) I might get rich, the act of working does not express in any way, as content, the intended result of getting rich. Work can be done for a lot of reasons, and I am connecting it with getting rich only by using the phrase "in order that" in my sentence. But verbs of speaking or thinking actually have content (which one might directly express using quotation marks in English), and this content is often, in Greek, expressed with an infinitive construction. In Matthew 5.40, for example, the content of the wish is to sue you in court. I am not making some random wish in order that I might get to sue you in court, as if wishing itself always led to lawsuits; rather, my wish, expressed in words, would be, "I want to sue you." The lawsuit is the content of the wish. I hope that makes sense.

But the Latin conjunction ut is routinely used after verbs of wishing, commanding, and speaking. Lewis & Short list the following:

1. In object clauses....
(α). After verbs denoting to wish, request, pray, demand, or invite....
(β). After verbs expressing or implying advice, suggestion, or exhortation....
(γ). After verbs expressing resolution or agreement to do something....
(δ). After verbs of command or prohibition....

Hence, apparently, the claim that the similar use of ἵνα in Greek is a Latinism.

6:25 I want (ἵνα) you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist
9:30 passed through Galilee. And he did not want (ἵνα) anyone to know,
10:35 Teacher, we want (ἵνα) you to do for us whatever we ask of you
10:51 “What do you want me to do for you?” And the blind man said to him, “Rabbi, (ἵνα) let
?? 14:12 Where will you have us go and prepare for you (ἵνα) to eat the Passover? ??

Ben C. Smith wrote:But bear in mind that I have not read the book being referenced. I only yesterday found the reference to it.

spin wrote:

Secret Alias wrote:

Nor those Latinisms. In your conspiracy theory, weren't they written from the perspective of Rome??

Irenaeus was using Clement's source to reconstruct his pro-Roman agenda. He clearly used Papias to reconstruct the Matthew argument. The idea that Irenaeus was using sources to reconstruct Adv Haer 2.2 is without doubt. But he's going beyond those sources. Watson and others have noted how Irenaeus twists Papias's testimony into something new to further his agenda (Papias is not likely speaking about a narrative gospel). It would not be beyond the realm of possibilities that Mark the evangelist who wrote in Rome was the starting point to the Latinisms.

You are not dealing with the problem of the implications of the Latinisms at any level. You are merely asserting a conspiracy theory, for which you have no possibility of supporting sufficiently, and retrojecting the linguistic knowledge available today onto people 1800 years ago. Can you at least show evidence of some ancient writer evincing the skills you want people of the era to have? I strongly doubt you can.

Greek language and literature were a prominent part of the education of the Roman upper classes. It is a generally accepted view that Lucilius, like Cicero in his letters, uses Greek as an element of private, colloquial speech, free from the constraints of official/formal communication. This is certainly true, and in this respect Horace was right in viewing the work of his predecessor as a form of self-portraiture, i.e. the reflection of a personality who would ‘confide intimate facts to his books, which he trusted like friends; … so the whole of the old man’s life is laid before us as if it were painted on a votive tablet’ (Sat. 2.1.30-34, transl. N. Rudd).[10] More directly rooted in reality that any other literary genre, satire depicts the world from a single point of view: the author’s. To do so, Lucilius often picked the language of the Greek-educated Roman man he was. I shall briefly illustrate this point below, offering a few remarks on the practices of imperfect bilingualism among the Romans in the last two centuries of the Republic (III.1 and IV).

The notion of Greek as ‘language of intimacy’,[11] however, tells only part of the story. In some cases, change of language implies mockery, contempt and even hostility – in other words, distance. In these cases change of language seems to mark the switch to a different speaking voice in the poem. On such passages I shall mainly concentrate, arguing that Greek in Lucilius may serve a purpose of characterisation, i.e. the author is appropriating someone else’s language, reproducing it in a humorous and often malicious manner (III.3).[12]

Practices of code-switching, a recurring feature of spoken language, are not easy to detect and analyse in a corpus language such as Latin. The fragmentary state of Lucilius’ text does not make the task any easier. In literary Latin the phenomenon is identifiable in a significant degree in Plautus,[29] Lucilius,[30] Varro,[31] Cicero’s letters[32] (in apparent contradiction with Cicero’s own public statements and practice), Seneca’s Apocolycontosis,[33] Petronius,[34] Pliny the Younger.[35] We also have examples from love poetry and sarcastic representations of erotic contexts in Lucretius, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal.[36]

Lucilius exploits the Greek poetic tradition as a source of literary tags, in an intellectual game between author and reader. Well-read Romans are occasionally reported to do the same in conversation. In relating an encounter between friends, Varro combines a Homeric phrase, a Greek greeting, and a humorous Greek-based neologism (RR 2.5.1):

‘At this point the senator Q. Lucienus, a gentleman of extreme refinement and great humour with whom we are all well acquainted, came in and said: ‘how do you do (chaerete), my fellow Epirots (Synepirotae), for Scrofa, and our friend Varro, “shepherd of the people” (poimena lao¯n), I saw and greeted early this morning’ (Transl. L. Storr-Best).[38]