(Ron) Immediately - Why Ron is Simply Wrong
Farrell Till jftill@midwest.net
Thu, 03 Sep 1998 10:06:13 -0700 (00904860373, 2.2.32.19980903170613.0086d9a0@midwest.net)
At 02:54 PM 9/3/98 +0200, Jan Haugland wrote:
>>RON
>> In the word for word literal translation the verse is translated as
>> "immediately, BUT after the tribulation (distress) of those days" Why
>> the "but"?
>
>JAN
>Please, please, please. If you're so interested in the Bible, why not study
>some Greek? You could just as well ask why the two "do"s in "how do you
>do?" in English. Because that's the way it is. Duh!
>
>"de" does not really mean "but". I guess "but" is the closest equivalent in
>English, and an interlinear must have *something* to write below the word,
>but it's extremely misleading to take this at face value if you're looking
>for a meaning. In Greek, "de"s are distributed liberally. It can be
>translated "and" or "but"; however very often the word is not translated at
>all. We learned to call it a postpositive particle, and I never learned any
>rule for where to throw it in (just that it's never first in a clause).
>After some time you just get the "feel" for the language, and throw it in
>wherever you've seen it done earlier in source texts.
>
>Don't believe this particle changes the meaning of the text in any direction
>you would want to have it.
>
TILL
I'm going back 40+ years to try to remember what I studied in college Greek,
but isn't "de" in this case called a "continuative," which means that it is
a word that, in this case, would tie "immediately" to "after" to emphasize a
continuative or uninterrupted thought. In other words, the purpose of the
continuative would have been exactly the opposite of what Ron is trying to
make it mean. Its purpose would have been to emphasize that what comes
later in the sentence was going to happen immediately after the tribulation
of those days. It would have been as if the writer had said,
"Immediately--and I do mean immediately--after the tribulation of those
days...."
Memory can fade within the space of 40 years--except of course for those who
wrote the gospel narratives and their memories sharpened with time, enough
so that they could recall even long speeches that Jesus made... at any rate,
memory can fade within the space of 40 years, so I may not be correctly
recalling what we were taught about the effect that a "continuative" had in
Greek. Perhaps someone whose studies in Greek were more recent than mine
will know.
At any rate, by working in France as a missionary, I learned that what is
done in one language isn't necessarily done in another and that the "logic"
of one language won't always work in another. When I was in the early
stages of learning French, I remember asking a French woman who had married
a missionary friend why in French adjectives were put after the words they
modify, and her answer was, "Why are they put before the words they modify
in English?" In other words, if a construction in Greek appears literally
to read "immediately but after," Ron can't conclude from this that because
that structure would be awkward in English, it therefore could not mean what
we would mean in English when we say "immediately after."
Farrell Till
Skepticism, Inc.
jftill@midwest.net