But if you’re making an argument, it is your duty to explain it properly. I personally don’t buy into your assertion that the relative pronouns have no anecedents, so obviously I’m not looking for anything “on the page” through the filter of your understanding . You have to tell us exactly what it is that you see in this regard in the “rest of the Epistle.” It’s your assertion. . I’m saying this as gently as I can, and at the same time being as straighforward as possible; sometimes this is a hard thing to do.. But I mean no dis-respect. .
IMHO, in this thread you have made not one but two very dubious assertions, they are :
(A) τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς in 1 John 1:1 cannot be two genitives in simple apposition unless we add ὅ ἐστι to the expression .
(B) The neuter relatives ὅ in the opening section of the Epistle have no antecedent(s).
We must not make claims like these and not take responsibility for them. I think you should recant claim (A) imediately, and explain your claim (B) more clearly.
Smyth, Greek Grammar, 2502d.
d. The relative may stand in the neuter, in agreement with the notion implied in the antecedent rather than with the antecedent itself; as διὰ τὴν πλεονεξία_ν, δ̀ πᾶσα φύσις διώκειν πέφυ_κεν ὡς ἀγαθόν for the sake of profit, a thing which every nature is inclined to pursue as a good P. R. 359c.
Maybe. Would that mean that the logos is not understood as a person? No, I don’t think so.
Or maybe I’m off base here. Is that the direction you are going in, Isaac?
My position is that Logos prior to becoming “flesh” (i.e. “a human being”/"a person’) was not a “person,” --otherwise I would have the unenviable task of arguing that John 1:14 is asserting that a person became a person. David A. Reed elaborates upon my position about what the Logos was prior to it’s coming to earth very well in this regard. If you have the time would you read the following ? http://fdier.free.fr/ReedSemiticJohn.pdf
I assume that you construing the verse as though John wrote:
…Or maybe I’m off base here. Is that the direction you are going in, Isaac?
I’m actually construing differently. The first relative pronoun ὃ
is the subject of ἦν . The object of ἀκηκόαμεν,ἑωράκαμεν, ἐθεασάμεθα
and ἐψηλάφησαν is λόγος, aka ζωή, aka φῶς.. So I would translate as follows:
“The Word , that is, the Life was from the beginning. We have heard it. We have seen it. We observed and touched it. …”
No Isaac Newton you are mistaken. I had no duty to try to help you in the first place, and I have no duty to you now. I stand by everything I’ve told you, and regret that none of it seems to have got through to you.
I’m working from the assumption that apostle John was a Jew and also a monotheist, that is, that he was a Jewish monotheist, and not just any monotheist . A Jewish monotheist would find it impossible to conceive of God as multiple “persons” within a “Godhead.” For a Jew such is the ultimate sin, “Avodah Zarah” ( idol worship) – it is the most severe prohibition in the Torah. So in order to correctly grasp what the apostle is actually saying in his prologue , we have to think like the Jews, preferably like first century Jews .
In this regard, what better place than the Encyclopedia Judaica , if we wish to correctly understand ancient Jewish paradigms . We find here that Torah is much more than just a book of sacred writings. It is the very thing which was with God in the beginning and which he consulted as he began to create the Universe. These Jews identified Torah with the Logos:
Origin and Preexistence
“Moses received the Torah from Sinai” (Avot 1:1). Yet there is an ancient tradition that the Torah existed in heaven not only before God revealed it to Moses, but even before the world was created. The apocryphal book The Wisdom of Ben Sira identified the Torah with preexistent personified wisdom (1:1–5, 26; 15:1; 24:1ff.; 34:8; cf. Prov. 8:22–31). In rabbinic literature, it was taught that the Torah was one of the six or seven things created prior to the creation of the world (Gen. R. 1:4; Pes. 54a, et al.). Of these preexistent things, it was said that only the Torah and the throne of glory were actually created, while the others were only conceived, and that the Torah preceded the throne of glory (Gen. R. 1:4). According to Eliezer ben Yose the Galilean, for 974 generations before the creation of the world, the Torah lay in God’s bosom and joined the ministering angels in song (arn1 31, p. 91; cf. Gen. R. 28:4, et al.). Simeon ben Lakish taught that the Torah preceded the world by 2,000 years (Lev. R. 19:1, et al.) and was written in black fire upon white fire (tj, Shek. 6:1, 49d, et al.). Akiva called the Torah “the precious instrument by which the world was created” (Avot 3:14). Rav *Hoshaiah, explicitly identifying the Torah with the preexistent wisdom of Proverbs, said that God created the world by looking into the Torah as an architect builds a palace by looking into blueprints. He also took the first word of Genesis not in the sense of “In the beginning,” but in that of “By means of the beginning,” and he taught that “beginning” (probably in the philosophic sense of the Greek archē) designates Torah, since it is written of wisdom (= Torah), “The Lord made me the beginning of His way” (Prov. 8:22; Gen. R. 1:1). It was also taught that God took council with the Torah before He created the world (Tanḥ. B. 2, et al.). > The concept of the preexistence of the Torah is perhaps implicit in the philosophy of Philo, who wrote of the preexistence and role in creation of the Word of God (logos; e.g., Op. 20, 25, 36; Cher. 127) and identified the Word of God with the Torah (Mig. 130; cf. Op. and ii Mos> .).
The relative pronoun is used again and again for literary effect and to cover the various senses, to say that not only were the authors of the letter (the group for whom the writer was speaking) claiming to have seen something, but to have heard it, to have touched it, to have handled it, etc. The verb associated with all of these relative clauses is one and the same: ἀπαγγέλλομεν.
What are they announcing? They are announcing to the recipients of the letters what they have seen and experienced for themselves. They are relating their personal experience — and this is the meaning of the relative pronoun ὅ with its various clauses.
Reading anything more than this into it is eisegetical.
And that “something” is clearly identified by the author as τοῦ Λόγου , that is, τῆς ζωῆς . The antecedent of ὃ in all clauses here is the logos, aka, the life.
Above (bold) seems to have been lifted from Daniel Wallace’s Net Bible notes. This is Wallace’s “translation”:
1:1 > This is what we proclaim to you> :1 what was from the beginning,2 what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and our hands have touched (concerning the word of life – 1:2 and the life was revealed, and we have seen and testify and announce3 to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us).4 1:3 What we have seen and heard we announce5 to you too, so that6 you may have fellowship7 with us (and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ).
Notice Wallace adds an entire verse into the epistle (bold above), and cuts off περὶ τοῦ Λόγου τῆς ζωῆς from the opening verse [see the brackets] by relegating it into a parenthetical in order to make all of the relative clauses in verses 1 through 3 the objects of ἀπαγγέλλομεν .
To be sure ὃ is the object of the verbs ἀκηκόαμεν.., ἑωράκαμεν.., ἐθεασάμεθα.. and ἐψηλάφησαν respectively. But where Wallace goes wrong is in his insistence that these phrases or relative clauses are themselves the object of the verb ἀπαγγέλλομεν. In English as well as in Greek, a relative clause if it is the object of a verb is invariably in it’s immediate (or else very close) vicinity. The bottom line is that the relative clauses in 1 John 1:1-4 are not the object of a verb.
I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but ἀπαγγέλλομεν in verse 3 governs only the single clause ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν (notice the relative pronoun is not repeated).
Here’s A Workbook for Intermediate Greek: Grammar, Exegesis, and Commentary on 1-3 John, by Herbert W. Bateman, IV:
(> A> ) > The relative pronoun could refer to “the Word” in the phrase “the Word of life”. "This “Word,” like the “Word” in John’s Gospel ( 1:1) was from the beginning. > But as you already know, the relative in the phrase is neuter and not the masculine form you might expect in order to be in agreement with Logos. This view is not impossible (W 336-45), but it remains an awkward grammatical construction (HJS, 21-22).
(B) Another possibility is that the relative pronoun refers to “life,” which also occurs in the prepositional phrase of verse 1. However “life” also lacks agreement with the pronoun , and this along with the awkward grammatical construction, may argue against this view.
(C) It is probable that the relative pronoun refers to Jesus and his whole career (perhaps as it is described in the GJohn). All the relative pronouns in vv. 1-3 appear to be a comprehensive reference to the Incarnation of Jesus, whose existence as a man and career the author “witnessed” and thereby bears “testimony” about to his readers (Brown, 154). Thus the object of the author’s proclamation is the person, words, and deeds of Jesus (NET). So then, in your own words, what do the relative clauses refer to in vv. 1-3?
(A) above is the only sensible understanding of the text IMHO (and is prehaps why Bateman subconsciously lists it first). It comes across as “awkward” to him because he fails to recognize the apostle’s application of constructio ad sensum here, due to Bateman’s thorough trinitarian indoctrination.
Had it not been for the fact that Bateman aproaches this text with preconceived 4th century Chalcedonian lenses, he could not have given option (C) any serious consideration, IMHO.
I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but ἀπαγγέλλομεν in verse 3 governs only the single clause ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν (notice the relative pronoun is not repeated).
Hi, I understood you to be saying that the ὃ’s in verse 1 were too far away from ἀπαγγέλλομεν in verse 3 for them to be their object. Now to me it is obvious that the ὃ in verse 3 is referring to the same thing as they are - I think he is repeating it for the very reason you say, that they are rather a long way away from the verb otherwise. ‘What we saw and what we heard’ is pretty much the same as ‘what we saw and heard’, is it not - and I think that is true in the Greek too. I think ὃ means τοῦτο ὃ - much like ‘that which’ in English means much the same as ‘what’. ‘We announce to you what we saw and heard about the word of life’ is the general idea, so far as I can see.
What do you mean by “repeating it” ? The apostle is “repeating” only the words “ὃ ἑωράκαμεν” and “ἀκηκόαμεν” ( but not with the same grammatical construction or within the same contextual framework) , nor is he repeating the other relative clauses, including the crucial first one. And most importantly, he’s not “repeating” ἀπαγγέλλομεν.
If anything your example (verse 3) proves my point that a relative clause, if it is the object of a verb , is in it’s immediate vicinity .We know ὃ ἑωράκαμεν and ἀκηκόαμεν in verse 3 are governed by the verb ἀπαγγέλλομεν because the verb immediately follows the clause. It is ungrammatical to pick on a verb that governs a relative clause and argue that it governs another set of four relative clauses detached from it.
What do you mean by “repeating it” ? The apostle is “repeating” only the words “ὃ ἑωράκαμεν” and “ἀκηκόαμεν” ( but not with the same grammatical construction or within the same contextual framework) , nor is he repeating the other relative clauses, including the crucial first one. And most importantly, he’s not “repeating” ἀπαγγέλλομεν.
So do you think that the ὃ in verse 3 has a different referent to the ὃ in verse 1?
It seems quite normal to abbreviate a bit, when one is reiterating something and picking it up again - otherwise it would be long-winded, it seems to me.
It seems quite normal to abbreviate a bit, when one is reiterating something and picking it up again - otherwise it would be long-winded, it seems to me.
It seems to me that his main point that he starts with is that they were eye-witnesses - we were there, we saw what happened, we heard Jesus’s teaching firsthand etc etc - and he is going to say that what we saw and heard, we also pass on to you - all this is about the word of life - and when he says ‘life’, he is inspired to speak about the Life, who was the Lord Himself, but also the message of eternal life - and then he picks up again his point about transmission, you could call it the apostolic transmission - that what they saw they were transmitting to those who hadn’t themselves been there.
In both the Greek texts I have to hand, the editor has put hyphens before and after verse 2, indicating what one might call a digression - but an inspired one as I say. Would you punctuate it differently?
Do you agree with “jaihare” that “the verb associated with all of these relative clauses is one and the same: ἀπαγγέλλομεν” ?
Yes, I think that is right - assuming you mean the relative clauses in verse 1 and 3. And what do you think about the punctuation? Would you punctuate it differently?
Do you know of any translators that have understood it differently? Here for example is the NASB:
What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life— 2 and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us— 3 what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.
Would you agree that in this translation the verb associated with all the relative clauses in verses 1 and 3 is one and the same: ‘we proclaim’?
Only the relative clause in verse 3 is the object of ἀπαγγέλλομεν – ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμενἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν, ἵνα καὶ ὑμεῖς κοινωνίαν ἔχητε μεθ’ ἡμῶν.
How do we know this, because it’s right next to it . The other relative clauses are divorced from this verb. I must say that the reading your championing is ungrammatical.
Would you agree that in this translation the verb associated with all the relative clauses in verses 1 and 3 is one and the same: ‘we proclaim’?
Andrew
No. I’ve only seen Wallace’s Net bible make the assertion you and “jaihare” are proffering.
In an earlier post, I offered the following as a decent translation, though I would change the word “existed” in verse 1 to “was” and change one or two other minor things from this translation :
1The Word of life existed from the beginning. We have heard it. We have seen it. We observed and touched it. 2This life was revealed to us. We have seen it, and we testify about it. We are reporting to you about this eternal life that was in the presence of the Father and was revealed to us. 3This is the life we have seen and heard. We are reporting about it to you also so that you, too, can have a relationship with us. Our relationship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4We are writing this so that we can be completely filled with joy.