The Gospel of John typically uses near synonyms to avoid lexical repetition. On the other hand we find places like John 4:19ff where the discourse is focused on a topic represented by one more words in this case προσκυνεῖν and πνεῦμα, ἐν πνεύματι. The repetition of these words bind the discourse together thematically; a feature of a “text” sometimes referred to as “texture.” Thematic cohesion doesn’t require lexical repetition, it can be accomplish buy using words from a shared scenario or a similar semantic domain.
I’m not a fan of translation, but I think that some of the foreign material here needs to be put into English.
The repetition of these words bind the discourse together thematically; a feature of a “text” sometimes referred to as “texture.” Thematic cohesion doesn’t require lexical repetition, it can be accomplish buy using words from a shared scenario or a similar semantic domain.
I might say:
Repeating the same words over again tightens this text. This repetition is a text’s flavor. A text doesn’t need repetition to be tight. You can just use other words that mean the same thing.
Now on to John 4:19-26. This is pure poetry. There is a more repetition than has been been highlighted, mostly at the phrase level. However, especially by the time you get to verse 23, you do tend to wonder if something special is being done with “προσκυν-”. I wonder if there is some special emphasis being placed on the root? Ie., the repetition might be drawing out the concrete meaning of “being prostrate,” nicely setting up the eventual contradiction of doing that “ἐν πνεύματι.”
“The Gospel of John typically uses near synonyms to avoid lexical repetition.”
I hadn’t noticed that when I read through it (not at all recently), and I wouldn’t have expected him to be averse to lexical repetition. Is it really the case? It may be, but I’d like to see evidence.
In this passage it’s hard to think he could have used any other word, isn’t it? Nor could he well have avoided using it so often.
In this passage it’s hard to think he could have used any other word, isn’t it? Nor could he well have avoided using it so often.
I could almost buy this, though the repetition of so much else in the John 4:19- makes it clear that there is an overall artificiality going on here. But in verse 23-24, it is very easy to imagine more pronouns sneaking in.
I would say that the primary argument against προσκυν- meaning anything is that all of the repetition in the passage is primarily poetic, and there is no reason to single out any word specifically, and of course the topic gets repeated a lot.
Perhaps I am missing the point but I don’t see anything artificial about repeating a word. On the other hand writers of Ancient Greek who went to great lengths to avoid word repetition do at times produce strange and artificial phrases, using words that do not semantically fit the context.
Along those lines one might select from the word group σέβομαι, σεβάζομα, εὐσεβέω, σέβασμα; as an alternative for προσκυνέω. That word group is not represented in the traditional Johannine corpus.
Stirling,
My question is, Was the author of the John gospel one of those writers who went out of his way to avoid word repetition, as you seemed to suggest at the head of this thread? It’s something I wouldn’t have expected, so I’d be grateful for some assurance that it is in fact the case.
As for this particular passage, when the woman says “οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν ἐν τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ προσεκύνησαν· καὶ ὑμεῖς λέγετε ὅτι ἐν Ἱεροσολύμοις ἐστὶν ὁ τόπος ὅπου προσκυνεῖν δεῖ,” surely neither σεβεσθαι nor ευσεβειν would be possible verbs to use? and the same goes for the repeated verb in Jesus’ response.
“Along those lines” refers to “…using words that do not semantically fit the context.” So I agree that σεβεσθα … would be a less than ideal equivalent. It has some semantic domain overlap with προσκυνεῖν word group but doesn’t suggest falling down before or physical manifestations of worship.
I often argue both sides of a point in a single thread simply because stark either/or choices rarely solve problems in literary analysis. “John” employed a small vocabulary if compared to Luke. He had to get a lot of millage out of this vocabulary. He also varied words, perhaps for reasons we do not know. Repetition isn’t always aesthetically pleasing. It is hard to know why an author makes these decisions. Speculations like “to avoid repetition” are just that speculations. First year students will typically try to find a semantic “nuance” in a variant word choice. Sometimes that nuance doesn’t exist.
I would have thought that anyone reading through the gospels would find that one of John’s foremost style techniques is his love of repetition.
However, it’s not that much trouble to prove it. I created text file versions of Mark, Luke, and John, from the SBLGNT with the apparatus stripped. I then piped these into a short program that broke them up into blocks of 500 consecutive words, and counted the number of words in each block that were repeated more than 5 times.
Mark averages 10.91 words repeated over 5 times per block of 500 words.
Luke averages 11.07.
John comes out on top at 14.97.
For comparison purposes, Xenophon’s Anabasis averages 9.24 and Homer’s Iliad 5.75. Genesis in the Septuagint (UBS version), whose style very much runs towards parataxis and which John was copying, is 15.98. The entire Septuagint averages 13.88.
Are you able to recognize different inflections of the same word? Otherwise, this will simply give a big number for those texts that use a lot of particles and other uninflected words. And even if you take inflection into account, I suppose you would still have to distinguish between words that are repeated everywhere like καί and rarer words whose repetitions are more significant.
Yes. After reducing your sample to verbs nouns adjectives and converting them into dictionary form, then you need to decide what counts as a repetition. A repetition may be defined as a certain number of words between occurrences. That number is arbitrary. I would place it somewhere under 25.
That wouldn’t quite capture what we’re looking for: repetition of sound. Rather than grammatical analysis, I would suggest that the first improvement to my method would be to look at repetition of letter combinations, with higher scores being given to combinations of longer lengths. Also, it’s a 15 minute project rather than a weekend project. None of these alternatives, though, will give you a substantially different answer on any of the texts I considered above. The physicist in me would call the original program a “back of the envelope calculation.”
I’d like everyone to remember that the primary thing that we’re arguing about here is whether the man who wrote sentences like “Ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ ἦν, καὶ ὁ κόσμος διʼ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ ὁ κόσμος αὐτὸν οὐκ ἔγνω” was or was not going for repetition? I could find an example like that, probably several, on any given page of John! And very few in Mark or Matthew or Luke.
I am more than willing to admit that John also went out of his way to avoid repetition at many places. Yet, even more frequently he drums in the patterns. This overwhelming attention to repetition throughout the Gospel of John is the mark of a poet. And, what’s more, it’s the primary manner of poetry of the Hebrew Bible in its original form and also the form that John was familiar with it in. He was actively imitating Hebrew scripture in a way that is found nowhere else in the New Testament, except for the book of Revelation. John conceived of what he was writing as scripture when he wrote it; this is a consciousness that is also not found frequently in the NT.
statistical analysis of texts is not a simple problem. Not a weekend project. There are any number of Ancient Greek PhD dissertations which demonstrate that unsound statistical methods lead to unpersuasive conclusions. I remember how upset one Accordance user was in the mid 90s when he found out that Accordance counted punctuation as a word. It messed up his numbers in his dissertation. My reflection at the time was that punctuation was not the problem with his numbers, the whole approach he was taking was wrong headed.
W. Foerster TDNT VII 171-172 asserts that σέβομαι is used for physical acts of visable worship, not just veneration and cites several examples incuding: