Question about grammar of propositions and dative case

Greek Koine and Biblical and Medieval Greek
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I need to clearly understand when to use what case, and there is a gap in my understanding of English.

First, in “Faith in Christ” (whether that is a correct translation is one of the great theological questions of the universe), is Christ an indirect object or the object of a preposition?

Second, in Koine, what case does the object of a preposition get? I’ve read that in English the object of a preposition is a direct object, which seems unlikely!

So, if I put the book in the bookcase, book case is an indirect object, but it seems like it’s also a prepositional phrase? In English it makes no difference whether it’s an indirect object or the object of a preposition since it’s the same word either way.

Since there seems no conceivable way “of Christ” could NOT be the genitive, perhaps the matter reduces to whether a prepositional phrase ever gets the GENITIVE?

Mind, I am NOT looking for opinions on whether St. Paul actually referred 8 times to “faith in Christ” or “faith of Christ”. Desire to figure that out for myself finalized my decision to learn Koine! It’s the sort of thing each person must evidently decide for themselves, even if it might or might not be hard to see how that’s a mystery. I enjoy solving mysteries, and evidently very different interpretations of how who is saved come from this - so I’m really not looking for someone else to solve it for me.

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The question I just asked about cases, and prepositional phrases, would be good to know the answer to, but for the meaning of pistis Christou or pistis tou Christou I don’t need to know it.

Christou is inarguably the genitive. That seems to make it hard to translate it as anything but “faith of Christ” (or “faithfulness of Christ”), but apparently some scholars think they know of a way.

I understand I can’t post links while I’m a newbie, so I’ll have to quote.

"For almost all interpreters until the last few decades, the question hasn’t really been a question: it means ‘faith in Christ’ (the ‘objective genitive’ reading, since Christ is the object of the faith). But writers like Richard Hays and Tom Wright, along with an increasingly large contingent within New Testament scholarship, have argued strongly that it should instead be translated ‘faithfulness of Christ’ (the ‘subjective genitive’, since Christ is the subject of the faith/faithfulness.) "

(for those who might wonder, what almost all interpreters have been doing originated with Luther and is not what the King James does, and NT “Tom” Wright has visibly been bullied on his debates on You Tube into saying it’s usually translated as “in Christ”, yet the main version of the new interpretation of Paul is that Christ’s faithfulness figures prominently, and Wright has a major book out on that theme.)

How valid is this? Is the object genitive a thing, or did someone make it up because they don’t want to admit that Luther mangled teh translation of this phrase? That is, has there only been one instance of an “objective genitive” in Koine history?

My understanding of the genitive is it’s pretty simple. In Greek, “the whatever of Christ” requires that Christ gets the genitive because it is Christ’s. In Hebrew it would be the first word that would change to mean the same thing. Each language has its own distinctive grammatical way it does not possession, but possession can’t reverse while keeping the same grammar, not even for political reasons.

Scholars have never been sure if Paul meant “faith” or “faithfulness”, but I see that as secondary to getting the grammar right. Common sense cannot be applied to the matter. I’ve seen theological arguments based on both “faithfulness of Christ” and “faith of Christ”.

Yours,
Dora

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McCoy: "You mean that to understand your perspective on death, I have to die?:
Spock: “Precisely, doctor.”

Before I answer your specific questions, let me suggest that you are jumping the gun quite a bit here. If you want to learn Greek, start at the beginning. You said in your intro post that you want to learn it to answer theological controversies related to Paul, and you give one example in your next post. Fine – it’s as good a motivation as any to get started, I suppose, but you need actually to get started. Plenty of people on this forum can help you with this, but at least get a beginning grammar and start working through it systematically. If you stick with it, then you’ll get to a point where these things will make a great deal more sense to you, and you can operate from a framework of knowledge about the language, and not ignorance. Personally, I started ancient Greek as a freshman in college eager to read my Greek New Testament for ever and ever, and then discovered that there was a whole lot of interesting literature out there, and I was stuck. I actually met half of my original goal, but my perspective was greatly expanded, and I’ve never looked back, so to speak.

  1. “In” and “of” are prepositions in English. Any word which follows them is therefore the object of a preposition. In English, “Christ” in the phrase “In Christ” is the object of the preposition “in.” Notice the language here: we distinguish between “the object of the preposition” and “the direct object” (which has to do with the noun “receiving” the action of the verb).

  2. “In” does not normally express an indirect object in English. In your example above “In the bookcase” shows the location of the book, and doesn’t express an indirect object. Indirect objects are usually expressed with word order, as “I gave Emily the book.” Emily is the indirect object. We also sometimes use the preposition “to,” I gave the book to Emily." In Greek, indirect objects are normally expressed in the dative case without a preposition.

  3. In Greek, prepositions take a variety of cases. ἐν is construed with the dative, εἰς with the accusative, ἐκ with the genitive, and so forth. Some prepositions, such as ἐπί can take more than one case, and that can affect the meaning of the preposition. The cases are also used in a variety of constructions without prepositions, but sometimes require prepositions in translation to make sense in English.

Now, that’s hardly the entire story. You need to learn the language and see these things in the context of the whole language before you start making exegetical capital out of them. No shortcuts here – the only way to the end is through.

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LOL, well of course.

But I foresaw not getting very far without a firmer grasp of the same grammatical functions in English.

The key thing I didn’t yet know was it doesn’t matter. I can now see that in this case, however, I don’t actually need to know the answer to what case noun a preposition takes in English .

In English, it does not matter.

In Koine, any given preposition can go with one or more of the three cases that aren’t the nominative.
Each preposition has a specific case or cases it can go with, and the meaning changes with the case of the object of the preposition. And some of the examples illustrate that you really can’t get from what is in the text to the correct translation without a Greek imagination.