Pastors and Teachers, and the Article (Eph 4:11)

Bill Mounce — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:03:29 -0500

This passage has long engendered debate, and I doubt I will forever close that debate in this blog. But it is a good example of how Greek grammar clarifies the issues and gives us an acceptable range of meaning, after which sensitivity to the language and context make the final decisions.

Wouldn’t it be great if a knowledge of Greek solved all the mysteries of the universe, or at least answered all the questions of the New Testament? It doesn’t, and opinions to the contrary border on cult mentality.

Paul is discussing the gifts that God gives. In v 11 he says, word for word, “And he gave men the apostles de the prophets de the evangelists de the pastors and teachers. The men … de is the correlative construction “both … and … and” that often does not make it into translations because while it is gentle and smooth in Greek our correlatives are a bit rougher and more intrusive.

The question is whether “pastors and teachers” designate one spiritual gift or two.

The Definite Article and 1 Timothy 4:13

Bill Mounce — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:36:08 -0600

The word that we call the “definite article” in Greek is a slippery fellow. Many of its uses in English overlap with that of Greek, and so it is easy to tell first year Greek students to translate it is “the” when ho is present, and to not include it when ho is absent.

But even in first year Greek we quickly start to see the problems of this approach. Greek uses ho when we never would, such as before proper names. So we tell our students to ignore ho in this case.

But then it is "missing" when English requires it, such as in prepositional phrases, so we tell students they can add in &qout;the" when English requires it, such as in a preposition-noun construction where the noun is anarthrous (i.e., not preceded by ho). "born of … spirit" in John 3:5 becomes "born of … the Spirit".

And then as we get further into the language we start seeing more subtleties. The fact of the matter is that Greek nouns carry a degree of definiteness beyond that of English nouns, and the Greek article is not required to make them definite. This is why we can add "the" into a translation when English requires it to carry over the sense of the Greek. But the more we do this, the further we go into interpretation, and the further we go into interpretation the greater the danger of subjectivity in the translation process.