Robert said

The lexical approach is indeed important, but I want to make the grammatical discussion as simple as possible. Would Dionysius Thrax have understood the weight of centuries of theological dispute being piled onto an overly sharp distinction between an objective and a subjective genitive? No, he spoke of the genitive in much simpler terms. Anyone trying to understand how Paul himself understood his own use of a genitive is probably better served by reading Dionysius Thrax’s one-line description of the genitive than by trying to decipher all the theological ink (and indeed even some blood) spilled since Luther.   

Ah.  So, it turns less on the noun, but more on (in English, at least) the preposition.

I tried to Google Dionysius of Thrax – is it his point about genitive as possession and parentage?  I’m in the Greek deep end without a floatation device.

Robert said

Well usually there is no preposition in Greek so the choice of preposition in English is just trying to make sense of the Greek in the target language of English. 

Extra clear, got it.  Thank you – I cannot wield the technical apparatus to talk about parts of speech in the Greek, so I must revert to English in order to ensure I’m expressing the right thing.  Turns on the mode of christou – and in English, the “of”. Excellent.

Robert said

Near as I can tell, if someone were to ask Dionysius Thrax if Paul’s phrase πίστις χριστοῦ (pistis christou, faith[fulness] of Christ) might be an objective genitive meaning ‘the faith of (one believing in) Christ’, he would respond, “What in the world is an objective genitive? I’ve never heard of such a thing.” 

To which a modern might say, “You know, when a noun has an active sense, the genitive can denote the object of that noun thought of as a verb.” Read the modern grammars, Dionysius! Where have you been these past two thousand years? He would be dumbfounded. He would again explain what a noun is and that the whole point of the genitive case is to show, as you say, possession or parentage. The genitive indicates the owner, possessor, or even creator of an object, or the origin, eg, ‘the son of a father‘. It just so happens that a father creates and owns his children so it was not always that great of a distinction in his time. 

And all of these senses fall within what moderns anachronistically call the subjective genitive.

The faith or faithfulness of Christ is most obviously that faith possessed by Christ himself or perhaps the faith that arises from, originates in, or is engendered by Christ or the Christ event. Thus it may be considered firstly as either a subjective genitive or a genitive of origin, which is really not all that different from a subjective genitive. This can, of course, also be shared by all those who believe in Christ and believe as Christ. No one would believe in Christ if Christ himself did not first exist as a person of faith, faithfulness, worthy of faith and trust. Thus, if we come to share in a faith similar to that faith and faithfulness first exemplified by Jesus, we might be said to also have the faith of Christ or the faith arising from Christ himself. That is a very natural expression of or minimal extension of the basic root meaning of the genitive as understood by Dionysius and requires no more complicated explanation. Except it doesn’t really say what Luther and his ilk, both before and after him, wanted Paul’s text to say. And theologians have been trying to invent grammatical rules to impose their preferred meaning on his texts ever since.

But is it how Paul would have understood his own text? Some legitimately criticize Dionysius as not possessing knowledge of all the comparative historical languages from which one should construct a modern philological grammatical analysis. OK. Neither did Paul. And how did Paul understand the language he was using? Probably rather similarly to the teachers of Greek of his time, from whom he learned to speak and write in Greek.

That’s not the end of the discussion. There are always special cases that might not fit very well into the contemporary grammar of Paul’s time. But this should be the beginning of the discussion.  

This is quite crisply cogent. 

To make sure I’m understanding the extension of the argument, let me ask a few questions:

– Is there a corresponding absence of (clear) objective genitives in Paul?

– Given Paul’s explicit use of the parallel between Abraham’s faith and Jesus’s, is the construction of “faithfulness of Abraham” similarly (anachronistically) subjective genitive in the Greek?

– Does this generalize;  i.e., is the argument (pace DoT) that, more broadly in Koine at the time, there was not an objective genitive?

Robert said

– Is there a corresponding absence of (clear) objective genitives in Paul?

To paraphrase perhaps the greatest religious genius since Jesus, “the reports of the existence of the objective genitive are greatly exaggerated.”

There is indeed such a thing, yes, even in Paul, but very many of the of-cited examples of such are better or at least as well understood as a generic genitives, which are either a genuinely Greek genitives of origin (‘engendered by’) or some kind of adjectival genitive found very frequently in the Greek influenced by the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew construct state. Some Greek grammarians say that the objective genitive decreased in frequency after the Koine, but in my opinion they are merely misunderstanding the blip in temporary influence of Hebrew translation Greek in the New Testament and patristic authors influenced by the Septuagint. Still, when Paul speaks of the ‘faithfulness of Christ’, even if he is mostly influenced by the Septuagintal translation Greek from Hebrew, as opposed to a more pure Thracian Dionysian grammatical Greek, if he is merely alluding to an adjectival genitive, this would still be a ‘Christlike faith’ and not a Lutheran ‘faith in Christ’.

I feel like I’m getting a look behind the curtain of Greek genitives.

So:

– If Dionysius of Thrax, then subjective genitive

– If Septuagint (from the base Hebrew), then adjectival genitive

– If not one of these, then generic genitive

Is there a good, paradigmatic case of a clearly and only objective genitive in Paul?

In contrast to “faith in Christ”, would a Pauline reliance on the salvific nature of the “faithfulness of Christ” better explain why one would need to “participate in Christ’s death” via baptism or “participate in Christ’s Kingdom table fellowship” via the Eucharist, rather than just believe?  If it was only belief (in the propositional sense) that counted, what would baptism or the Eucharist add?  If one has to be on Christ’s faithfulness team, however, these participatory acts would fit. 

Robert said

– Given Paul’s explicit use of the parallel between Abraham’s faith and Jesus’s, is the construction of “faithfulness of Abraham” similarly (anachronistically) subjective genitive in the Greek?

This is actually perhaps the strongest argument for a subjective genitive in Paul’s speaking about the faith of Christ. Comparable to the faith of Abraham, we are also encouraged, instructed, exhorted to imitate the faith of Jesus. There are no instances where Paul tells us to believe in Abraham. It is the example of Abraham’s faith (subjective genitive, genitive of origin), prior to the giving of the law on Sinai, around which Paul would have us understand the whole origin and tradition of Judaism.

Parallelism of concept, parallelism of grammar.

Robert said

– Does this generalize; i.e., is the argument ([per Dionysius of Thrax]) that, more broadly in Koine at the time, there was not an objective genitive?

I’m a little lost here. What is DoT? Also, I don’t think the objective genitive was nonexistent, but I do think it is greatly exaggerated in modern grammars, especially when one is trying to place place Paul’s own understanding of his Greek grammatical usage in his own historical context.  

Sorry, typing on train – leads to autocorrect  errors and errant acronyms.  “Per Dionysius of Thrax” is what that’s supposed to say…

Robert said

Some would interpret Dionysius’ term (γενική) for the case itself as ‘generic’, but I would go by his more concrete illustrations, ‘possession or parentage’ or ‘ownership or origin’. Also, the generic genitive is for all intents and purposes the same thing as the adjectival genitive.

I’m not qualified to make this statement, but of course won’t let that stand in my way:  as I think through it, it would seem that, in a Venn diagram of their extensions, the generic genitive (if I understand it correctly) would seemingly be contained within the adjectival genitive’s circle.  Would the generic genitive be a special case of the adjectival genitive?

Outside Dionysius of Thrax, are there other Greek grammarians who give treatment to the genitive (especially those that might be at cross purposes to Dionysius’s subjective mode)?

Robert said 

I’m sure there are many, but I may need a couple of days to come up with the very best counter-example. Need to try and rescue a colleague’s account.

Good luck with the work fire drill.  

Please don’t even think twice about diverting to find a knockout example – I am a fully licensed Google machine operator, and I occasionally navigate it off-road through territory previously unknown to me, sometimes even with success. 

Robert said

Absolutely. Almost everything in Paul makes much more sense for those of us on Team Faithfulness, especially the importance of the moral law, the messianic law of love, God’s final judgment, etc. But as the forged letter of James shows, there were early misinterpretations or caricatures of Paul (or deutero-Paul) as something like Team Luther.  

Ok, good to know I am stumbling in the right general direction.

When I think about a how a concept of the salvific nature of the faithfulness of Christ would work, it seems to entail a mode of “faith in Christ” packed into the concept.  Christ’s faithfulness to God led to his atoning self-sacrifice, and emulating the faithfulness of Christ by trusting God’s promises to Abraham (who’s faith Christ emulated) means one must have faith “in” the atoning self-sacrifice and faith “that” it works (to make use of an elementary analytic distinction).

I’m wary (and weary) of the theological-only arguments around the Pistis Christou debate.  It had felt to me like it’s rife with cherry picking, on both (or all three, if one countenances a compatibilist solution) sides.  Coming at it from a grammatical/lexical angle gives some dispassionate heft to the arguments.  Thanks for turning me on to it. 

Welcome back. Hope all is well.

Robert said

If grammarians who interpret Dionysius’ terminology as merely speaking of a generic genitive are correct, then perhaps you could say that specifically Septuagintal Greek, influenced by the Hebrew construct state, is a special case of translation Greek as opposed to pure Greek.

Ah, ok – so it would be “artificial” Greek, that is trying to map itself onto the underlying Hebrew (which has an embedded sense that doesn’t directly translate across). Without being able to read Hebrew nor Greek, is there an easy/intuitive way (in English) to conceptualize the difference in the underlying Hebrew relative to the Greek that would give rise to this synthetic genitive in Greek, one that doesn’t involve you having to sink too much time into explicating for me?

Robert said

I’m currently working my way through the Greek text of Apollonius Dyscolus as time permits. He focuses on the genitive as primarily pointing to possession, ‘though he certainly also speaks of the partitive genitive. He may also speak of something comparable to an objective genitive, but I have not yet found an unambiguous passage in his surviving work that clearly affirms this.   

To this wholly unlicensed lexicographer, it would seem when I think through the partitive genitive, it would be a sub-species of the generic – and even then only taxonomically distinct through a large effort of conceptualization.

Robert said

Temporarily saved one junior colleague’s project…

Good to hear.  Sometimes stopping the clock is enough to change the game. 

Robert said

[R]emains to be seen if I will thereby take over the role of mentor from one of my senior colleagues, who is just not good at or interested in mentoring junior colleagues with their minor clients. I am good at teaching people and even somewhat interested in doing so if they show genuine promise. Not sure this one does.

Training up the juniors – can be both a most rewarding experience or a frustrating one, depending on the mix and amounts of aptitude and attitude of said junior.  Good luck.

Robert said

I wouldn’t consider it artificial Greek, just Jewish Greek from a particular time. All languages, and especially Greek, more than any other, has developed over time in communication with many diverse cultures. This is Greek that is expanding it’s own grammatical structures to express a similar but different structure in Hebrew. I think what may have already existed in Greek became more widely used in Jewish circles because they were frequently interested in translating a similar but somewhat different syntactical structure in Hebrew. Whereas Hebrew subtly altered the form of the first noun in a genetival construct, in Greek grammar, it was typically the ‘second’ noun that was more obviously altered. I think this increased the frequency of a relatively vague sense of the genitive which was already possible in Greek but now became relatively more common among Greek speaking Jews. 

Ah thank you.  Would it be the reversed word order of the operative modifier that led to the vagueness, or is it another feature of the underlying Hebrew “noun pair” that created the ambiguity as it moved into the Greek?

Robert said

I think that’s fair, but it may be true of every genitive, especially if one were to insist upon the generic genitive as “the true genitive.” Personally  I don’t think there is one true master Aryan race of genitives evident in the Sanskrit. I’m not entirely kidding here. Reading some of the still hugely influential Greek grammars of the early 20th century, one cannot help but be struck by some of these overtones. I prefer to focus first on how contemporary Greek speaking writers might have learned the grammar of the language they used–hence my interest in Dionysius Thrax for understanding the Greek of the New Testament.   

I feel lucky to be ignorant enough to enter this genitive conversation at the then-contemporary-usage point via your invite, because it seems wildly more intuitive as a path than retrojecting later (or even modern) grammatical lenses.

Along with Greek grammars (in this genitive context), there’s a lot best left behind from the early 20th century…

Hi Fredbauck – around your “believe in” point above, it’s an incisive question and one which I personally wrestle with in the context of historical reconstruction. On a definitive answer, I will have to demur. I was intentionally less precise in my language, to avoid getting (at that point in the thread) stuck on the precise meaning of “believe in”, instrumentally.  There is quite a range of possibilities that could be consistent with the beliefs of each of the historical people, which could be different by each person. It is further complicated by the range of meaning there is in “believe in” itself (distinct from but not mutually exclusive to the propositional  “believe that”), and is also amplified over again by the potential range of meaning that stems from pistis christou debate.

I have an opinion on each of the historical figures’ position, but it’s limited to that of an interested layman.  Of the three figures, I feel we obviously have more specific belief statements to work with when considering Paul (vs the pillars); but even with him, there’s a fair amount of room (as the pistis christou debate makes abundantly clear).