I have been a lurker on the B-Greek list since I first heard about it two years ago, posting occasionally. If you have not subscribed to it and are interested in Greek, it is a tremendous resource that I would heartily recommend. Like anything on the web, one needs to critically filter the responses, but reading the posts for a while will help to separate the wheat from the chaff.
At any rate (marker of resumption of main line following off-line material, the bunny trail endeth here), the moderator is Carl Conrad, the crusty old quintessential grammarian, emeritus Classics professor from Washington University in St. Louis, and a plain old great guy. A common criticism he levels is that writers like Mark or John use poorly formulated Greek.1 At first I tended to reject this notion; but as my sense of the language continues to develop, I find myself agreeing with him more and more. In fact, just last week I axed an example from the grammar regarding the use of GAR in Mark, as it was not prototypical usage. This raises a question about the difference between “bad grammar” and bad or wrong language use.
My seventh grade English teacher at Lake Braddock Secondary was Mrs. Williams. I think she would roll over in her grave if she knew that I have devoted my life to the study of grammar. I was one of those intolerable miscreants that made her question the wisdom of her vocational calling as a teacher. Anyhow (another resumption), she was constantly correcting our grammar, trying to get us to conform to the prescribed forms of usage, to speak and writer “properly”. I find myself doing the same thing with my daughters: “That’s not how we say that. It should be…”
There is an important distinction to be made between bad grammar, i.e. not following the prescribed norms, and bad language, wherein the utterance is ungrammatical. My youngest is currently using the idiom, “Why I wanted/did X is because…” She is trying to create a reason/result frame of reference by topicalizing a subordinate clause.2 However, this usage is not part of the prescribed “proper” usage. This may be true, but from a linguistic standpoint, it is perfectly formed and can be described just like any other prescriptive grammatical construction.
In similar ways, I readily concede that there are idioms or usage in Mark and John that are not proper Greek. John’s use of asyndeton in narrative is a good example. He should be using KAI. Having said this, one can nonetheless describe what John is doing because he is systematic in his usage. You could say he is in a league all by himself. Granted it may not be proper, prescriptive grammar, but he is still following rules even if they are his own. Yes, there are anomalies, but on the whole there is a rhyme and reason to usage in John and Mark, although it may not be the standard Koine one. The same could be said for the Semiticisms in Luke that Randall Buth discussed in his SBL and ETS presentations in November. Luke may have departed from Koine norms based on translation from a source, but the usage still follows a describable pattern.
To be sure, there is non-prescriptive usage in the Greek NT. Some of the writers do not follow the proper Koine norms. However, if the usage is systematic, then it should be able to be described. The usage, though it may make classically-trained ears cringe, is likely to be following a broader linguistic norm. “Why I wanted to do this is because…” honestly makes me cringe, but it is properly formulated from a linguistic perspective. She is following proper rules, just not the ones that Mrs. Williams devoted her life to promoting.
This raises a related issue, one that I do not have time to take up: Is writing a descriptive grammar of Markan or Johannine usage the best way to write a descriptive grammar of Koine usage?
- I need to add a caveat based on a conversation with Carl today. Writing in “bad” Koine does not mean that a writer lacks style, it just means that it is unique to him rather than representative of broader Koine usage. See below on being in a league by yourself. [↩]
- Two excellent articles by Holger Diessel discuss the distributional disparity of adverbial clauses, sometimes at that begining, sometimes at the end, and in some cases both: “Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses” and “The ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses a typological study.” More great stuff can also be found on his publications page. [↩]
Steve,
Thanks for this. Your conclusions are important.
Are you familiar with Carl Conrad’s translation of Mark? I believe it is on his personal website.
He mentioned it to me this morning, but I have not looked at it yet. Post the link if you have it, please.
There is no merit to my translation of Mark except as clarification of what I understand the essential meaning of the Greek text to be; it serves as a reference for my “Brief Commentary”
(http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/Mark/ = http://tinyurl.com/7sdfju), which sets forth my own idiosyncratic interpretation of “Mark’s” literary intent in his composition.
With regard to Steve’s basic proposition above, I don’t think I’d talk so much about “bad grammar” vs. “bad language,” but rather about “bad writing” vs. “good writing.” By “bad writing” I mean a composition that does not communicate clearly or effectively to a reader/listener what the writer intends. I guess I used the word “bad Greek” in my talk with Steve in reference to writing that is intelligible but is awkward in formulation. An example: Mark 11:23 ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι ὃς ἂν εἴπῃ τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ· ἄρθητι καὶ βλήθητι εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν, καὶ μὴ διακριθῇ ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτοῦ ἀλλὰ πιστεύῃ ὅτι ὃ λαλεῖ γίνεται, ἔσται αὐτῷ.
Bad Greek again. I think this is clearly a Hellenized version of a Semitic formulation. The ὃς ἂν εἴπῃ is the common colloquial equivalent of ἐάν τις εἴπῃ. Matthew’s redacted version is far, far better: 21:20 … ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν ἔχητε πίστιν καὶ μὴ διακριθῆτε, οὐ μόνον τὸ τῆς συκῆς ποιήσετε, ἀλλὰ κἂν τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ εἴπητε· ἄρθητι καὶ βλήθητι εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν, γενήσεται·
Two other notes about “Mark’s” Greek:
(1) The literary character of Mark’s gospel, in my opinion, is not greatly undercut by the many instances of “bad writing.” I personally think that Mark is a fine storyteller with a fascinating mode of presentation for a very distinctive perspective on Jesus and the milieu of disciples, antagonists, and throngs of listeners, and I think that his “bad writing” may even enhance the enigmatic character of his mode of proclamation.
(2) In recent years I’ve come to share the view of Edward Hobbs regarding Mark’s competence in Greek: that the awkward constructions that I’m calling “bad writing” are very likely not Mark’s own composition but the Greek text-format of the tradition(s) that he reproduces, while on the other hand some of the parts for which the evangelist as redactor seems clearly himself responsible are clear and well-formulated.
As Steve noted, there’s intelligible writing in the GNT that doesn’t conform to the rules of school grammar; if Revelation puzzles listeners/readers, it isn’t because the Greek is unintelligible — but, as BDF notes, Revelation is notorious for its solecisms (the curious fact being that Revelation’s solecisms are, more often than not, readily intelligible (ὁ ὢν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος). On the other hand, Ephesians 1:3-14 seems to me a monstrosity of “bad writing”: while some have explained it as a sort of liturgical concatenation of credal elements, I think that the writer (I really don’t think it’s Paul) could and should have taken the time to do a bit of revising here.
Perplexities of Markan ideolect, especially prescriptive ones. As Carl has said, there are some irregularities in Markan composition. And the matter of personal choice. And the origins of that gospel are likely indebted to its origins in the oral preaching of Peter. And yes, I’m giving some credibility to Papias’ (and others) explanations on this matter. And in terms of linguistic method we need to be careful to distinguish what Mark’s Mrs. Williams taught him and how we describe the way in which we assess and explain his communication of his message. And that is usually described as prescriptive versus descriptive. And I’d describe much of Mark as a very simple, και-laden text, which is nonetheless effective and even powerful, in part because of his content, but also his ability (when he so desires) to write a very complex sentence consisting of multiple clauses, many of which consist of adverbial participles, which could be compared favorably with the standards of much more “classical” usage, or at least the literary koine of his day, which was not entirely foreign to him. Anacolouthon can be used also to provide a contrast to his usual και-initial sentences, often making departure to a new topic. And that can be seen even in my febble attempt at “Mark-syncing” since it comes across very clumsily here–actually quite a contrast with the impact made by Mark’s own language, which seems quite natural to him, but strained when imitated. 🙂
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/Mark/index.html
Carl,
I think that your 11:23 example is a good one of essentially stretching a construction too far, yet in an intelligible way. My sense of Mark at this point is that he had a limited aresenal of grammatical devices at his command, which can lead to some abuse in order to get the job done. When I first got my contractor’s licence in ’96, I vowed not to go into debt to get set-up. I built my first houses with a nail gun, compressor, skilsaw, hand saw, 8′ ladder and hand tools. This meant I used my skilsaw to cut out the arch-top windows, using a straight blade to cut an arch. It sounded like I was running a cat through a meat grinder tail first, but it got the job done. Mark 11:23 could have been improved or simplified, but we understand what he meant. Thanks for the comment.
Rod, you make some great points about the complexities of Mark. It is a complex conundrum of often conflicting motivations for doing different things. Do you assign it to grammatical competence, Semitic sources, established tradition, or the hand of another writer? I will stick to describing what he does, and leave it to smarter folks to figure out the rest. Thanks for the comments.
I’m working on (what I hope will be) a reasonably accurate *description* of what Mark does and how he communicates. I’m not ready to assign a why at this point (and may never get that far!). There are several explanations, and likely some elements of all of them are in play. I don’t think there is one simple or even over-riding explanation. Carl’s suggestion, following Hobbs, may touch part of it, though I’m inclined at times to think that the “tradition” that’s being reproduced might be Peter’s preaching; there are enough elements of an oral style, particularly that of a storyteller, to make that seem credible to me.
In my class at GIAL, “Language & Society,” we had a professor talk about his time in Brazil working and organizing translation projects at an administrative level for the tribal people groups of the jungle. He often told stories about families who knew that they only want their children could get ahead in the world was by learning the trade language. But in their setting, there was no one skilled enough to teach it will whether native speaker or otherwise. Thus, the parents would teach the language as best they knew and the children ended up growing up with exactly the kind of limited number of grammatical devices available to them, just as you describe for Mark. Considering what we see in Revelation, I might suggest that could very well be part of the reason that Mark & John’s Greek is so “rough” or “basic.”
This couldn’t be the whole story, of course, but it seems like a reasonable possibility as part.
>> I need to add a caveat based on a conversation with Carl today. Writing in “bad” Koine does not mean that a writer lacks style, it just means that it is unique to him rather than representative of broader Koine usage. See below on being in a league by yourself.
Or at least to the record of the Koine usage we have available to us… Perhaps it could be representative of a class of speakers from which wewe don’t have a lot of written representation? Just playing devil’s advocate here… 🙂
Sorry to ask this, Steve, but for a layman, can you explain what GAR is, as in:
“I axed an example from the grammar regarding the use of GAR in Mark.”
Thanks