Fortigurn wrote: Wallace is a professional Greek scholar who can articulate the rule in far better detail than myself. It is more important for you to read him than to read me. Anything I write will be dismissed as the view of a 'cultist' in any case. Having said which, I have already summed up in my own words how this rule applies. You just haven't read my post.
Yes I read your post - but for those who do not wish to read the enitre Wallace paper should heed his Conclusion on the matter stated in this source by Wallace, even you Mr. Fortigurn at the end of this page frame:
Conclusion: Daniel B. Wallace , Th.M., Ph.D.
Source:
http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=1496
Although Granville Sharp lacked the erudition of a lettered savant, he had an authentically visceral sense about the structure of language. This intuition, fueled by an unquenchable piety, enabled him to be the first to articulate a genuine feature of the language which spans the constellation graecae from the sublime elegance of the Attic philosophers to the mundane and hasty scribblings of nameless masses in the vulgar papyri.
Calvin Winstanley's counter-examples, borne no doubt of great industry, served their purpose well. Thomas Fanshaw Middleton might never have devoted so much space to Sharp's canon had Winstanley's illustrations not been so challenging.217 And to Middleton we owe a debt of gratitude for raising the stakes, for giving a measure of linguistic sophistication to the articulation of Sharp's principle. These three—Sharp, Winstanley, Middleton—more than the whole company of combatants that would follow have put real meat on the table, for they all produced examples. While others contented themselves with linguistic sophistry or theological prejudice (as in the case of Winer on one side and a legion of well-meaning scholars on the other), this trio of Englishmen virtually alone anchored the discussion to the actual data.
In particular, Winstanley produced four classes of exceptions to Sharp's rule: generic singulars, translation Greek (one illustration), several substantives in the construction (one illustration), and patristic usage. Our research has turned up more examples for the first and third categories, as well an instance of a fifth (ordinal numerals). Yet even Winstanley admitted the general validity of Sharp's rule in the language. The emerging conviction of this paper—albeit based on partial data—is that the five classes of “exceptions” can be readily explained on sound linguistic principles. These exceptions in fact help to reveal the semantic depth of Sharp's rule, even to the extent that it is much more than a general principle.
Three final comments will conclude this essay. First, although the restatement of Sharp's rule addresses all the exceptions, the sampling of Greek writing examined for this paper was but a small drop in the bucket. Rough estimates suggest that less than four percent of the more than 57 million words of extant Greek writings218 were investigated. Only extreme naﶥt頯r bald arrogance would permit us to shut our eyes to the possibility of other counter-examples in the remaining ninety-six percent. At the same time, it must be admitted that numerous examples have been produced which tell the same monotonous story: Sharp's rule is valid.
Second, the other side of the coin is that the more classes of exceptions there are, the less Occam's razor can be invoked. The rule, even as Sharp stated it, was complex enough to be ignored or forgotten very quickly by opponents and proponents alike.
If our restatement of the rule is a compounding of that complexity, rather than a clarification of the need for it, one has to wonder how a non-native Greek speaker could have perceived such subtle nuances. At the same time, the fact that all of the exceptions fit into a small number of carefully defined categories seems to be eloquent testimony that Occam's razor retains its cutting edge. There is indeed a tension between linguistic formulation and empirical evidence, between science and history. With historico-literary documents, absolute proof is an ignis fatuus. But the burden of proof is a different matter; demonstrating this is quite achievable. This brings us to our third point.
In part, this paper was an attempt to investigate Winstanley's evidence (as well as other, more synchronic evidence) and deal with it on a more sure-footed, linguistic basis. Our restatement of Sharp's rule is believed to be true to the nature of the language, and able to address all classes of exceptions that Winstanley raised. The “Sharper” rule is as follows:
In native Greek constructions (i.e., not translation Greek), when a single article modifies two substantives connected by kaiv (thus, article-substantive-kaiv-substantive), when both substantives are (1) singular (both grammatically and semantically), (2) personal, (3) and common nouns (not proper names or ordinals), they have the same referent.
This rule, as stated, covers all the so-called exceptions. Further, even the exceptions do not impact the christologically significant passages in the NT, for the semantic situation of Titus 2:13 and 2 Pet 1:1 is outside the scope of Winstanley's counter-illustrations.
History is filled with biting ironies. The debate over Sharp's rule over the past two centuries has revealed one of them. As industrious as the efforts of the Englishman Winstanley were to dislodge Sharp's rule, his volume—which was filled with counter-examples—had little impact. It took one cavalier footnote, whose substance was only theological innuendo, from a continental man to dislodge Sharp's rule. Georg Benedict Winer, the great NT grammarian of the nineteenth century, in this instance spoke outside of his realm, for he gave an unsubstantiated opinion based on a theological preunderstanding. Yet this single footnote largely brought about the eclipse of understanding of Sharp's rule.
Friend and foe alike have unwittingly abused the canon, with the result that scores of NT passages have been misunderstood.
Winer's opinion notwithstanding, solid linguistic reasons and plenty of phenomenological data were found to support the requirements that Sharp laid down. When substantives meet the requirements of Sharp's canon, apposition is the result, and inviolably so in the NT. The canon even works outside the twenty-seven books and, hence, ought to be resurrected as a sound principle which has overwhelming validity in all of Greek literature.
Consequently, in Titus 2:13 and 2 Pet 1:1 we are compelled to recognize that, on a grammatical level, a heavy burden of proof rests with the one who wishes to deny that “God and Savior” refers to one person, Jesus Christ.
-
-
-