Grammatical commentary on acts 20:18–21

Seminaries train preachers to interpret Bible verses by making a more or less word-for-word translation and explaining that this is what the original Greek really means. However since there is not a one-to-one correspondence between English and Greek, the literal translation tool often sheds more distortion than light on the passage. And without the discipline of a method, it often opens room for imagination on how interpreter thinks the Greek works.

The syntax diagram and the unit diagram are better tools to display the entire set of grammatical relations at a glance than the literal translation. There is nothing that the literal translation does that they cannot do better. One of the most helpful tools that seminaries could introduce into exegesis is a simple Greek sentence diagrammer such as the GC is proposing. The diagram is the core of a method that, if followed, helps the exegete get the Greek right.

Since the original GNT is written in good Greek, a translation into clumsy literal English often sounds more like a lawyer talking than Jesus or apostles connecting to the heart. What frequently happens in exegesis by literal translation is that the exegete writes the dictionary meaning of each word and then exegetes the grammar and meaning from his English gloss.

Commentaries are also often based on the same tool, the literal translation, and on exegesis of the English based on word for word imagination, often without regard for Greek idioms that differ from English patterns. Not only individual exegetes but also commentators would improve their clarity by switching from the literal translation tool to the more thorough and explicit diagrams.

Suppose that the exegete is studying the Greek sentence found in Acts 20:18–21,

Suppose that the exegete looks in a commentary and sees the following translation:

(You know) how I served the Lord with great humility and sorrow (in the midst of) the trials that happened to me because of the plots of the Jews, and how I held back nothing that was useful, lest I fail to announce to you and teach you both in public and from house to house, (and how) I testified to both Jews and Greeks about repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus.

This commentary has a grammatical component, and the author likes using grammatical terms. He parses a number of Greek words and gives grammatical relations for some of them. However, without a diagram, the effort is spotty. In particular he has failed to identify the syntax and grammatical relation of μή where he has mistaken its function.

Like many, he thinks of words as individual bricks with their own isolated meaning that are built up into a whole. He knows that μή often means not or lest, and is dissatisfied to see that the translators have not preserved this meaning and wants to correct what he considers a mistake. The not meaning does not seem to fit, so he selects lest.

The commentator may or may not be aware that μή as lest requires a finite verb (which is lacking in the Greek since it clearly modifies an infinitive). In any case he eisegetes one (“fail”) into the verse because the English lest requires one, even though “fail” is missing from the original. The commentator is a literalist, and supplying ellipses is generally against his policy, but here he is inconsistent. If he had gone through the discipline of diagramming the Greek, he would have become aware that it does not support his translation.

The self confidence of commentators in their own opinion and in the correctness of their assumptions is astonishing in view of lack of confirming evidence from other translators, but this is typical of experts.  This tendency of grammatical experts to rely on their opinions would be corrected if they submitted to a formal process like diagramming and finding precedents in grammatical constructions as supplied by the GC.

Smyth in 2739 calls this μή a redundant or sympathetic μή used on the infinitive with verbs of a negative meaning such as deny or avoid. It is part of an idiom. This information is what the commentator should have provided to help the reader. The appropriate response is to ignore it in translation. However, some grammatical experts rely on their English intuition rather than knowledge of Greek language patterns.

—Dennis Kenaga, April 2018