Jesse, solum verba, and the chronic denial of frontier protestantism toward holy things

When untrained radical protestants perceive the need to know Koine Greek in order to defend themselves from textual stupidity, they don't learn to read Greek. They don't try to study the language and its uses and acquire the capacity to read it and discover the manifold textual variants and exceptionally loose grip on exactly what the NT writers are saying. Because they bizarrely think that manuscript variance is suspiciously a misleading symptom of modernism. Even when they spend enough money and time to scratch the surface of the mountain of variation, they dismiss it. After all, their Bible is supposed to be easily read by any believing individual expressing his or her priesthood by plowing the back 40 or nursing the 6th child. (Or, in Marshal's case, just follow some helicopter maintenance guys in what they think.) The serious, seat-of-the-pants radical protestant will lay out a lot of cash, though, to buy English language reference books that deal with common words, phrases, and a beginner's application of grammar. Which, obviously, is not how one can read - or begin to know - any other language as language. Language use is infinitely more complex than a manual published by Baker or Zondervan... or Tyndale House.

Jesse falls, repeatedly, into this beginner's wooden spiked trap. He also willfully chooses to be obtuse to try to make me look stupid. He behaves Trump-like.

Regarding the Annunciation, he quotes me (while unable to face me): “The angel Gabriel doesn’t say ‘Hail, Mary.’ Gabriel says, ‘Chaíre, kecharitōménē!’ ‘Greetings, you‑who‑have‑been‑fully‑graced‑forever.’”

1. And then writes, "This proposed translation is overstated and romanticized. Chaíre simply means “Greetings” or “Rejoice,” a common salutation in Greek letters and encounters."

Right. Probably why I used, as you duplicated, the translation, "Greetings..." Blazingly obtuse, Jesse. We just used the same English word, Mr Overstated and Romanticized.

2. And speaking of using words as pronouns, you-who-are-my-fellow-overstated-and-romanticized-One, participles in Koine Greek are often used as descriptive pronouns. P

articiples in New Testament Greek are often used with a definite article to refer to people, effectively acting as substitutes for pronouns in direct address or description.

Examples:

Matthew 13:16: ὁ παρὰ τὴν ὁδὸν σπαρείς... "the-ones-sown-by-the-path"

John 12:47: ὁ ἐμὲ μὴ ἀκούων... "the-one-hearing" and ὁ δὲ λόγος μου οὐ τηρῶν... "the-one-not-hearing"

Romans 12:14 τοὺς διώκοντας ὑμᾶς... "the-ones-pursuing-you"

Ephesians 1: τοὺς προηλπικότας... "we, who-were-the-first-to-put-our-hope in Christ"

All these participial constructions are used to refer to a person or persons. They are pronouns in function. 

[There are also many cases of using the genitive absolute, when a long participle phrase is used as a pronoun to throw in information about a person which is independent of the normative grammar of the sentence. Such as Matthew 8:1: Καταβάντος δὲ αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τοῦ ὄρους... "And of him having come down from the mountain..."]

Jesus sometimes uses participle structure as a pronouns in direct address:

Matthew 23:37, he directly addresses Jerusalem as ἡ ἀποκτείνουσα τοὺς προφήτας... "the-one-killing the-prophets"

Matthew 25:41, he tells a story in which he will directly address those who did not feed the hungry or  care for the widows, the imprisoned, the foreigner [pay attention, Marshal] as: οἱ κατηραμένοι... [depart from me] "you-who-are-cursed."

This last usage is pertinent, because Jesus is using a perfect, passive, participle in direct address. Exactly how Jesse thinks of the Annunciation greeting because he read a grammar manual. Jesus is directly addressing those who did not care for the oppressed - and by extension did not care for Jesus himself - in the perfect tense: "you-who-were-cursed-once-forever (hence, by their behavior even before this judgement)."

3. The perfect tense is absolutely key. It is the perfect tense that determines that an action has been taken that has permanent character. In 2002, John A. Chapman was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Posthumously. But once awarded, Sergeant John Chapman is forever a Congressional Medal of Honor awardee. In 1993, Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. She will always be a Nobel laureate.

Jesse is quite right that participles are conveying descriptive information. But in the cases of perfect participles, conveyed descriptive information also convert that information into epithets that permanently define a person or persons. But that's just the beginning.

The fact that the perfect tense of οἱ κατηραμένο ("you-who-were-cursed-and-will-permanently-remain-having-been-cursed") is an adjectival participle in structure but used as a substantive serves to INTENSIFY the description as ontological, which greatly expands the meaning of Jesus' words to calling them, "the ones who are the very definition of cursed." The permanent descriptive information is now wholly descriptive definition of who they ARE. So, yes, participles, can be used as pronouns in order to introject extra information onto the person being talked about or talked to, but also in order to fully, holistically define them.

4. Exceptionally, though, here in the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel directly addresses Mary with a greeting not using her name, AND NEITHER USING A DEFINITE ARTICLE TYPICALLY DENOTING THE DESCRIPTIVE FUNCTION OF A PARTICIPLE. Notice that all the above examples use a definite article, which is exactly how a particle is usually used 

But Gabriel is using a structural participle as the 2nd person pronoun, "you". There is no "you-who-have been-once-forever"..." What Gabriel is able to do - having learned Greek far better than Jesse - is to make the description Mary's central referent, even above her name. Luke is using the same effect for us: by calling to her with her ontological status in heaven - for it is God whom the angel represents and whom the actions therefore, the angel is communicating.

Jesse is right that there is no imperative mood as in a verb, as I stated wrongly. But Jesse's problem still remains the perfect tense of kekaritomene: once done and true forever. And in this case, done by God to Mary. Kekaritomene is her being as declared by God, who does not such thing to any other.  

5. Stephen, in Acts 6:8, is full of grace. But not made so once and so forever. Luke is simply saying that is πλήρης χάριτος/pleres charitos... "full of grace." Straitforward description. No pyrotechnics about action and permanence of state or being defined by that. Simply, Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people."

Jesus, too, in John 1:14 is full of grace. But not made so once and so forever. John is simply saying that the Word dwelt among us πλήρης χάριτος/pleres charitos... "full of grace." Straitforward description. No pyrotechnics about action and permanence of state or being defined by that. Simply, full of grace and truth.

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Obviously, if one reads with spiritual wisdom, mature reasoning about an angel of the Lord directly addressing the woman soon to be pregnant with the Son of God and using an exceptionally intensified pronoun in the place of her name, as her name, should really shake our lives and demand concentration.

Who is she? She IS the one God made to be super blessed and graced (1st intensification), forever marked as such (2nd intensification), uniquely so, and the only one in the Christian Bible marked as such (3rd intensification), above everything imaginable. Acting in history, at some point before the Annunciation, perhaps even at her birth (where else?), God made her the most highly graced person and so it is her perpetual state of reality from then on.

She is not Running Bear in a John Wayne movie where "running bear" is a cute epithet tagged on to a child, a name to carry to death. To think this way is simply radical protestant denial of the power of God, the eternal work of the Holy Spirit, and the obedience of the angel of the Lord. And it is ignorant of the Koine Greek language in scriptural action.

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If we cannot believe that God bestowed extraordinary grace on Mary before she bore the incarnation of God in human life…

… then we are not prepared to believe that in a spiritual life of faith God already makes us, also, his purified children.

And not only that. Soon we will even be like Christ. Restored exactly to his image and likeness:

“If you consider that God is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him.

See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure.”