Addendum: Lavender’s Response…
The specific document to which I am responding no longer seems to be online. For quite while, Lavender's site, Crisispub.com, was offline, but is now back. Therefore the link below is to the website generally, and not the document in question. If he puts his "Response" back online, I'll post a link to it.
I note that “Dr.” Lavender has written a response to my review of his work on Greek Grammar and Syntax (which he now promises as a forthcoming hardcopy book). He very politely includes a link to this original review above, allowing the reader to compare his responses with what I have written. I am glad he has done so: any interested reader may then see that he fails to answer nearly every argument that I have made. I am not going to answer his comments in detail here, except to note that he has communicated even more clearly his lack of ability with the Greek language. I feel that my earlier evaluation of his work has been thoroughly validated, and anyone with more than an elementary knowledge of Greek will almost certainly agree. Below I interact with a couple of points to support this assertion, and then plan to find better things to do with my time.
Lavender writes the following, in response to my observation about his claims for the middle voice of επικαλησεται (epikalēsetai)in Rom 10:13:
Some Calvinists attempt to circumvent the true nature of the middle voice: It is claimed in The Lavender Review, “By the time the NT is written, the middle voice has all but dropped out except in a few ‘frozen’ forms.” [See Analytical Concordance of the Greek New Testament. I counted about 58 constructions.] On “epikaleo, Bauer reminds us that the middle voice is simply used to mean ‘appeal to a higher authority.’”
Now, notice that he doesn’t answer my argument, which is about the meaning or usage of the middle voice: he simply states that I have discounted the “true nature” of it and that he has counted about 58 constructions using the middle voice (I assume he means verbs using middle forms). Neither does he answer the lexicographical evaluation made by Bauer (BAGD, sub loc.).
Now, my point was that in Hellenistic Greek (of which Koine is certainly a part) the middle voice in the reflexive sense that we sometimes see it used in classical Greek has largely disappeared. Even in classical Greek, the middle is used when the action of the verb is “in the interest of” the subject, and to translate it “do for oneself” (where “do” can be any verb) is often an over-translation: the specific manner of the interest is normally communicated by context in English.
Chamberlain puts it thus:
The
middle voice calls special attention to the subject, but does not indicate the
particular thing about the subject which is emphasized. The context must do that…. Commentators and
translators often make unnecessary difficulty for themselves by assuming that
the primary meaning of the middle voice is reflexive. An Exegetical Grammar of the Greek New Testament, (Grand Rapids:
Baker, 1979 [reprint MacMillan 1941 edition]), p. 81.
Carl W. Conrad has an interesting take on the concept of voice in Greek that incorporates much of the more recent research on the subject. I am not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, but he includes a great deal of helpful information:
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/NewObsAncGrkVc.pdf
Even more incredibly was this response to my criticism that he had misunderstood the syntax of Rom 9:11:
Eklogēn, the
accusative object, is made the object of katV rather than the object of the verb menę. Prepositions do not take objects in Greek
He supports this with the following reference:
“Prepositions do not govern cases or ‘take objects.’
They help substantives to express their relation to verbs or other parts of
speech. They mark the direction and position of the action expressed by the
verb. For instance in the sentence fe,rei li,qouj
eivj to.n oi=kon [He is carrying the stones
into the house] the preposition helps the noun mark the limit of the action of
the verb” (Ray Summers, Essentials of New
Testament Greek, § 25, (3).
Summers here appears to be following the same line of
reasoning as that found in Chamberlain, p. 112.
Both writers are concerned with the historical development of the
preposition as an adverb (frequent in Homer, much rarer in the Attic, and only
once in the NT, 2 Cor
I am grateful to Lavender for alerting me to this line of reasoning, to which previously I had not been exposed, since I had never used any grammar which employed it, but rather those which reflect the “many grammarians” who speak of prepositions “governing” or “taking” cases. Bottom line, I think the rationale is just simply wrong, or at least irrelevant, even though it correctly reflects something about the historical development of the preposition. It is not at all helpful to the student to take this approach. The student does not need to know the historical development of the preposition: he does need to know that απο is always associated with a noun in the genitive case, that εις is always associated with the accusative, and that προς with the dative might mean something different than προς with the accusative.
This means that the use to which Lavender has put this “fact” is completely irrelevant to the argument that I made. The prepositional phrase κατ’ εκλογην (kat’ eklogēn) is used attributively to modify προθεσις (prothesis), not adverbially to modify μενη (menē, which, as an intransitive verb, may take a predicate, but not a direct object). There is nothing contextually to support Lavender’s claim that the “choice” is that of the people rather than God, and every reason to suppose the opposite (I seen no need to repeat my exegesis here).
Since throughout his response all Lavender does is repeat his former arguments in slightly different wording, I see no need for a detailed response. Again, what we simply have here is proof that Lavender 1) does not really know Greek in any meaningful sense, and 2) can selectively quote authorities to make it seem as though he knows what he is talking about. However, I assure the reader, that any one with two or more years of Greek, who has actually passed the coursework at the “B” level of competence or higher, will easily see through the tissue paper arguments which Lavender offers.