Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament

Douglas Estes

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780310525080
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Riferimenti biblici

While there are almost 1000 questions in the Greek New Testament, many commentators, pastors, and students skip over the questions for more 'theological' verses or worse they convert questions into statements to mine them for what they are saying theologically. However, this is not the way questions in the Greek New Testament work, and it overlooks the rhetorical importance of questions and how they were used in the ancient world.

Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament is a helpful and thorough examination of questions in the Greek New Testament, seen from the standpoint of grammatical, semantic, and linguistic analysis, with special emphasis on their rhetorical effects. It includes charts, tools, and lists that explain and categorize the almost 1000 questions in the Greek New Testament. Thus, the user is able to go to the section in the book dealing with the type of question they are studying and find the exegetical parameters needed to understand that question.

Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament offers vibrant examples of all the major categories of questions to aid the reader in grasping how questions work in the Greek New Testament. Special emphasis is given to the way questions persuade and influence readers of the Greek New Testament.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Why study questions in the Greek New Testament? Aren’t biblical exegetes looking for answers, not questions, when they study the New Testament? Aren’t the many powerful statements enough? The answer to these questions lies in our desire to interpret faithfully and accurately the Greek New Testament to the best of our ability — and not just the statements, but the questions too. This book will help you to understand and interpret the questions that the New Testament asks in a whole new way.

It is said that in order to find the answer to something, someone must first know the question that needs to be asked. The difficulty for most readers of the Greek New Testament is that they are not prepared to understand the questions. This is because their training, up to now, has been in understanding the statements of the New Testament (NT). This book will equip you to better think through what is being asked in the nearly one thousand questions found throughout the Greek New Testament (GNT).¹

Whether readers of the NT realize it or not, it is as much the questions in the NT as the statements that make such a great impact on readers:

• “What is truth?”	JOHN 18:38
• “What do you seek?”	JOHN 1:38A
• “Who are you, Lord?”	ACTS 9:5
• “Who is like the beast?”	REV 13:4
• “Where then is boasting?”	ROM 3:27A
• “Do you speak Greek?”	ACTS 21:37B

These are just a few examples of questions in the NT that influence the reading of the NT. They influence the theology of the text, but they also influence the life of the reader through their persuasiveness. Thus, we must take care not to underestimate the importance of the questions in the NT for reading the NT. They are included in the NT for a reason — and now, thanks to modern linguistics and related disciplines, we have an opportunity to interpret them with greater skill and acuity than ever before.

Questions Greatly Affect the Meaning of the Text

Imagine for a moment that you were reading a book where someone cut every seventh sentence out of the book. Would you be able to understand the book? Yes. But would you understand or appreciate the book in the same way as you would as if all the sentences were included? No. Those extra sentences — even if they only make up 15% of the book — really make a big difference. In the GNT, questions make up about 15% of the sentences. Therefore, when we read the NT without understanding the questions, we are like the reader who skips over every seventh sentence in the book. Many of the important theological ideas developed in Scripture occur in proximity to, or in response to, a question. As a result, it is difficult to appreciate those ideas when the neighboring sentences are not fully included in the interpretation.

In the study of the NT, readers have overlooked the importance of questions. This problem has gone on for centuries, slowly worsening over time since the end of the patristic age. It is a problem that is prevalent today. We can illustrate this numerically. In the GNT, there are approximately sixty-eight optatives, and most GNT grammars take the time to cover this (unusual and interesting) grammatical phenomenon.² In contrast, there are nearly one thousand direct questions in the GNT, for which little is said in most Greek grammars. In fact, 8,650 words make up the questions in the GNT. For us to interpret those words correctly, we must understand them through the logic of questions, not the logic of statements. If we are unable to understand them as questions, then there is a large gap in our interpretation.

Questions Give a Whole New Perspective on the Text

Questions have a different logic than statements (propositions). That is, the way a person thinks about a question is different from the way a person thinks about a proposition. Questions, when interpreted as questions, give a whole new perspective on the GNT because they make the reader think with question logic instead of proposition logic. The difficulty for most readers of the GNT today is that their training only included approaches to the text using alethic logic (the thinking behind propositions).³ Gaining experience in the use of erotetic logic (the thinking behind questions) allows the exegete to approach the text in a whole new way. Instead of constantly thinking about what the text is saying, the interpreter with a background in erotetic logic can also think more precisely about what the text is asking.

This plays out in important areas of interpretation for the GNT. One of the challenges in interpretation is to relate to others what the text is saying. However, should the interpreter not relate to others what the text is asking? In fact, what is the GNT asking of its readers? What are the characters in the GNT narratives asking each other? What is the text asking of itself? If we can better understand what the GNT is asking of its readers and asking of itself, it will give us a completely new perspective on what it is telling as well. In fact, it will help us to know what questions were asked to begin with that prompted the GNT to tell what it does tell.

Questions Are at the Center of the Rhetoric of the Text

When reading a book, it is not unusual for a reader to read for the most interesting part of the text. Sometimes we readers skip over the details to get to the “good stuff.” This good stuff — in texts such as we find in the GNT — often functions as a rhetorical peak in the text. Often a persuasive or controversial utterance gets the reader thinking. The same thing happens when we read and interpret from the GNT; we gravitate toward the rhetorical peaks, and they heavily influence our reading. For example, we focus heavily on John 3:16 but less so on John 3:17. In the ancient world, however, it was not just statements that readers understood to carry a rhetorical peak but also questions. (Today people recognize this in some forms of communication, such as political speeches, but less so in other forms, such as written texts.) In a highly oral culture, such as the one in which the GNT was originally created and first read, many questions are grouped around the rhetorical peaks in many of its texts. The words of Pilate are a great example of this — he really knew how to ask questions to get the hearer’s attention.

As a result, readers and exegetes of the GNT will want to get to the heart of the important parts of the texts. In order to do that, a better understanding of the logic and the rhetoric of the questions contained within is a must. One reason they are included is to introduce new or controversial information for the reader. Another reason they are included is to persuade the reader in the direction they want the reader to go. As readers, our coming to terms with this new information and persuasion helps us understand the meaningful statements that are embedded nearby.

The study of questions in the GNT is more complex than it may appear at first glance. There are many different types of questions, each type with a distinct logic and rhetoric, and the great variety of types of questions found in as large a body of literature as the GNT points to the potential for tremendous complexity. A parallel situation to the study of questions is the study of prepositions; the complexity of prepositional usage in the GNT is profound.⁴ In this book, we will look at the top thirty-six different question types, distributed among the four major formations for questions. And it won’t be a neat undertaking; each question can fit into more than one type, and most fit into several — which means this book will only start the exegete on the journey toward understanding the logic and rhetoric of the questions in the GNT. In summation, the purpose of this book is to help interpreters understand the logic of questions in the GNT so they can explain the rhetorical (persuasive) effect of these questions in their interpretation of the NT.

A. The Question of Questions

What is a question? This is one question that is hard to answer. Questions are such an everyday part of life and communication that we intuitively know what a question is and how to ask a question, long before we ever know what word we apply to define the act of asking. Within the modern study of language, there are at least eighteen significant answers to the question, “What is a question?”⁵ While it is beyond the scope of this book to try to answer this question with any precision, I will offer a simple working definition: A question is any utterance with interrogative force that asks not says, that always applies some rhetorical effect, and that invites a reply of some sort.⁶ In most Indo-European languages, the question is the communicative act whose primary job is to gain information. Indo-European (IE) is a large family of languages (including Greek, Latin, English, German, French, and Spanish, but not Hebrew) that share many similarities. Sometimes these similarities allow us to look at one language to gain insight into another (close) language in the IE family (a process called comparative linguistics; CDL 88).

If we cannot well define the idea of a question, we can at least give some suggestions as to what it is not. It is not a proposition, statement, or assertion. This doesn’t mean questions can’t assert things or propose things; what it means is that questions are formed primarily with the purpose of doing something different. Even if we cannot well define questions, we can reveal much about the way that they function when they are used by a speaker or writer. We can also show how a question functions within discourse. While we cannot always know when an utterance is a question — instead of a proposition — the surrounding discourse will often provide the reader clues as to what type of utterance one is reading.

A Thought Experiment

Let’s do a thought experiment to consider how deep the bias against questions runs.⁷ As we read the Gospel of John, we are trained to think about the statements that Jesus makes. Some of the most remarked upon declarations in John are any one of “the hour” statements. For example, Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23 NIV). Propositions such as this one are often considered a “peak” of the gospel text and are frequently taken from context and used as a naked proposition (as in the example, “God is love”). These “the hour” statements are critical utterances in John, and they are far more studied and discussed by scholars and readers than, for example, the preceding narrative statement, “Philip went to tell Andrew; Andrew and Philip in turn told Jesus” (John 12:22 NIV). Now for the experiment: How do we really know that John 12:23 is a statement rather than a question? At first blush this question seems ridiculous. Surely we know it is a statement. But how do we know it is a statement? Is it not possible to translate ἐλήλυθεν ἡ ὥρα ἵνα δοξασθῇ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου as “Has the hour come for the Son of Man to be glorified?” It is possible. However, this is not my argument.

In John 2, during the wedding at Cana in Galilee, Jesus’s mother goes to Jesus to tell him that the wine is gone (though the wedding is still going). Jesus responds, “Woman, what do you want with me? My hour has not yet come.” In all modern translations, we read John 2:4b as a proposition where Jesus continues to rebuke his mother after what appears to be a pointed or rude question.⁸ Yet recent research by J. F. Coakley reveals a Syriac tradition going...