Matthew 14:25

Shirley Rollinson wrote: ↑

January 5th, 2018, 8:55 pm

In Matthew 14:25 Jesus walks ἐπὶ τὴν θάλασσαν - but in the next verse the disciples see him walking ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης - could it be that in the first instance the thought is that he is walking 'towards' them - hence Accusative?

Barry Hofstetter wrote: ↑

January 4th, 2018, 10:13 pm

Several things are suggested here. 1) Prepositions don't easily map from one language to another, in what one would expect from having learned the initial glosses at the beginning level. We were just discussing this in our Latin 4 lit class the other day. 2) Individual authors might use different prepositions to express what seem to us to mean the same thing. Synoptic comparisons might be interesting here. However, the contexts must be parallel for it to be meaningful. What you seem to have done, Jonathan, it to simply seen all the prepositional phrases used with ζάω. Most of the contexts call for radically different prepositional phrases. What you want are contexts which actually use ἐκ and ἐν. Here is one example. In Matthew, Jesus walks ἐπὶ τὴν θάλασσαν, but in Mark, he walks ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης. Same preposition, but Matthew uses the accusative case while Mark uses the genitive. Difference in meaning? I don't think so here -- it's simply that each author has a slightly different sense of how the preposition is used, but context makes it clear that both usages mean the same thing. Does that mean ἐκ and ἐν are the same? I don't think so. ἐκ is often used of giving reason, cause or justification. ἐν may be used of giving the basis or foundation... My point here is that hyper attention must be given to the context to see precisely how the author is using the preposition that he does.