Search Help Needed for Relative Negative Construction

Kenneth Neighoff
Kenneth Neighoff Member Posts: 2,625 ✭✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

In BI163 Mike Heiser, in regards to John 9:3 states, 

"


“Jesus answered, ‘It was not’ ”—there is a negative word; the word “not” is a negative. “ ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but”—that’s the Greek word alla—“but that”—there’s another Greek word there, hina—“but that (all’ hina) the works of God might be displayed in him.”


What we have here in Greek is we have a negative word, a negator, followed by alla, followed by hina. It’s not a very common string of words, and it does have grammatical meaning. There are six of these in John, nine more in the rest of the Greek New Testament. And it’s important because grammarians have taken note of this specific string. They’ve given it a name. They call it the “relative negative.” It’s often used to catch these expressed statements about reality where the first part of the statement, the negated part, is not real. But the next part of the statement is indeed the case. It is indeed the reality."


Michael S. Heiser, BI163 Problems in Bible Interpretation: Difficult Passages III, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019).

I have been trying to replicate this search to find the 15 occurrences.  I have come up with this for my search string-  @TN WITHIN 10 WORDS root:αλλος WITHIN 10 WORDS lemma:ἵνα in THGNT

This search finds 63 passages.  I can go through them to try to narrow it down to 15, but was wondering how to narrow the search string to find them.

Heiser lists John 1:8, 1:31, and 11:51 (I think it ought to be 11:52) and John 9:3.

Any help would be appreciated.

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