Search Help Needed for Relative Negative Construction
In BI163 Mike Heiser, in regards to John 9:3 states,
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“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.
Comments
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Kenneth Neighoff said:
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.
Assuming the alla and hina need to be adjacent (which seems to match the set of verses you mention), you can refine the search to:
@TN BEFORE 5 WORDS lemma:ἀλλά BEFORE 1 WORDS lemma:ἵνα
But without any more guidance on how to relate the negator to this pair of words I don't see how the search could be refined any further
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Thanks Graham
The search string you provided finds 10 verses, Heiser states 15, 6 in John and 9 more in the NT. I wish he would of cited one outside of John.
I will send time combing through my search results and the search string you provided and see what I can come up with. Maybe Keep Smiling 4 Jesus will see this post and offer some insights. He is the search guru.
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Graham Criddle said:
Assuming the alla and hina need to be adjacent (which seems to match the set of verses you mention), you can refine the search to:
@TN BEFORE 5 WORDS lemma:ἀλλά BEFORE 1 WORDS lemma:ἵνα
Expanding proximity search some finds 14 verses:
@TN BEFORE 9 WORDS "lemma:ἀλλά lemma:ἵνα"
Expanding search some more finds 40 verses:
(@BN OR @TN) BEFORE 9 WORDS root:αλλος BEFORE 9 WORDS root:ινα
Screen shot does not show Mark 4:22 & Mark 14:49 results in the second search.
Kenneth Neighoff said:Heiser states 15, 6 in John and 9 more in the NT.
In John 15, verse 16 has the first occurrence of root:αλλος in SBLGNT (and Metzger's Textual Commentary does not mention ἀλλά in John 15) so 15,6 in John is puzzling.
Keep Smiling [:)]
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Thanks KS4J
Is it possible to further limit a search In this way- The examples Heiser points out are answers following a question. Is it possible to make the search string after the question mark in the Greek text.
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