Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament: An Essential Reference Resource for Exegesis

Preface

Like our world, the world of the Greek New Testament is one that is full of questions. This book tries to understand these questions and take the exegete a little further down the road in their understanding of these questions. Thus, this book is more of a beginning than an end. In this book, I have not tried to be exhaustive in cataloguing and categorizing every question in the Greek New Testament. The reason for this is both practical and philosophical. Practically, there are too many questions with too many unique features for just one book. Philosophically, the idea of exactly identifying and categorizing a question goes against what it means to ask a question. There are always new logical angles and rhetorical effects for a reader to discover in questions asked. I also have purposefully limited the study to the questions in the New Testament and have not interacted (much) with questions in the Septuagint or other texts of Classical and Koine Greek. I believe that these kinds of investigations would be profitable, but they were beyond the scope of this work.

The reason for writing this book was simple: questions represent a numerically significant but largely overlooked feature of the Greek New Testament (GNT). Questions also play a much more important role in ancient discourse than modern readers assume. This book hopes to begin to address the imbalance. Even if the reader is not passionate about questions, I hope that at the least this will expose the reader to bigger questions about the style, discourse features, rhetoric, and aesthetics of the GNT — to move away from flat readings that are so common.

In this book, we explore twenty-eight linguistic features of question asking, the four major formations of questions, and thirty-six question types. We do so through more than forty in-depth case studies and hundreds of detailed examples. This book is by purpose and design interdisciplinary: I freely sample from such diverse fields as ancient and modern rhetoric, ancient Greek literary and grammatical theory, argumentation theory, linguistics, historiography, conversation analysis, speech act theory, psychology, and many more. Readers may notice, though, that the organization for this book is different from the organization of my previous book on questions, The Questions of Jesus in John (Leiden: Brill, 2013). This does not reflect a change in my thinking about questions as much as it has to do with the specific goals for each book. In The Questions of Jesus in John, my goal was solely to look at Jesus’s questions in one Gospel, and the five categories I created for organizing those questions moved the reader from the less rhetorical in quality to the more rhetorical in quality. Those categories were descriptive categories, and while I could have used them in this book, I felt that the more exhaustive nature of this book required a less descriptive and more taxonomic approach to questions. Unlike my previous book, this book is intended as a ready reference for Greek exegesis; therefore, my hope is that this organizational style will make it easier for readers to get out of it what they need more quickly than if I had retained my descriptive categories. I have divided the questions of the GNT up into their more native categories as driven by their syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. I have tried to keep footnotes to an absolute minimum, choosing instead to rely on targeted bibliography sections at the end of each section.

I am thankful for the late Verlyn Verbrugge and for his desire to see this research reach a larger audience. Though he was unable to see the finished product, his early engagement with this book was both helpful and encouraging. The rest of the Zondervan team, including Ryan Pazdur, Nancy Erickson, Christopher Beetham, and Joshua Kessler were wonderful to work with as always. I am also thankful for the late Douglas R. Estes Jr., who also was unable to see the finished product. In so many ways, he made me the person I am today.

One does not get far in life without others who have believed in, supported, helped, prayed, and blessed one’s work. While there are far more people to whom I owe gratitude than can be listed here, I name but a few: Nadine Estes; Eric and Morgan Estes; Jason, Su-Anne, Hudson, and Molly Wills Estes; David Estes; Ruth Estes; Ken and Emily Mears; Jason and Gretchen Woods; Matt and Jaime Reed; CJ and Jennifer Young; Jed and Crystal Smith; Sandy Kaiser and the rest of my Mesa staff; Vivian and Ross Oliver; Chuck and Marivic Mora, plus all the wonderful folks from BVC; Gary and Mary Appel; Charles Cubby and Lillie Boothe; Fred and Nita Boothe; Mary Ann and Ron Poythress; Terrell and Linda Boothe; Diann Cook; David Frees; all the folks that were a part of S2; and Joshua Paul Smith. Above all, my deepest gratitude goes to my children, Wyatt, Bridget, Violet, and Everett, and to my marvelous wife, Noël. Nawapenda na barikiwa. It is to my sweet Violet that I dedicate this book.

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:

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 back to as early as the second century that reads John 2:4b as a question instead of a declarative due to the presence of an early Syriac form of punctuation for polar questions.⁹ Thus, it appears likely that some early Syriac Christians heard Jesus’s response to his mother as Woman, what do you want with me? Has my hour still not come?¹⁰ If we were to read Jesus’s statement as a question today, it would change the timbre of the passage; rather than rebuking his mother, Jesus would be using a standard multiple-question combination common in the GNT (§5.D.1) to persuade his mother to think through the implication of asking him to do something about the lack of wine. A question here would also give the reader pause — was the mother of Jesus more aware of Jesus’s purpose than readers assume? Was Jesus asking her blessing to move forward with his Father’s plan? Substituting an interrogative force for an assertive force brings out new shades of meaning and depth of relationship between Jesus and his mother. The dramatic quality and persuasive feel of the passage increases substantially. Other overtones begin to emerge. End of the thought experiment.

B. The Use of Questions

Questions are as primitive and embryonic a feature of language as is any other feature of language. Long before there were participles or predicate nominatives, there were questions. In fact, questions may be one of the only aspects of language that is prephonological and, arguably, prephonetic. Human children know how to ask questions without any instruction at the earliest ages and before any formal language develops. Questions are holophrastic (CDL 212), which means that they can be asked in abbreviated form with only one word: Food? is asked and understood universally. Therefore, to fully grasp a language, a speaker or reader must grasp questions as well as statements.

Questions play an important role in texts such as the GNT for reasons that are often overlooked. Because the NT is often consulted for what it says — and often poorly, in snippets — the NT is often seen as a book of answers or information or facts. Long before Wikipedia and its revolving buffet of factoids, modern readers started searching the NT to discover truths that they could apply to their lives. It was all very modern, factual, rational, didactic, and neat. However, the NT writers were not very interested in modern, factual, rational, didactic, and neat truths. They were very much interested in showing, persuading, encouraging, reasoning, and warning the reader. This is where questions come in — while propositions excel at communicating truth claims, questions excel at reasoning and persuading. In fact, while logic and reason in modernity focus on propositions, asking questions is truly the first and foremost theory of reasoning.¹¹ Thus, if reasoning and debate are to occur, questions must be a major component of the discourse.

What a strange world it would be if language only consisted of assertions (and commands and exclamations, even more so). There would be no way to engage another speaker other than talking at them. Long before the GNT, the writer of the book of Job used questions to establish the facts of the matter (1:7 – 12), to launch an argument (4:2), and to dispute ironically with a reader (41:1 – 7). Long before the GNT, questions were a cornerstone of local Greek civic discourse, occupying the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle and becoming a staple of oral and rhetorical presentations.¹² It is, and as far as we can tell always has been, a widely used language pattern in all forms of human communication.

Human communication is highly dialogical — people don’t seem to be as interested in speaking to themselves as they are in speaking to other humans. Questions are the form of human communication wherein people are able to identify a need they have, and share this need with other people in the hopes that this need will be met. Often this need or lack is informational, but sometimes it is an action. Thus, people ask questions when they want to know something and sometimes when they want someone to do something. In either case, the question of one person directly intersects the behavior of another person: either the person asked will be persuaded to impart something or to agree to do something. Therefore, in all cases questions attempt to persuade a hearer to change their next course of action. While it is true that all communication is in essence persuasive,¹³ questions occupy a special persuasive role in engaging hearers. As we know from experience, asking for something is far more persuasive (in most cases) than simply making statements about things.¹⁴

To accomplish this special rhetorical role in information exchange and request for behavior change in the broader scope of everyday communication, there must be many different kinds of questions with many different persuasive effects and many different intentional outcomes. The near limitless situations in which one person needs to engage another person require near limitless types of questions. One important writer in the history of the study of questions is Marcus Quintilian (AD 35 – ca. 95), a rhetorician and lawyer. With his practice in these areas, Quintilian understood that there was an infinite variety of question types.¹⁵ Having said this, readers may begin to wonder how this fits in with the two types of questions that English speakers are most familiar with: informational and rhetorical. As we will discuss extensively below, these two categories are not really categories; they are broad terms that have become almost meaningless. All questions — by their nature as questions — are both informational and rhetorical. The concept of the rhetorical question is a late invention; there is no similar all-inclusive category in thinkers such as Quintilian or in the rhetorical and grammatical manuals from antiquity.¹⁶ So as to prepare the reader for later chapters: there is no such thing in ancient Greek (or the GNT) as a rhetorical question. To be more accurate, there is no such thing as a rhetorical question as all questions are rhetorical to some degree. In fact, what English readers overlook the most is that rhetorical questions ask just as much as informational questions ask, as all questions are informational to some degree.¹⁷ To say that a question is a rhetorical question is to say nothing at all about the question.

In English grammar, one of the primary characteristics of the rhetorical question is that they do not seek an answer. This perspective fundamentally misunderstands the act of asking a question. All questions are asked — and this includes questions asked in ancient texts — for someone to give some answer somehow. When dealing with rhetorical questions, there is a difference between saying rhetorical questions don’t seek an answer and saying rhetorical questions don’t need an explicit answer. When asked, the questions most often labeled as rhetorical questions are answered internally or are intentionally inapposite (§4.M) or create an i-predicament (§2.C.7) or one of any other rhetorical effects; hence, they do not encourage an explicit answer (or one may embarrass oneself by replying, in some cases). If there is really no such thing as a rhetorical question, why do we so quickly label a question rhetorical in the GNT? Besides our training in English grammar, it is because the familiarity of the Bible coupled with the familiarity for how one is supposed to read the texts of the Bible means that most readers early on are pragmatically conditioned to see the texts in the Bible as telling and never asking. The result is that we are not actually reading 15% of the NT.

Throughout this book, we will refer regularly to two primary qualities that shape the use of questions in language. These two qualities are the logic of questions and the rhetoric of questions. For the purpose of this book, we chose these two qualities to serve as umbrella terms to help the reader understand the two most important qualities for the way questions work within discourse. (1) The logic of a question covers how the writer forms the question and how that question works within its grammatical-linguistic constraints. So for example, when we encounter a question that starts with a π-word, we will see that its formation and logic will be (most likely) built around the π-word. The logic of the question indicates what answer it seeks or information it requests. (2) The rhetoric of a question encompasses the way in which the question affects the surrounding narrative context as well as the effect the question might have on the reader. To be successful in interpreting a question in the New Testament, both of these two qualities must be recognized and addressed — one cannot simply jump to the rhetorical effect of a question without coming to terms with its internal logic. There are other qualities that questions possess beyond these two, of course, but I have found that these two are the most useful for an effective assessment of the meaning of a question within the GNT.

Key Bibliography

Allen, Understanding, 437 – 48; Brueggemann, Jeremiah’s Use, 358 – 74; Johnson, Rhetorical Question; Kuntz, Form, Location, and Function, 121 – 42; Moshavi, Positive Rhetorical Question, 253 – 73; Moshavi, Two Types, 32 – 46; Porter, Argument, 655 – 77; Watson, Corinthians, 301 – 18; Wellman, Socratic Method.

C. Questions in the GNT

Before we turn to study the questions of the GNT in detail, we will start with an overview of these questions to gain a better idea of the bigger picture. By my count, there are approximately 980 direct questions in the GNT. This number is not a firm number, as there are several questions we include that may not be questions, and it is possible that some sentences were originally meant to be primarily interrogative in force but have, over time, lost their sense of interrogativity and are now read as propositions (e.g., John 2:4b). My estimation is that the exact number of questions could vary by as much as ±3% from our standard number of 980. However, we will use this number as a base on which to standardize our overview.

The first statistic we address in understanding the makeup of interrogativity in the GNT is the gross distribution of questions, meaning the raw number of questions per text. The gross distribution of questions in the GNT is presented in the chart at the top of page 26. As we can see, the gross distribution of questions in the GNT is illuminating in at least one aspect: Some texts are heavy in questions and some texts have few or no questions. On the one hand, all four Gospels, Acts, Romans, 1 – 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Hebrews, and James seem to have a sizable number of questions included in their texts. On the other hand, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, 2 John, 3 John, and Jude have no questions in their texts! (Is this book unusable for interpreting those books? No, because as a primary communicative force, interrogativity can be found in nonquestions also; §2.C.1). Evaluating this information reveals several interesting points:

• Genre is a strong indicator of question use. All four Gospels are heavily dependent on the use of questions. Each of the four Gospels is a narrative, with strong interest in one protagonist and a great deal of direct discourse. Acts is also narrative, though it has less focus on one protagonist and less focus on direct discourse (choosing instead longer speeches), and — perhaps therefore — fewer questions than the Gospels. Among the letters, longer letters with more complex issues seem to possess more questions, whereas the very short writings seem to have few or no questions. Interestingly, Revelation does have a few questions, all of which occur during heavenly conversations and none of which are found in the epistolary sections. The relationship between genre and question usage is not limited to the GNT, as it is a notable feature throughout IE texts (see also §2.D.5).¹⁸

• Questions are an important feature of narrative. One important property of narrative, especially narrative with direct discourse, is verisimilitude (the quality of being lifelike). Since questions are an important feature of human communication, and since good narrative will portray human communication accurately, good narrative will make good use of questions.

• Questions are an important feature of sustained rhetorical texts. Rhetorical texts, or texts with a great degree of rhetorical emphasis and features, can employ questions effectively. It stands to reason that longer rhetorical texts are more likely to use a variety of rhetorical features, including questions, with more frequency and variety, than shorter, to-the-point rhetorical texts. In the GNT, this seems to be the case; longer, more complex letters with notable rhetorical development appear to make greater use of questions than shorter, less complex letters with much less rhetorical development. This is a general statement that deserves greater investigation at another time.

• Questions are a weak indicator of authorship. Authorship is of keen interest in the study of the GNT, especially among the various letters. However, the gross distribution of questions in the GNT does not appear to speak conclusively to this issue. The fact that 1 – 2 Corinthians possess a great deal of questions and 1 – 2 Thessalonians do not could be an argument for/against certain authorship, much in the same way as 1 John possesses some questions and 2 and 3 John possess none. However, questions are such a common and general feature of human communication that the divide between use/nonuse of questions seems much more distinguishable between genres rather than authors.

Next, we consider the breakdown of questions in the GNT by their formation. In IE languages, there are essentially four different ways that questions are formed: polar questions (§3.A), variable questions (§3.B), alternative questions (§3.C), and set questions (§3.D). In addition, there are also a few questions that are compounds or deviations of the four basic formations, and we lump those together as composites (§3.E). Since composite questions base their formations on the basic four, they are not distinguished as such in this chart. The breakdown of questions in the GNT by formation is presented in the chart at the top of page 28. As we can see, the texts of the GNT use variable questions and polar questions the most, and alternative and set questions far less. This breakdown conforms with common, direct discourse expectations for IE languages. Among the top two, variable questions are more prevalent than polar questions. While we want to be careful drawing conclusions from this data, we can offer a few tentative suggestions:

• Questions in the GNT favor thought-provoking forms. Variable questions, by their nature, gravitate toward information gathering and encouraging the reader to think deeply.

• Questions in the GNT call for decision making. Polar questions, by their nature, gravitate toward calls for decision and action. As a notable subset of questions in the GNT, the polar questions within do call for some response among audience(s).

• Questions in the GNT do not favor intricate wordplays. In a general way, set questions, alternative questions, and composite questions are less frequent in human communication than variable questions and polar questions due to the unusual situations they create and help maintain. The fact that there are as many of these forms of questions in the GNT as there are means the texts do not shy away from complex situations, but it is not the norm for these texts, either.

When we consider the breakdown of questions by formation within the individual texts of the GNT, interesting features emerge. For example, the book of Revelation contains only one type of question formation, the variable question. Although the gross number of questions is small, it is still statistically interesting. In conclusion, this overview to the questions in the GNT is valuable for general considerations but should not be used for drawing hard conclusions.

Key Bibliography

Babbitt, Grammar, §570 – 81; Estes, Questions, 33 – 56; Goodwin, Greek Grammar, §1600 – 1606; McKay, New Syntax, §11; Morwood, Oxford Grammar, 161 – 67; Thompson, Usage, 3 – 5.

A Note on Questions in Modern English Versions of the New Testament

In this book, we work from the presupposition that there are ±980 direct questions in the GNT. However, if we were to search modern English versions of the New Testament for questions, we would come up with a slightly different number than 980 and would also come up with a slightly different number for different versions. There are several reasons for this, but the most basic is that different translators have different criteria for rendering a sentence as a question or as a statement. Unfortunately, as with any translation process, some of these criteria are more harmful to questions than others. One of the greatest weaknesses in this process is when an English translation (unintentionally) changes the logic of a question, or worse, renders a question as a statement (which forces the unassuming reader to use alethic rather than erotetic logic to decode the utterance). For example, Hebrews 12:9 is sometimes translated as a statement rather than as a question:

εἶτα τοὺς μὲν τῆς σαρκὸς ἡμῶν πατέρας εἴχομεν παιδευτὰς καὶ ἐνετρεπόμεθα· οὐ πολὺ [δὲ] μᾶλλον ὑποταγησόμεθα τῷ πατρὶ τῶν πνευμάτων καὶ ζήσομεν;

HEBREWS 12:9

• We have all had fathers here on earth who disciplined us, and we respected them. So it is even more important that we accept discipline from the Father of our spirits so we will have life. (NCV)

• Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! (NIV)

In doing this, these English versions replace the original question asking with statement telling, which alters the original logic of the utterance for the English reader. The original question logic is more along the lines of:

• In fact, we have had human fathers who disciplined us, and we respected them; but will we not obey the spiritual father so much more, and live?

The NCV and NIV make a smoother translation than mine above, but at the expense of removing a question directed at the reader of the letter. For the interpreter of the GNT, we want to come to terms with the internal logic of the utterance as it was made, not as it is interpreted through translation.

Another example of this problem comes in 1 John 2:22:

Τίς ἐστιν ὁ ψεύστης εἰ μὴ ὁ ἀρνούμενος ὅτι Ἰησοῦς οὐκ ἔστιν ὁ Χριστός;

• Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. (NIV)

• And who is a liar? Anyone who says that Jesus is not the Christ. (NLT)

However, if we want to see this question in English with a more accurate question logic, we could render it more like this:

• Who is the liar if not but the one denying that Jesus is the Christ?¹⁹

Here the English translations alter the erotetic logic of the sentence by simplifying the question, which reduces the impact of the original question’s logic.

The issue here is not to quibble over translation strategy, which in my mind is not the issue, but over a change in the internal logic of the verses. In a few cases, it is really going from apples to oranges! The reason why this is a large concern is that the logic and rhetoric of the sentence was changed for the reader during the translation process. Sometimes, in translation, this type of situation is unavoidable; but for the exegete, we are able to restore a closer-to-the-original logic and rhetoric to the sentence. This situation is not common, but we note it at the outset.

Key Bibliography

Cohen, What Is a Question?, 350 – 64; Estes, Questions, 39 – 42; Groenendijk and Stokhof, Studies, 3 – 7; Hagstrom, Questions, 478 – 92; Llewelyn, What Is a Question?, 69 – 85.

D. How to Use This Book

This book is intended as a ready resource and reference for interpreting the questions found in the GNT (and may prove useful in other venues as well, such as the Septuagint or the Greek fathers). It is organized around a grammatical-linguistic approach to the questions within the GNT. In some ways, this book is different than other language resources because it is not flat but presupposes several levels to the study. To make the most of the study, each level should be taken into account by the reader. Therefore, as it is a resource book, the reader may skip around and use this book in whatever order they see fit as long as they understand how these levels work together.

This book utilizes insights from both grammatical studies and linguistic studies to study questions in the GNT. This is somewhat different from the way Koine Greek is often taught today, especially in the beginning stages where most focus is placed on the grammar of the language. However, grammar is but one subset of the larger linguistic enterprise. Grammar examines the morphology and the syntax of a language, whereas linguistics can cover every part of language from phonetics to sociolinguistics (including morphology and syntax). Sometimes scholars refer to linguistics as a science, but it is really no more of a science than grammar; it does tend to be more complicated because it covers larger areas (CDL 269). In order to understand best how questions function in the GNT, we need to expand our area of study to areas outside of grammar (morphology and syntax). With that being said, there is nothing in this book that cannot be understood apart from basic Greek grammar and the application of a little logic. A student does not need to be familiar with linguistics to profit from this book (though some basic knowledge of linguistics would add to the profit). In addition, because this book is about questions and question logic, many of the grammatical and linguistics ideas and terms will only be mentioned in light of the relationship to questions. Therefore, it goes without saying that many of these ideas and terms have different meanings and uses in other areas of grammar and linguistics (for example, polarity in §2.B.8).

Each question type will be broken down into six sections:

When working through the logic and rhetoric of a question in the GNT, it is important not to dislocate the question from its context. Each question in the GNT is an utterance that is one small part of a larger utterance. To extract a question from its context removes the question from its native environment and severs its logical and rhetorical ties meant to offer clues as to the interpretation of the question. While this is true of propositions, this is (if possible) even more true of questions.

1. There are 980 direct questions in the GNT that are either undisputed or largely acknowledged as questions. Beyond this number, there are a number of disputed questions — usually these are sentences that most often appear in modern translations as a statement but for which a scholar has argued somewhere along the way that the sentence is better served being treated as a question. This includes sentences that are formed as statements but may carry interrogative force (something easier to pull off in Greek than English). And beyond that number, there is a multitude of indirect questions that will not be treated in this book but still have some indirect interrogative force that an interpreter needs to account for in the interpretation of the text.

2. E.g., Wallace, Greek Grammar, 480.

3. Alethic logic comes from the Greek ἀλήθεια, which means the quality of being in accord with what is true (BDAG 42). The reason scholars refer to the logic of propositions as alethic logic originates with Aristotle (384 – 322 BC), who has had tremendous influence in this area even up to present day. Aristotle believed the key differentiation between a proposition (ἀπόφανσις) and other types of utterances (e.g., prayers, wishes, questions) was that a proposition could be judged based on its truth content whereas other types of utterances could not (Aristotle, Interpretation 17a1 – 8). We see this reflected in modern debates over statements in the GNT, whether a statement is true or false, whether it was truly made or recreated by an author. Alethic logic is important, but it does not help in interpreting nonpropositional thought (which makes up a considerable part of the GNT).

4. Harris, Prepositions and Theology, 26 – 32; and cf. Bortone, Greek Prepositions, 171 – 94.

5. Estes, Questions, 39 – 42.

6. This is true even of so-called rhetorical questions; see §2.E.

7. For another similar thought experiment on the challenge of discovering questions in the GNT, see Estes, Questions, 7 – 8.

8. The question is not rude, it is phatic; thus it is misunderstood by students (and some commentators) who try to overliteralize the expression without recognizing its pragmatic function (§4.K). A related example would be if a modern American student asked a 19th century English gentleman or gentlewoman, What’s up? It would sound vulgar to their ears; they would be unable to interpret the expression as another form of How are you?

9. Coakley, Early Syriac Question Mark, 211 – 13. Long before Coakley’s discovery, Nigel Turner also wondered whether John 2:4b would be better interpreted as a question, given its place and function in discourse; see Turner, Grammatical Insights, 43; also Zerwick, Biblical Greek, §447.

10. For the use of οὔπω in questions in the GNT, see for example Matt 16:9; Mark 4:40b; 8:17b; 8:21; John 8:57.

11. Hintikka, Halonen, and Mutanen, Interrogative Logic, 295.

12. See for example, Carawan, "Erotesis."

13. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 2.

14. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 9.2.8.

15. Ibid., 9.2.10.

16. Fahnestock, "Quid Pro Nobis," 198.

17. Slot, How Can You Say That?, 85.

18. In a related study, Andreas Willi tested a wide range of syntactical issues across three different text types in Attic Greek. When it came to direct questions, Willi found that the sample passages of Attic historiography had no direct questions, the sample passages of Attic rhetoric had a few direct questions, and the sample passages of Attic narrative-with-direct-discourse had numerous direct questions. While Willi’s analysis is a small sampling, and ours is far more exhaustive, what is most interesting is the noninterrogative tendency of Attic historiography versus the tendency toward some direct interrogativity in Acts. It comes as no surprise that direct discourse in both Attic and Koine contains the most questions. For more details, see Willi, Register Variation, 306 – 8.

19. Here I use if not but as a way to communicate in English the multiple bias words that are well-formed in Greek.

Chapter 2

The Basics of Question Formation

The formation of questions in the GNT proceeds comparably to the formation of questions in most other Indo-European (IE) languages, in that questions only contain a few minor differences in construction that distinguish them from propositions or other types of utterances. In some situations, the difference between the formation of a question and of a proposition will be easy to distinguish, such as when the question begins with an interrogative variable (§2.B.10). However, it can also be at times impossible to clearly know when a sentence in Koine Greek is meant as a question and when it is meant as a proposition. In fact, writers of the GNT will at times form questions in the exact same way (without syntactical distinction) as they would a similar proposition, which makes identifying questions in the GNT a challenge. In this chapter, we cover numerous factors that affect question formation in the GNT, broken down into sections on where the effect is most felt.

One Positive Thing to Know about Question Formation

One positive thing to know about question formation in the Greek of the NT is that, as a rule, it makes sense and is logical. Furthermore, almost all the questions in the GNT follow a regular logic that is not hard to decipher (once one begins to think through questions as questions). This is great news, because language interpretation is hard enough without a great deal of irregularities making things more difficult. There are a few exceptions, but those are still not that exceptional. The value of this positive is that once one learns how Greek question logic works in the GNT, this logic will also work in the interpretation of the LXX, the Greek Apocrypha, the Greek fathers, and to some degree other texts within the IE language family. As we interpret questions throughout this book using erotetic logic, we will follow the rules for this type of logic even when this leads us to a disagreement with traditional interpretations.

One Negative Thing to Know about Question Types

One negative thing to know about question types in the Greek of the NT is that, as a rule, they resist easy categorization. This is not just a challenge for questions in the GNT — this is true of any attempt to categorize utterances within any natural language. It is the dynamic nature of natural language that resists and works against easy categorization. While the syntactical formations of questions in the GNT are relatively easy to master, the semantic and pragmatic values that need to be discerned from those questions are much more a challenge. It is those parts of interrogative logic that do the most to resist easy categorization. And the more complicated the question, the less easy it is to identify neatly. As a result, many of the questions of the GNT will fit more than one type of question. This is where your role as the interpreter comes in: Even as this book gives a start to understanding the questions in the GNT, there is still the vitally important function of interpretation that you’ll need to apply to these questions in order to determine their primary purpose in biblical context. Knowing the information — acquiring the tools — in this book is only half the step.

When it comes to the basic formation of questions, almost all human languages have some type of indicator(s) for interrogativity. While every language is different, many of the indicators are universal (even if applied differently in different languages). Also, sometimes these indicators are more pronounced in some situations and less pronounced in others. We call these indicators tells, as they are signs of questions in natural language. The tells in natural language for interrogativity are:

• Interrogative force (including intonation/stress/rhythm/prosody)

• Interrogative adverbs/adjectives/pronouns (such as why and when)

• Interrogative particles (such as the discourse particle ἆρα in ancient Greek)

• Positive-negative conjuncted clauses (in certain languages such as Mandarin, or certain formations such as tag questions)

• Subject-verb inversion (common in SVO languages such as English, French)

• Cleft construction for interrogative use (in certain languages such as French)

• Object-pronoun transformation (in certain languages such as Sanskrit)¹

Looking over the list, the question may arise: What about question marks? Because of the