Syntax structure of John 1:3-4

[gwd]

Hello, thank you for making this available. I'm in the process of trying to use GPT as a basis for a commentary for people learning Biblical Greek. (You can find the early results here ). In order to improve the results, I wanted to feed it the syntax and morphology information.

One thing I noted regarding your breakdown of John 1:3-4. The SBLGNT renders this as follows:

John 1:3    πάντα διʼ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν 
John 1:4    ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων· 

SBLGNT John

Note the period after "ἕν", rather than after "γέγονεν"; this would render the meaning "Everything was made by him, and without him nothing was made. That which was made in him was life, and the life was the light of men."

However, your syntax tree for John breaks down the sentence at the verse boundary, rather than two words beforehand. I realize that this is more in line with the traditional rendering (i.e., most Bibles have "...without him nothing was made which has been made. In him was life...".

I'm not sure what the arguments are on either side of the debate, but it seems like ideally annotation aids like this should reflect the editorial / textual decisions of the people producing the text.

[ryderwishart]

Thanks @gwd, that sounds like a cool project! Probably the best source for now (which doesn't, however, get you all the way inside the mind of the editor), is the apparatus, which can be downloaded in PDF here.

[jonathanrobie]

HI @gwd - first off, I suggest that you use the newer version of our trees, which you can find here:

https://github.com/Clear-Bible/macula-greek

We now have both SBLGNT and Nestle1904. You can see our analysis in this browser:

https://symphony.clearlabs.biblica.com/?workspace=reading&osisRef=John.1.3&structure=treedown-clauses

[jonathanrobie]

I'm not sure what the arguments are on either side of the debate, but it seems like ideally annotation aids like this should reflect the editorial / textual decisions of the people producing the text.

First off, your link shows the SBLGNT, but the biblicalhumanities text is Nestle1904. The Clear repository contains both.

Second, there are places that the syntax trees are not consistent with the punctuation in the base text. That's true for both SBLGNT and Nestle1904. The syntax trees provide one vaild interpretation of the text, but it is not the same interpretation that we see in the punctuation. There's a history to this: when the trees were created, there was a preference for smaller trees - the original trees actually used verse-based trees if there was a valid interpretation that fit.

The Nestle1904 text says this:

πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν 4ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων· 5καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.

But the syntactic analysis splits this at a place that disagrees with the punctuation:

SBLGNT has the same problem. So even with textual variants, this problem still persists.

[gwd]

Hey @jonathanrobie! Thanks for the quick response. Unless I'm wildly misunderstanding something biblicalhumanities has the SBLGNT as well; I was looking specifically at 04-john.xml.

At any rate, definitely happy to use the newer data! I didn't happen to see a pointer in this tree to the new tree; is there any particular reason for that?

[gwd]

Also -- from your answer, it wasn't clear to me whether the response was WONTFIX, or "thank you for raising this, fixing it will require careful further thought, let's keep this issue open to remind us to get around to it". Either's fine, but it's nice to know which it is.

[jonathanrobie]

At any rate, definitely happy to use the newer data! I didn't happen to see a pointer in this tree to the new tree; is there any particular reason for that?

I need to put that in the README so people realize this is basically legacy data. All our new work has been in the new repository for a long time.

[jonathanrobie]

Also -- from your answer, it wasn't clear to me whether the response was WONTFIX, or "thank you for raising this, fixing it will require careful further thought, let's keep this issue open to remind us to get around to it". Either's fine, but it's nice to know which it is.

Good question - and thanks for asking. First, a justification: we have given ourselves the freedom to ignore punctuation in our analysis. We do create trees that span verses, but when we can do smaller and simpler trees using the same text, we do that. That's by design.

In some future, with a good tree editing environment, we may decide to make each edition's trees match its punctuation, but we don't have the tools to do that efficiently for each critical edition, not yet. But that would also require someone with time to do the work. I would like to see that happen - in the new trees - but we are not in that world right now.

So yes, I think I am saying WONTFIX. Reluctantly. If you would like to open up a similar issue in the new repository, I would keep it open over there. But it may take a long time for us to get around to fixing it.