Deponency in koine greek: The grammatical question and the lexicographical dilemma

Trinity Journal, Spring 2003 by Pennington, Jonathan T

How has this misunderstanding come about? I can discern two wrong turns taken. First, our unfamiliarity with the Greek middle voice and our tendency to think about Greek through the lens of English has clouded our judgment. Second, the category of "deponent," borrowed from Latin, has unduly influenced our approach to the Greek middle, and has in turn boxed us in to a way of viewing the middle that is misleading. Let us unpack these allegations.

1. Greek Through the Lens of English

It is inevitable that English speakers tend to think about Greek through the lens of English grammatical structures and lexemes. Theoretically, native bilingualism would seem to be the only way out of this quandary. But our chronological distance from Koine Greek makes this an impossibility. Not even a brilliant child running the streets of Athens today could surmount this difficulty as Modern Greek is far removed from Hellenistic Greek as well.32

When it comes to deponency, the problem is acute. To define a deponent verb as one that is active in meaning but middle/passive in form begs the question about what it means for a verb to be "active in meaning." According to whose conception does this apply? Just because the gloss in English looks like an active meaning this does not mean it was so for the Greek speaker. Take again the example of .... "I receive, take" looks like an active voice in English, but it is not difficult at all to see the indirect middle force inherent in the lexeme, hence the middle/passive form. Because English lacks a middle voice we do not consider this as an option when classifying how the subject relates to the verb. Therefore we assume it is active in meaning and force upon ourselves a seeming discrepancy between meaning and form. As I have told my Greek students when encountering some construction or idiom that seems quite odd to us, this is our problem, not the Greeks'. Evidently, the average Greek speaker lived his or her life happily never considering how their native constructions might strike the ear as odd to someone living twenty centuries later.

This is another example of the principle that "translation is treason."33 That is, it is impossible not to lose something when comparing and translating languages. It is unfortunate that teachers of Greek miss this obvious point of contrast between Koine and English. Grammars glibly speak of the oddity of deponency. They make unqualified comments that speak of the laying aside of active forms when "the meaning is active, to be sure."34 Careful thought, however, reveals that in the majority of cases the meaning is "active, to be sure" only from the perspective of English.

McKay observes that the category of "deponent" is "useful in some respects, but is not entirely necessary in terms of ancient Greek itself." He goes on with the insightful comments and example:

The reason for a writer's choice of the middle rather than the active of a verb in which both have similar meanings is sometimes not clear to us, and many deponent verbs have an obviously middle or passive element in their meaning or in their history. In comparison with ..., I send, the middle force of the deponent verb ..., I send for (I am having sent to me), is obvious. On the other hand, in the case of ..., I journey, whose aorist is passive in form (...), there was in earlier Greek an active ..., I convey, so the passive would be natural enough for journeying on horseback or in a vehicle, but its meaning had long been extended to all kinds of journeying, including marching by infantry. We have no real evidence that speakers and writers of ancient Greek in general were conscious of an anomaly in their use of this and similar verbs.35