For a program in which I’m teaching, I’ve been reading E. Metaxas, Amazing Grace (2006), a biography of William Wilberforce, written and released in conjunction with last year’s good film of the same title. Metaxas is a cracking good writer, and the book can only be described as sprightly and riveting. I’m ashamed to say I avoided this text previously because the topic was “faddish”: I should not have done so.

Metaxas notes one of the prominent influences in Wilberforce’s life as one Granville Sharp. I was blown away—I learned Sharp’s rule in seminary, of course, but never knew anything about him. He apparently was quite a character with several freakish gifts (playing two flutes simultaneously, for instance; self-taught in Greek and Hebrew) and a fine example of coupling scholarship and Christian social praxis.

The best thing I’ve found in short amount of searching is a lengthy article by Dan Wallace in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 41.4 (1998), 591-613: available online for free.
According to Dan Wallace, Sharp’s first book was “a slender volume dealing with OT textual criticism. It was a critique of a paper written by Benjamin Kennicott who had outlined plans for introducing textual variants into the text of his forthcoming Hebrew Bible.ls Sharp’s critique, followed by correspondence and visits with Kennicott, persuaded the Oxford scholar to leave the text intact and place the variants culled from over six hundred Mss in an apparatus criticus at the bottom of each page. Sharp’s acumen in Biblical studies was such that he assumed no pretense about the infallibility of the MT, ls but he thought it imprudent to bury the readings of the MT in the apparatus when the science of OT textual criticism was still in its infant stages. Thus part of the reason that the HB has continued, even to the present, to be a diplomatic text (based on a single Ms)-as opposed to an eclectic text-is due to the influence that an untrained clerk had on Kennicott, the great Hebraist of the day.”

His other works were no less influential, as was his effort in abolition. See Wallace’s article for more.

In any event, Sharp stands as potent testimony to those who not only study with intensity, but live what they learn with the same intensity. These two facets are summarized by Dan Wallace, JETS 1998 (cited above), a good read. Wallace has defended at length the validity and utility of Sharp’s rule (despite two centuries of misunderstanding), both in his dissertation and in his massive Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: an Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Zondervan 1996ish). The latter can be searched, almost in its entirety. The section on Sharp is interesting, though I wonder if other, non-NT and non-patristic evidence is properly accounted for. In any event, Wallace’s defense is forceful and well worth consultation.

Here’s a short quote from Sharp’s famous rule (the first of six in his little tract):
“When the copulative kai connects two nouns of the same case, if the article ho, or any of its cases, precedes the first of the said nouns or participles, and is not repeated before the second noun or participle, the latter always relates to the same person that is expressed or described by the first noun or participle . . . .” (citing Sharp, Remarks on the Uses of the Definitive Article, 2).
This has been modified various times, various ways, but still (arguably) applies in various, Christologically important NT passages.

Any thoughts on the validity (or non-validity) of Sharp’s rule for exegesis today?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 6:38 pm by jbhood and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.