Thursday, December 04, 2008

Not NT Wrong and a poem to show I’m connected with my feminine side

James McGrath's hilarious series trying to guess the identity of NT Wrong took a particularly sick turn today with the suggestion that yours truly is the culprit. Just to make it clear: I wasn't a screaming, terrorising, rabid, foaming mouthed heretic filled to the nostrils with the spirit of anti-Wright last time I looked. So no, I am not NT Wrong. Besides, NT Wrong is clearly a man – the style of his rhetoric, turns of phrases, all manner of clues give him away. More to the point, his blog reveals that he is male orientated to the extent of having lost touch with his inner woman (the recent 'poem' about Zwingli only shows his hardened maleness). So to prove my case all the more convincingly, that I am not NT Wrong, I have penned a short poem to demonstrate how in touch with my feminine side I am, to further distance myself from the anti-Wright and to silence once and for all these unsavoury slurs against Chrisendom.

*Clears throat*

A Letter of Christ

It is not clear how πιστολ Χριστο
should ever be read as precisely
a subjective genitive
as the subjective/objective genitive debate
should revolve around
the relation
of the given genitive to a verbal noun,

- Not to be confused with an infinitive,
which is syntactically a verbal noun -

such that the head noun
has a verbal idea
and is thus transformed into a verb.
While the noun πιστολή does have
a verbal cognate (πιστέλλω),
it appears rarely in the NT
(only in Acts 15:20; 21:25 and Heb. 13:22)
and is never
used by Paul
who instead
always prefers to use the verb γράφω
Cf. Rom. 15:15; 1 Cor. 4:14; 5:9, 11; 7:1; 9:15; 14:37;
2 Cor. 1:13; 2:3f, 9; 7:12; 9:1; 13:10; Gal. 1:20; 6:11;
Phil. 3:1; 1 Thess. 4:9; 5:1; Philem. 19, 21.
Cf. also 2 Thess. 3:17 and 1 Tim. 3:14

(Chris Tilling, © 2008)

I thank you.

11 comments:

Chris Tilling said...

OK, any comments about the "his hardened maleness" bit will be deleted.

goulablogger said...

Tsk tsk. You know what for.

Chuck Grantham

Josh McManaway said...

I'm man enough to admit that I wept at that beautiful poem. Honestly...you had me at syntactically.

steph said...

What a load of snot Chris! Women make sense - men might not understand, but women do. The only femininity you're in touch with is Anja!

Peter M. Head said...

Methinks thou dost protest too much.

Chris Tilling said...

Hi Steph,

"The only femininity you're in touch with is Anja!"

And what femininity she is!

Josh, thank you, you have no idea how much that means to me. My eyes welled up at syntactically too. Had to stopwriting for a mo to compose myself.

steph said...

Precisely - and that is why you haven't got any sense of your own femininity :-)

Esteban Vázquez said...

BRAVO! BRAVISSIMO!

Kevin P. Edgecomb said...

Free verse. Ugh. Here's better for you:

There once was a man named Chris T.
Accused to have been an N.T.
Neither Wright nor yet Wrong
Yet he doth study long
In precisely that thing called N.T.

So there.

Chris Tilling said...

Kevin, I bow before you superior poetic skills!

By the way, did you know thatif you rearrange the letters of "Mother-in-law" you get "woman Hitler"? Just a random fact of the day!

Kevin P. Edgecomb said...

Thanks! Good one! Unfortunately, I have no mother-in-law to remind of this salient fact....