2 Corinthians 3:16-18.... AGAIN!

It sometimes seems that I was born to tango with this passage. I’m trying to be as rigorous and as consistent as I can be with applying my methodology to Kyrios translation to the New Testament and am finding some more subtleties than I originally was able to treat back on my original post on this passage. Rather than updating that older post for the second time, I thought it better to put here where the translation process is up to on this passage. I needed to write down some comments on this too, so here we go:

But whenever anyone turns to GODthe Lord, the veil is taken away.

  

Now GOD the Lord the is synonymous with his Spirit, and where the GOD’s Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

  

And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate GODthe Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing gloryfrom one degree of glory to the next, all of which comes fromis fuelled by GOD’sthe Lord, who is the Spirit.

  Here “God’s Spirit” is a different Greek construction to that which is given in the preceding verse, which has a more classic form (pneuma Kyriou/tou Theou). As can be seen, NIV currently draws attention to this particular form here by creating a clause: “, who is the Spirit”. In Greek, all we have is three super-dense words:

1) from (‘apo’)

2) God/Lord (‘Kyriou’)

3) Spirit (‘Pneumatos’)

 It seems like NIV could be correct in connecting, it would seem, the grammar of verse 17 with the context of Paul’s wider correspondence with the church in Corinth. The Spirit had become something quite other than the Spirit of God in 1 Corinthians (see 1 Corinthians 2:10-16, 3:16-17, 6:11, 10:3-4, 14:1-17 and especially 12:1-12).

So here in 2 Corinthians 3:18 we can go three ways.

We can go with the current NIV idea, adding the “who is” padding.

Secondly, we can recognise that both Kyriou and Pneumatos are on level pegging with relation to the action of transformation of believers from one degree to the next. Grammatically, this time, it is neither from-the-Spirit-belonging-to-God nor from-God-belonging-to-the-Spirit. This makes sense since Paul has already pointed out that God and the Spirit are synonymous. But applying such rigorous attention to the grammar, while looking for alternatives to the wordy “who is”, seems to lead us to something like a hyphenated “God-Spirit” or with an ugly forward slash “God/Spirit”. A usable revision to NIV would probably need to discard this second option entirely.

A third option is to consider, as I have done, that for the modern reader, Paul’s point about the synonymity of ‘Kyrios’ and ‘to Pneuma’ in verse 17 has been made by supplying the “is synonymous with his” in that verse. Now, the language can move back to “God’s Spirit” for ‘Kyriou Pneumatos’ in verse 18, which returns us to familiar English in a unified way that still remains faithful to Paul’s point in the Greek.

Scripture taken and adapted from The Holy Bible, New International Version® (Anglicised), NIV®. Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Limited, a division of Hachette UK.