[gbak]

I am Greek and had to do six years of Ancient Greek. I don't understand how you got to that conclusion. The test is asking questions on ancient Greek grammar and only. It has nothing to do with religion or what so ever, New Testament Greek is very close but also very different from Ancient Greek -it has some idiosyncrasies of it's own.

I really want to know how you concluded that this has something to do with religion...

[tmsh]

You're right. I spoke too quickly. Thanks.

I studied ancient Greek too for several years. I hadn't heard of this 'General Supposition' as a way to describe conditional clauses. Apparently -- just looked it up some -- it was an older way of describing the categories we use now (which are mostly temporal based -- future less-vivid, etc.). So there are two spheres for classifying conditional clauses.

If you look up the Goodwin grammar reference for 'General Suppositions', the vast majority are from NT Greek. So that's what made think it was mostly used in NT Greek.

So in a way, thinking about conditionals as 'General Suppositions' is sort of biased in that direction.

But you're right, could apply to Classical Greek too. I should've remembered that Classical Greek is mostly a superset of NT Greek, so there would be examples there too, etc.

But it's actually a rather deep question. Classifying conditions as 'general' asks for a kind of aphoristic understanding of things (talking only about the very general case). I would hazard a guess that the majority of this is in NT Greek. But I suppose some historians and philosophers also generalized (Thucydides, Plato) in this way and could have their protases classified as such. But it is sort of a different way of thinking. Bad to generalize ;-) -- but it may go quite to the heart of certain differences between aspects of NT and ancient Greek.