If the grammar is sound, it is very questionable to
mind-read the Gospel writer ... "he did this because he was thinking of a person, or thing, or whatever". Grammar rarely works on subtle mental machinations. And I think Scott and I fully agree on that aspect. Scott as a translator, me as a common sense type of guy.
And I really do not care what these "New Testament Greek" experts think about choosing neuter or masculine in cases where both
may be acceptable grammatically. Prove it.
The ones I would want to hear from are fluent Greek speakers, who
may also be familiar with classical and koine Greek.
Ironically, Steven Anderson did a fairly good job recently demonstrating the truth that the differences between modern Greek and koine Greek have been vastly overstated. He went to Cyprus and handed young Greek speakers the Greek New Testament (TR). They were very comfortable with the text, they were not struggling over subtleties.
Dump the New Testament Greek grammarians.
Laugh at the Granville Sharp Rule for Fools, the classic example of seminarian style incompetence, silly nonsense inspired by doctrinal bias. (Even if many oneness folks may be included among the
blunderama crew.) Foolish Christians pushed that mostly because they were concerned about the attacks on "God was manifest in the flesh" and the heavenly witnesses. Thus, they hoped to change the pure Bible and come up with new "Jesus is God" verses in a type of tit-for-tat Bible verse exchange.
Nonsense. The Bible should inform our doctrine, we do not change the Bible to match our doctrine.
To be fair, occasionally a New Testament scholar will point out that the Grammatical Emperor has no wardrobe. Stanley Porter eviscerating the Daniel Wallace nonsense is a good example.
Notice all the dual addressing verses in the Bible. Virtually non-existent today, whatever the Christology.
Also very interesting is what happens when the 1881 Westcott-Hort recension text has bald, grating solecisms.
1 Timothy 3:16 and the earthly witnesses without the heavenly are two examples. The grammarians jump through hoops to try to justify the errant text. One of the funniest ones is claiming that
1 Timothy 3:16 is placing in the middle of a hymn. Often, critical text apologetics is simply a cheap con.
For commentaries, you generally will get a much higher quality analysis in the 1600s and 1700s. (John Owen, Matthew Henry, John Gill, et al.)