chris mathew wrote: ↑August 14th, 2021, 6:06 am
Yes, I can read Greek.
Let's suppose someone can read English words, word by word, parse them, find them in a dictionary and find glosses for another language and then translate the result word by word into the other language. Would you say he can read English?
Those who write here regularly usually think that reading means fluent or at least semi-fluent reading, especially without an interlinear. Most people need a dictionary every now and then and at least I need some parsing help every now and then. Way too often, to be honest, and I'm far from fluent. But I recommend a Reader's Edition rather than an interlinear.
Your questions reveal that you handle Greek differently than you handle other human languages. You don't read and understand, you analyze bit by bit and then try to understand the bits you analyzed, then trying to draw the analysis together. That's not worthless and may be even necessary sometimes but it isn't reading or knowing Greek.
In my opinion there's nothing in the Greek here which couldn't be seen in the English if you just read it. "Appointed" is not appointed by oneself. The time of appointing can be seen in the English, too, when it's read naturally. It would be far stretched to say that appointing happened after believing or even contemporaneously.
I see the structure this way:
ὅσοι ἦσαν τεταγμένοι εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον works like a subject of the sentence for our purposes. ("As many as were appointed, believed" works as a sentence).
The participle τεταγμένοι works like an adjective, not as "dependent verbal" (see Wallace).
The main verb in that clause, ἦσαν, is contemporaneous with believing. τεταγμένοι refers to an event which happened in the past, with present results, but so that the moment which ἦσαν refers to is the "present" and time before that is the "past". Appointing had happened before these described events.
The voice system of Koine is important to grasp, especially because we have now a better modern linguistically based explanation for it. Greek is a two voice system, not three. Active and mediopassive or middle-passive. Middle-passive marks (this is simplified!) "subject affectedness", i.e. the grammatical subject is affected by the event. Middle is actually more central than passive; passive is just a special case of subject affectedness where the subject is only a patient and there's someone/something else acting as an agent. When the form is ambiguous it's not even always necessary to know if it's semantically passive (external agent) or middle (self-affected, spontaneous etc.). It may be enough to know the subject is affected.
(Then there's the question of deponency: what it means and if it exists at all. Don't trust anyone who says a deponent is something in form and something else in meaning.)
Usually the translations handle middle/passive correctly so that the essential meaning is seen in English or another translation language if read naturally. If you want to dig deeper, read the BAGD/BDAG entry for that word carefully and note how it handles the middle-passive forms. Usually it grasps well how the native speakers understood the voice with that specific lexeme (interpretation depends heavily on the lexeme because different verb lexemes have different properties which affect this). If you want to go even deeper, read
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/296246183.pdf for maybe the most up to date linguistic account.