1 John 1.1 - articles with no nouns/pronouns
Posted: February 19th, 2023, 7:19 pm
Hello again,
A few weeks on from my first forays into a Greek grammar and I'm tentatively trying to tackle the actual text, starting, as seems to be generally advised, with 1 John, and although I have managed to figure out that those unfamiliar looking verb forms are the Perfect tense, and jumped ahead a few chapters to read about them, I'm actually falling at the very first word...
Ὁ ἠν ἀπ' ἀρχης, ὁ ἀκηκοαμεν, ὁ ἐωρακαμεν τοις οφθαλμοισ ἡμων, ὁ ἐθεασαμεθα...
Now naïvely I would translate that as "The he was from the beginning, the we have heard, the we have seen with our eyes, the we have looked upon..." but obviously that makes no sense. Of course I've looked a handful of other translations and generally found the article being translated as "that which" or something along those lines.
And of course that makes sense when you consider that the article is technically an adjective, so in the same way that I'd read, say, αγαθος without a noun or pronoun attached as 'a good thing' then 'the' with no noun/pronoun just becomes 'the thing', and then that becomes 'that which' because it sounds a bit fancier and doesn't bring up images of the disembodied Addams Family hand.
So I guess my questions are whether that is a sensible way of thinking about this, and how common a construction it is, and whether there are any tricks to spotting it, or even any actual rules about how you can tell that an article is 'free-floating' like this, when word order seems to be less of a clue in Greek than it is in English.
Cheers,
Sebastian
A few weeks on from my first forays into a Greek grammar and I'm tentatively trying to tackle the actual text, starting, as seems to be generally advised, with 1 John, and although I have managed to figure out that those unfamiliar looking verb forms are the Perfect tense, and jumped ahead a few chapters to read about them, I'm actually falling at the very first word...
Ὁ ἠν ἀπ' ἀρχης, ὁ ἀκηκοαμεν, ὁ ἐωρακαμεν τοις οφθαλμοισ ἡμων, ὁ ἐθεασαμεθα...
Now naïvely I would translate that as "The he was from the beginning, the we have heard, the we have seen with our eyes, the we have looked upon..." but obviously that makes no sense. Of course I've looked a handful of other translations and generally found the article being translated as "that which" or something along those lines.
And of course that makes sense when you consider that the article is technically an adjective, so in the same way that I'd read, say, αγαθος without a noun or pronoun attached as 'a good thing' then 'the' with no noun/pronoun just becomes 'the thing', and then that becomes 'that which' because it sounds a bit fancier and doesn't bring up images of the disembodied Addams Family hand.
So I guess my questions are whether that is a sensible way of thinking about this, and how common a construction it is, and whether there are any tricks to spotting it, or even any actual rules about how you can tell that an article is 'free-floating' like this, when word order seems to be less of a clue in Greek than it is in English.
Cheers,
Sebastian