ἐκ in John 1:35

[Sam]

John 1:35 [SBLGNT]
Τῇ ἐπαύριον πάλιν εἱστήκει ὁ Ἰωάννης καὶ ἐκ τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ δύο,

Why is ἐκ left untranslated?

[Jason Hare]

John 1:35 [SBLGNT]
Τῇ ἐπαύριον πάλιν εἱστήκει ὁ Ἰωάννης καὶ ἐκ τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ δύο,

Why is ἐκ left untranslated?

You’ve left the entire verse untranslated. What translation are you talking about?

ἐκ here is used in the partitive sense. Let’s say that I have three children, but I tell you that “two of my children” went to summer camp last year. It means that two went and one stayed home. That is, part of the group went, but the other part didn’t. Here we know that John (the baptizer) had a set of disciples, and out of those disciples, two of them were standing with him that day. We don’t have to render the ἐκ as “out of.” When it is used partitively, we simply say “of” in normal speech.

That is, “out of my children, two went to camp” is the same as “two of my children went to camp.” This is what we have here: “two of [John’s] disciples.” It isn’t left untranslated unless you simply don’t translate the verse (as you didn’t above).

[Sam]

Sorry about that.

I looked into many translations, even Young's Literal, none translated ἐκ.

But you did answer my question. Thank you. I just looked the word up again in my lexicon and saw 'partitively of' in one of the definitions, but I really couldn't have understood it without reading your explanation first.

[Devenios Doulenios]

Sam,

I believe you are being thrown off a little by the differences in Greek and English word order here. In fact, Young's Literal does translate εκ here, as does every major (and minor) English translation. Check a site such as Bible Gateway to confirm. Most all say "two of his disciples". A few use (as I do) "his followers", and a couple use the Hebrew talmidim instead of "disciples". But all translate εκ as "of" here. In time, as you continue your studies, you'll see that Greek often uses a different word order than the English as a matter of course. This is partly because in Greek meaning is often determined more by the form of the words (case endings for nouns and adjectives, for example, and verb endings) than by the order of words. This is quite normal with an inflected language such as Greek. English, on the other hand, uses word order to determine meaning more so than Greek does. There are also other factors that can determine meaning, which you'll learn in time.