1 John 1.1 - articles with no nouns/pronouns

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Sebastian Satkurunath
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Joined: December 28th, 2022, 2:33 pm

1 John 1.1 - articles with no nouns/pronouns

Post by Sebastian Satkurunath »

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
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Sebastian James Satkurunath
Sebastian Satkurunath
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Joined: December 28th, 2022, 2:33 pm

Re: 1 John 1.1 - articles with no nouns/pronouns

Post by Sebastian Satkurunath »

Wait! I have a follow up question.

I hope it's not terrible etiquette to reply to ones own posts before anyone has had a chance to reply, but it has just occurred to me that whilst the first Ὁ makes sense, because it's the subject of 'was', the subject of 'that which we have heard' is "we", and "that which" is the object, so why are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th articles ὁ rather than τον?
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Sebastian James Satkurunath
Jason Hare
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Re: 1 John 1.1 - articles with no nouns/pronouns

Post by Jason Hare »

The first word is , not —there’s a difference. It’s a relative pronoun (“what”), not an article (“the”). ὃ ἦν ἀπ᾿ ἀρχῆς “what was from the beginning” or “that which was from the beginning.” The article is masculine, and it doesn’t (normally) have an accent (it can happen when it is followed by an enclitic, as in ὅ τε ἀδελφὸς καὶ ἡ ἀδελφή “both the brother and the sister”). The relative pronoun does, though, bear an accent (ὅ ἐστιν “what is”). Sometimes the accents are important syntactically.

Article:
(masc) ὁ, τοῦ, τῷ, τόν; οἱ, τῶν, τοῖς, τούς
(fem) ἡ, τῆς, τῇ, τήν; αἱ, τῶν, ταῖς, τάς
(neut) τό, τοῦ, τῷ, τό; τά, τῶν, τοῖς, τά

Relative Pronoun:
(masc) ὅς, οὗ, ᾧ, ὅν; οἵ, ὧν, οἷς, οὕς
(neut) ἥ, ἧς, ᾗ, ἥν; αἵ, ὧν, αἷς, ἅς
(neut) ὅ, οὗ, ᾧ, ὅ; ἅ, ὧν, οἷς, ἅ
Jason A. Hare
The Hebrew Café
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Sebastian Satkurunath
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Joined: December 28th, 2022, 2:33 pm

Re: 1 John 1.1 - articles with no nouns/pronouns

Post by Sebastian Satkurunath »

Of, of course. I had even skimmed a bit that told me this was one area where accents actually change the meaning, but it clearly hasn't sunk in yet. And because it's neuter the accusative and the nominative are the same, which answers my follow up question as well.

Thank you ever so much for the help.
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Sebastian James Satkurunath
Sebastian Satkurunath
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Joined: December 28th, 2022, 2:33 pm

Re: 1 John 1.1 - articles with no nouns/pronouns

Post by Sebastian Satkurunath »

Okay, I think I need to come back to this again for 2.16:

ὅτι πᾶν τὸ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ, ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν καὶ ἡ ἀλαζονεία τοῦ βίου, οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ πατρός, ἀλλὰ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου ἐστίν·

Because it looks as though that first το is doing the same thing, but that really is an article, not a pronoun, isn't it?
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Sebastian James Satkurunath
Jason Hare
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Re: 1 John 1.1 - articles with no nouns/pronouns

Post by Jason Hare »

Sebastian Satkurunath wrote: February 22nd, 2023, 3:34 pm Okay, I think I need to come back to this again for 2.16:

ὅτι πᾶν τὸ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ, ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν καὶ ἡ ἀλαζονεία τοῦ βίου, οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ πατρός, ἀλλὰ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου ἐστίν·

Because it looks as though that first το is doing the same thing, but that really is an article, not a pronoun, isn't it?
Yes, τό is the article here. It is used as a substantive. To explain this, think of how “the man in the house” would be translated into Greek. It would be, in full form, ὁ ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ ἄνθρωπος (the in the house man) or ὁ ἄνθρωπος ὁ ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ (the man, the one in the house). In Greek, we can eliminate “man” from the equation and simply say ὁ ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ for “the [man] in the house.” The same with “woman” (ἡ γυνή) or even the plural. So that ἡ ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ means “the [woman] in the house” and οἱ ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ means “the [people] in the house.” In the case of neuter, when it comes with no other reference, it means “the thing,” and we pair it with whatever modifies it. So, τὸ ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ means “the thing in the house.”

In this specific phrase (πᾶν τὸ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ), we have “all the [thing] in the world,” which is better in English as “everything in the world.”
Jason A. Hare
The Hebrew Café
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Sebastian Satkurunath
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Joined: December 28th, 2022, 2:33 pm

Re: 1 John 1.1 - articles with no nouns/pronouns

Post by Sebastian Satkurunath »

Brilliant, thank you. That's what I thought was going on, but it's extremely reassuring to have it confirmed by someone with more than 2 months of Greek under their belt :)
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Sebastian James Satkurunath
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