[B-Greek] Article Confusion

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at ioa.com
Tue Aug 23 17:51:16 EDT 2005


On Aug 23, 2005, at 5:35 PM, Fitzwilliam Darcy wrote:

> Could someone please explain to me the purpose of the definite  
> article (nominative masculine singular) in Matthew 6:9? “Pater hmwn  
> ho en tois ouranois”
>
> Pater is a vocative masculine singular noun so I did a search in  
> the New Testament (I didn’t check the LXX) and could not find  
> another example of the article being used in this way with Pater.  
> In Luke 11:2 there is no article either; Pater is simply followed  
> by a comma.
>
> In a related question, what is signaling other parts of speech  
> (verbs, pronouns, etc.) to translators? KJV: “Our Father which art  
> in heaven;” NAS and ASV: “Our Father who art in heaven.” The ESV  
> and NIV translate it as “Our Father in heaven” which makes the most  
> sense to my very, very basic understanding of what the Greek words  
> mean.

You may need a firmer foundation in elementary Greek for  
understanding what is involved in how these phrasings are translated.  
There is not really anything unusual here: it is an instance of the  
use of the article to formulate a prepositional phrase as an  
attributive qualifying a substantive. Cf. hO ANQRWPOS hO TRECWN =  
"the running man" or "the man who is running." So PATHR hHMWN hO EN  
TOIS OURANOIS is "our father (the one who is) in heaven ..."

If you're unfamiliar with the standard B-Greek transliteration  
pattern you'll find it in our FAQ (http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/ 
faq.txt ) -- and in fact, there's a neat diagram of it on our home  
page (http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek).


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




More information about the B-Greek mailing list