[B-Greek] Article Confusion

Carlton Winbery winberycl at earthlink.net
Tue Aug 23 18:09:41 EDT 2005


>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.
>
>Thank you,
>
>Fitzwilliam Darcy
>
Actually the article is used with EN TOIS OURANOIS and transforms the 
prepositional phrase into a modifier of PATHR, "the in Heaven one." 
Some choose to understand a participle with this construction. hO WN 
EN TOIS OURANOIS. This is a quite common use of the article to show 
grammatical relationships of other elements in the sentence.

-- 
Carlton L. Winbery
Retired Professor of Religion
Louisiana College
318-448-6103
winberycl at earthlink.net
winbery at lacollege.edu



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