John 4:41
Posted: April 27th, 2017, 10:16 am
Hey!
First post on the forum, so hello everyone!
I've done about a year of New Testament Greek for college and am stuck revising some of John.
The verse is:
καὶ πολλῷ πλείους ἐπίστευσαν διὰ τὸν λόγον αὐτοῦ
πλείους is a feminine plural accusative adjective. I have some idea of an 'adverbial accusative' meaning this πλείους could be modifying ἐπίστευσαν to read as 'they believed more' meaning that their faith increased in some way.
But then trying to understand the dative πολλῷ confuses me - all the public translations suggest something like 'many (more) believed' - but why would the subject be in the dative? could πολλῷ then be the object of their belief?
This is the translation that I would get out of the above:
And they believed more in much [that Jesus did
] because of his word.
I suspect I'm over complicating a simple verse, but I'm unsure how to make the different cases fit together.
Thanks
Neil
First post on the forum, so hello everyone!
The verse is:
καὶ πολλῷ πλείους ἐπίστευσαν διὰ τὸν λόγον αὐτοῦ
πλείους is a feminine plural accusative adjective. I have some idea of an 'adverbial accusative' meaning this πλείους could be modifying ἐπίστευσαν to read as 'they believed more' meaning that their faith increased in some way.
But then trying to understand the dative πολλῷ confuses me - all the public translations suggest something like 'many (more) believed' - but why would the subject be in the dative? could πολλῷ then be the object of their belief?
This is the translation that I would get out of the above:
And they believed more in much [that Jesus did
I suspect I'm over complicating a simple verse, but I'm unsure how to make the different cases fit together.
Thanks
Neil