Elementary New Testament Greek, 2014a

9: Active, Middle, Passive Voices
The Grammatical Fate of Agents and
Instruments in Passive Sentences
We have seen that the Direct Object of an active, transitive verb can become the
Subject of a passive verb. We have also seen that the Subject (the actor/agent in an
active sentence) can be expressed within a Prepositional Phrase:
Sub. Active Verb DO Sub. Passive Verb Prep. Phrase
God is saving us. We are being saved by God.
The Middle Voice
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Verbs in the Middle Voice imply that the persons involved (I, you, he/she/it, we,
y’all, they) are performing the action, but are somehow more intimately involved
in the action than usual. This foggy notion must be teased out circumstance by
circumstance, with a fair amount of interpretive wiggle room remaining. To
illustrate some of these interpretive possibilities, imagine nding our verb as an
indisputable Middle. How might we translate it to convey a middle sense?
We are destroying
(ourselves).
[A middle verb could imply that the action is
reexive: directly self-inicted.]
transformation
We are destroying our
health.
We (ourselves) are
destroying the counterfeit
money.
[A middle verb could emphasize our actions
are ultimately affecting our own bodies.]
[A middle verb could imply that we are
acting personally and directly, not through an
intermediary.]
But Greek has some specic preferences about how these Subjects (in active
sentences) should be expressed when the sentences are transformed into their passive
counterparts:
If the Subject (the “do-er”) in an active sentence is a person (e.g. God is
saving us), then in the passive transformation that person will be set in the
Genitive Case with the preposition . The “doer” is now called the
Personal Agent. “We are being saved by God ( )
If the Subject (the “do-er”) in an active sentence is a thing (e.g. The word
is saving us), then in the passive transformation that thing will usually be
set in the Dative Case without a preposition. The “doer” is now called the
Impersonal Means. “We are being saved by the word ( )
Middle Voice Forms
Oddly enough, the forms of the Middle Voice (in the Present Indicative) share the
forms of the Passive Voice! Only by examining other factors can we tell whether we
are dealing with a Middle or a Passive.
But because true (and undisputed) Middles are relatively rare in the GNT, we will
not spend much time at this point working with them. When you encounter Middle
Passive forms in our exercises, you should typically treat them as Passives…or as
Deponents (see below).
Deponent Verbs
A signicant number of Greek verbs share an important characteristic: though they are
MiddlePassive in form, they should be translated actively. They have traditionally