Elementary New Testament Greek, 2014a

3: Nouns and Their Cases
Let’s add to our Greek example sentence the vocative “Oh teacher”, illustrating at the
same time the use of commas by modern editors of the GNT.
,
, ,
, ,
, ,
,
Each of these sentences could be translated:
“O Teacher, angels are giving crowns of gold to apostles.”
Additional Note about the Vocative:
You have seen in the forms provided for that in the plural the nominative and
the vocative share the same form (). While this can lead to some confusion,
the presence of commas in the GNT could help you recognize the difference.
But if you are really sharp, you should say, “Well, the commas are supplied by modern
editors! How do we know they are right?” Good point! And that is just the kind
of question good students ask! Such a plural form would need to be “tried out” in a
sentence as a nominative, then as a vocative. In all likelihood, the context would make
it perfectly clear which works best. If context doesn’t make it clear….well, that’s
why you are learning Greek! Now you understand why English versions may differ
among themselves, why scholars may disagree on a given point, and what the full
range of interpretive options might really be, which no English version can set before
the reader! We are not working this hard just to be able to produce a “translation” of
the Greek. Dozens of English versions do that quite well! We are working to be able,
among other things, to look beneath translations, to understand how Greek works so
as to see what interpretive decisions have been made by translators without our even
knowing it!
The Number of Nouns
As the chart at the beginning of this chapter shows us, the various endings of the
Greek noun locate this noun in one of two “numbers”, singular or plural.
This is just as simple as it seems: singular refers to “one” angel, and plural refers to
“more than one.”
In the example sentence we have been using, you have already noticed that we had
to place each Greek noun into either a singular or a plural form. [ is a
nominative plural; is an accusative plural; is a genitive
singular; is a dative plural; is a vocative singular.]
If we wish, we can modify our sentence to switch the number for each noun. Notice
how the Greek forms change from the rst sentence, which is our “original”:
Important Note about Number:
Angels are giving crowns of gold to
apostles.
Angels are giving crowns of gold to an
apostle.
Angels are giving a crown of gold to an
apostle.
An angel is giving a crown of gold to
an apostle.
You might have noticed in this last sentence that we changed more than just the
number of the noun for “angel”. We also changed our verb from third person plural
() to third person singular (). This is a required move! The
reason for this should be obvious after a moment’s reection. If the nominative is
clarifying the identity of the person signaled by the verb, then these two elements (the
nominative noun and the person of the verb) must agree in number. In traditional
grammatical instruction this is called Subject-Verb Agreement.
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While English is not as inected as Greek, we can still see places where subject-verb
agreement becomes visible in our choice of English words or their spelling.