Elementary New Testament Greek, 2014a

3: Nouns and Their Cases
New Testament Exploration
Matthew 26:18 He said, “Go into the city to a certain man and say to him,
‘My time is near. I will observe the Passover
with my disciples at your house.’”
Mark 4:38 And he was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. They woke
him up don’t you care that we are
about to die?”
Digging Deeper into the New Testament
Text
1) Find Romans 5:1-5 in your GNT. Read aloud 5:5 until smooth. Be ready
to read these verses aloud in class.
2) Open your Greek Interlinear and nd Romans 5:1-5. Since we’ve studied
various cases of the noun, we’re going to look at one particular case issue
in these verses. As you look at this text in the Interlinear, you will notice
that the third line of information contains the parsings of all Greek words.
All nouns are identied with parsing codes that begin with the English
letter “n,” easily signaling to us that the Greek word immediately above it
is a “noun.”
How many nouns do you nd in 5:1-5?
The entire parsing code of a noun, you will notice, has two clusters of information.
The rst noun you see in 5:1, for example, is parsed as: n.gsf
Decoded, these particular letters and numbers represent the following information:
Noun | Genitive-Singular-Feminine
In other words, the rst letter in the second grouping tells us what case the noun is
in [n.gsf]. Mounce’s code for nouns is:
Case Number Gender
n= nominative s = singular m = masculine
g = genitive p = plural f = feminine
d = dative
a = accustive
v = vocative
n = neuter
Now go through 5:1-5 again. What case is each noun in? [At this point we don’t need
to know or translate these nouns.]
3) Go in Wallace’s Intermediate Grammar The Basics of NT Syntax to pages
41-64 [Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, pages 72–136]. The table of
contents on p. 41 [72] gives a listing of the various senses or values that
the genitive case can express. Obviously, this can go far beyond the senses
carried by the English word of. We aren’t going to memorize these usages,
but merely expose ourselves to the range of the genitive.
The main “Verbal Genitive” options will occupy our attention here: the subjective
genitive and the objective genitive. On pp. 57-59 [113–119] you see a fuller discussion
of these particular senses. You can see from the diagram on p. 58 [118] that our
very expression “the love of God” can be analyzed in two different ways: according
to the subjective sense, and then according to the objective sense. According to
the subjective sense (imagining “love” to be the verb in a sentence diagram), we
could take “God” to be subject of such a sentence. According to the objective sense
(imagining “love” to be the verb in a sentence diagram), we could take “God” to be
object of such a sentence. We’re left with two very different notions of what the
Apostle Paul is saying. Do believers now sense a swelling love for God (objective),
or do they sense a swelling love that God has (subjective) for them?
Two leading scholars take two different pathways here. James D. G. Dunn (with the
majority) chooses the subjective as making best sense in this passage. N. T. Wright
takes the objective reading, believing that the OT backdrop of Deuteronomy 6:4-5
(with its call to love the Lord with all one’s heart) should swing our discernment.
[Notice that the NIV translation seems to push the reader strongly toward the
subjective side here. If we read only the NIV, we would likely not be aware of the
possibility of a different notion that the Greek grammar here makes possible.]
4) IV. In the Interlinear, nd in 5:5 the English expression “has poured out.”
You will notice that this expression is the NIV’s attempt to translate the
single Greek word . On the fourth line beneath it you see its
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