Elementary New Testament Greek, 2014a

4: The (Denite) Article
New Testament Exploration
John 3:10–11 Jesus answered and said to him, “
Truely, truely, I say to you, we speak about
what we know and testify about what we have seen, yet you all do not receive our
testimony. ( = you are; = Israel; = these things; = not)
Digging Deeper into the New Testament
Text
1) Find II Corinthians 5:16-21 in your GNT. Read aloud 5:16-17 until
smooth. Be ready to read these verses aloud in class. Continue looking
at these verses to notice several adverbs, two conjunctions, a verb, and an
interjection that you can already recognize. What are they?
Still in your GNT, broaden your scope to 5:16-21. Scan through all of these verses.
How many articles have you found? For each of them, write out all possible parsings
according to the forms of the article already given to you in this chapter.
2) Now open your Greek Interlinear to II Corinthians 5:16-21. From our
discussion above, you know that the Interlinear code for the article is the
English letter d (for Denite Article). Scan across the parsing line (the
third line of the Interlinear) to nd all articles. Did your own search of the
GNT match the results of your Interlinear search?
[Note: Mounce has used two additional codes to represent two specialized
forms of the verb: a verbal noun (innitive) is coded as f, and a verbal
adjective (participle) is coded as pt. Technically, these are verbs, and do
not represent new parts of speech. We, along with Mounce, will call them
the innitive and the participle, but will remember that they are verbs. Now
you know all of Mounce’s coding.]
3) In the Interlinear, nd in 5:17 the English word “creation.” You will notice
that this expression is the NIV’s translation of the Greek word .
On the fourth line beneath it you see its wordlist code: 3232. Go back to
Appendix B, and note the “dictionary form” there provided. Then look up
exactly this dictionary form in BDAG.
a) What denitions are offered in BDAG? Which one does BDAG
suggest for the occurrence in 5:17?
b) How do the NIV translation, and the suggested BDAG translation
of 5:17 differ?
4) Go in Wallace’s Intermediate Grammar The Basics of NT Syntax to pages
93-128 [Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, pages 206–290]. The table of
contents on p. 93 [206] gives a listing of the various senses treated in Part
I, while p.114 [255] gives an overview of Part II. It’s amazing what a little
word like “the” can do in Greek! Simply leaf through these pages for now.
If you have a chance at a later point in your academic studies to venture
into Advanced Greek, you will be exploring (among other things) the
subtle but important insights that come when the Greek article is mastered.
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Now you can see that the Interlinear offers not all possible parsings for the article,
but only the parsing that ts its use in this sentence, according to the noun with
which it is used. Examine 5:19, and nd three (3) articles. Do you see that they
match in case, number, and gender with their respective nouns? [They also happen
to match in spelling.]
Still in your Interlinear, do a Parts of Speech Inventory, following the codes provided
on line three (3) of the Interlinear. Simply work sequentially through 5:16-19, listing
the code and the part of speech. For example:
5:16 cj (conjunction), p (preposition), d (denite article), adv (adverb)…