Most Common Greek Words in the NT

Good evening, oh everybody sounds so excited to be here, oh it's okay you don't have to fake it for me, but I am glad that you're here, I'm excited to continue our rigorous pursuit of theological and academic excellence, okay, everybody's so excited.

Well, if you have your syllabus, you will note that tonight is week four, which means that we are officially, after the end of tonight's class, we will have completed the halfway point of this class. How confident are you?

Getting there? Some, some, some not? Well, we are going to begin by not going into the book, because last class we spent almost the whole time just going through the book, and I don't want this to become where your eyes are rolling back and you're starting to, you know, feel yourself kind of pass out.

I want it to stay functional and interesting, and so we will go through the book, because that's part of what we're doing, but I'm going to do a few things before that in a way to sort of bring it out.

One of the things that I did tonight is I made a handout, and I'm going to pass these out. What we have on this page, this is all of the words that occur 900 times or more in the New Testament. So these are the most common words in the New Testament in Greek.

So we're going to go through these real quick, because these will be on every page when you're reading or you're looking at the Greek New Testament. The other side of this are some verses, and what we're going to do as a class is we're going to, based on what you know already and what you've learned, we're going to go through these verses and find the words that you recognize, okay?

So if you would pass some this way, and you can pass some this way, and we're going to begin. Have a little fun. Do a little exercise as we get started. Mr. Frank, I think we're good if you want to go ahead and pull that, too.

While the papers are going around, let's sing the alphabet. Alphabeta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Yoda, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nucleus, C, Omicron, P, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Kip, C, Omega, and again, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Yoda, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nucleus, C, Omicron, P, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Kip, C, Omega.

Now without me. Go. Stop. Wait. We roll off. Start again. Alpha. Beta. Nu. Cosine. I'm only laughing because we're so, it's, it's, yeah, yes, it's a, yes. How many of you are confident that if I were to ask you to come up and write the alphabet?

Can you do that? Okay. All right. All right. Well, just for the sake of time, I'm not going to ask you to, but that was just a question I was curious. That's one of the good drills that you can do on your own, simply writing out the alphabet.

The song is good for helping you remember the order of the alphabet. And like I said, it's, it's just, it's just repetition. You know, repetition is the key to learning and the key to learning is repetition.

That is the absolute truth. All right. Open up or take out the handout that I gave you and let's look at these 900 time Greek words, 900 time Greek words. These are the words that you're going to see more than any other words in the New Testament.

And you'll notice next to them is the number of occurrences. So the first word is actually not one word, but it's three words that all mean the same thing. Ha, Hey, Ta, Ha, Hey, Ta. And what that is, is called the article, Ha, Hey, and Ta are the article.

Now, can someone define for me what an article is? Okay. And don't say it's a, it's a something in a magazine, you know, magazine article. That's not what it is. An article is, yes, it's some, it's something that, that, um, defines a noun in some way.

So basically what we have in English is we have the article, the word is the, the, is the article that we use. For instance, if I say, Brian BJ, if I say you are the man, what I mean is that out of all the men, you're the one that I'm looking for.

You're the one that I'm calling out. You're the man. And by adding the word the, I am establishing you as the one that I'm looking at. And sometimes that's, that's not good. Like if you're in a police lineup and someone says, you're the man, that's, that's not when you want to have someone using the article in regard to you.

But if you, but if somebody says you're the winner, right, like if you, if somebody says you're a winner, you're like, yeah, that's great. I'm a winner. Wow. Yeah. Because that just means you're one of many.

Right. But if I said you're the winner, the modifies the noun, right? It establishes, in that sense, it's quantitative. It establishes one of many, quantity, right? Versus if I say you're a man, I'm simply denoting that you're one of many, but you're not the one of many.

So article, and then we have, we have words that are what we call anarthus. Anarthus simply means without the article. So if I say you're the man, that's articular, that has the article. If I say you're a man or you're a man, that's anarthus, that's without the article.

And where this comes up, and again, I know we look at this verse a lot. This comes up in John 1, 1. In the beginning was the word, that's articular, right? The word and the word was with God. That actually in the Greek is articular too.

It actually says, and the word was with the God, but we don't translate the God in English for that. But the last clause of John 1, 1 says what? And the word was God, right? The Jehovah Witnesses, they add the A there because they argue that because of the lack of the article that we have to include A.

There is no word for the A in Greek. So if in Greek you're reading something that says you're the man, but if you read something that simply says you're a man, typically we would add the A for English to make it phonetically correct and it would say you're a man.

So why don't we say that Jesus is a God? Because he is the God. Well there's several reasons why. You're all correct, but the linguistic reason is we are dealing with, in this sense, we're dealing with the nominative and the predicate nominative, and the nominative in the sentence is the word, the logos, and the predicate nominative is God, and the word was God.

The actual Greek says καὶ θεὸς ἐν ἁ λόγος, it's and God was the word, if we translated it. But we wouldn't translate it that way in English because in English the subject comes first and the nominative is the subject case, so the word would be first, and the word was God.

And the word God there is being used not in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense. God is not saying Jesus is a God in a quantity, like one of many, but it's saying that he is God in his quality or in his nature.

Like if I say, Brian, you're a man. Now if I don't say you're the man, and I don't say you're a man, I can still say, Brian, you are man, because that's your quality. In that sense, it's no longer quantitative, but it's qualitative.

It's using the, it's stressing what you are, not what you are in relation to other, you know, others, other men, in that regard. So there, to add the A, it was FF Bruce, great Greek scholar, who said the Jehovah Witnesses prove nothing when they add the A to John 1, 1, except for their ignorance of Greek grammar.

That's a pretty good line. I thought I might get an amen, but, okay, all right. So, but the first, so what is the first word there? It's the word the, it's the article, and you're going to see that all over.

The next word is chi, my favorite word, chi. What is chi? Chi is and. See that all over as well. That is used 9 ,161 times in the Greek New Testament. Only half, or a little less than half than the article, but still, almost 10 ,000 times.

The next word is altos, oh, excuse me, altos is the pronoun, he, she, it. You're going to see that a lot, of course, because pronouns obviously follow nouns. They have a, a pronoun will have an antecedent, so for instance, you will see a word, you'll see he, and you'll say, well, who is the he that's in reference here?

Well, you follow it back to the preceding noun, and in general, the preceding noun is the antecedent. Not always, because it has to match in regard to gender and things like that. So for instance, if it said, Jesus and Mary were walking, and he said, well, then you would know the he isn't talking about Mary, even though that's the immediate preceding noun would be Mary.

Because of the gender, you would understand that it's referring to Jesus. Well, that works in a similar way in other, other ways in Greek. So altos, and you see on the right side where it says derivatives, think of the word automatic.

What does automatic mean? Means self-working, right? It's self, it's a self-working thing. So the word auto, in a sense, means self. So altos is a, it's self, or he, or she, or it, it's a pronoun, okay?

The next is su. Su is the word for you, and you will see this as su or humes. You'll see it written in two different ways, but they both reference the, the singular and the plural pronoun, the third person pronoun, or I'm sorry, second person, the you.

And think about this, you and you in English are both the same. Like if I said you, and I'm looking at you, but if I said you, now I'm talking about all y 'all. See, in, in the South, we got the, we have the plural, because we have the y 'all, which is.

All y 'all. And, well, y 'all is the, is the small group, all y 'all is the big group. And then you got the really southern, the you-ins. That's the, that's the, you know, when y 'all are related. Use guys.

Yeah, that's right. But you see here, we have the su, which is the singular, humes is the plural. So here's a good point in Greek. If you, if Jesus is speaking to a singular person or a group, you can tell by the Greek, where you couldn't tell in the English, if he says you, but you look at the Greek and you could tell whether or not he's speaking to singular or to a group, or plural in his, in his speech.

De, de, de, or delta, epsilon, is but. Can also be used for and, but chi, you're going to see chi much more as the and. But is typically how you're going to translate that or see it translated. In is what?

In. We've seen that already many, many times. And then there is ego and humes. Ego is I, humes is we. Notice again, the singular and the plural, right? The singular ego, or we, we might in English say ego, because we think about ourself.

And humes is the we. It's a, how was I saying, humes, yeah, you notice the little accent mark, the backwards, the backwards, that means you make a ha sound, ha, yeah, if you, if you see a backwards comma above the letter, and it's the first letter of the word, and it's a vowel, usually it will be the omicron or the eta, and you're going to, you're going to add the ha sound.

Like for instance, the word hamartia is the word for sin, but it doesn't start with an H because there's no H, it starts with an alpha, ha, ha, it's amartia with the ha ha sound, so it becomes hamartia, this would be humes, okay?

Next one, ami, we've, we've, we've talked about this one because if you put ego and ami together, it becomes the strong I am, and that's what Jesus said in regard to Abraham before Abraham was I am, and that's, he, he spoke that, that's also the same thing he said when he walked on water, a lot of people don't realize that because it's not normally translated that way, normally they, when they translate it, it's Jesus says, fear not, it is I, but actually what the Greek says is, fear not, I am, when he's on the water, it's very clear that it's this, this construction.

Lego, remember lego, my ego, lego, I say or I speak, ace is into, oo is not, you're going to see as a not, or a negative, has, he, ha, that is who, utas, ate, tuta is this, and then the next one which is used 1317 times is the word theos, that of course is the word for God, hati is because, and you'll see that a lot, because you'll, you know, this happened because of this, as a result of this, because of that, you'll see the word because a lot, hati is that word, pas, this is huge, I have to mention this, the word pas is a Greek word that means all, every, or each, it's also pasa or pan, you'll see it actually several different ways, but it's typically pas, pasa, and pan, sometimes you'll hear somebody say pas, pasa, pan, pas, pasa, pan, and what they're basically just giving you the three ways of all, you know, you'll hear that sometimes when people are talking about this word, pas, pasa, pan, this sounds kind of funny, so anyway, this word's important because it comes up as a huge issue when referring to the subject of divine election, because the argument is whether or not God is actively saving all men, or his purpose is to actively try to save all men, and oftentimes what you will hear people say is all always means all, and the response is, well, all means all in the context of all, for instance, we read that all Judea went out and was baptized by John, clearly says it, uses the word pas, all Judea went out and was baptized by John, were all the people in Judea baptized by John?

No, we could say for very, we could say clearly the Pharisees were not, many of the Romans were not, many of the Jews were not, so why would it use the word all, because it is using the word all in the sense of all without distinction, not all without exception, so what does that mean?

Well, if the president were to visit Jacksonville, and he had a huge crowd made up of numerous types of people from all around Jacksonville, someone might go on television and say all of Jacksonville turned out to see the president, now we know that that doesn't mean that every single person, they didn't empty the nursing homes, they didn't empty the hospitals, they didn't call upon everyone to leave their house and go see Donald Trump, what they mean is all without distinction, not all without exception, and so the word pas can have nuance of meaning depending upon how it is being used.

No, it's not so much figurative, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the scope, right? It's still all, but it's not all without exception, it's all without distinction, you know, it's, it's, it's, it, but, but no, I wouldn't say figurative, it's more an issue of the scope of the, the word, the word has various scopes, right?

Context, that's context, mm-hmm, yeah, for instance, and I don't want to debate this, this is certainly not something I've intended to talk about, but since we're here, I'll do it. In the book of, I think it's 1st Peter, it says, God is not willing that any should perish, but all should come to repentance, right?

And a lot of people use that to try to argue that it is God's will that everyone be saved, and they base it on that passage. The first problem is they never quote the whole passage, because the whole passage does not say, it is not God's will that any should perish, but all should come to repentance.

What the passage actually says is that God is merciful toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. So notice the any and the all are automatically modified by the word us, and if you look at the word us and trace us as a pronoun, you trace the word us back, and the antecedent is God's elect.

So it doesn't deny election. You see how the context would rule in regard to that. John 3 16 uses the word pos, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will not perish, but have everlasting life.

Is that what it says? Well, that's what it says in the King James, so it's not wrong, but the word whosoever is actually a translation of the word pos, and the full phrase is pos hapistuon, all the believing ones.

So John 3 16 actually says, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that all the believing ones will not perish, but have everlasting life. It's very clear that the whosoever will are the believing ones, and so I'm not saying the King James is necessarily wrong.

I'm simply saying pos hapistuon references specifically those believing. So in John 3 16, we have the idea of the believers are the ones who are going to be saved, not all people. There are some who are universalists who try to argue that everybody's going to heaven, and they use the word pos to try to argue that everyone's going to be saved.

The Bible clearly does not teach that. So anyway, that word pos is important, and I didn't mean to take a left-handed excursion into that. That's an important word. Let's just say say that. The next one is the word me, and that again is not, it's similar to the oo at ook that you had earlier, but this is for a good example.

This one is Romans 6. Shall we continue in sin, so that grace may abound? Me gnoita. Me is not. Gne is the the root of the word meaning to be, and gnoita, me gnoita, means may it never be. Shall we continue in sin, so that grace would abound?

May you never even think that way, is really what Paul is trying to say. So the may is no, not. It's the adversative, no. All right. Gar. I always think of Garth, like Garth Brooks. Gar. Gar. This is four or so then.

The next and last one is really the one I was hoping to get to, and I know we're taking a lot more time on this than I meant to. Yesu. Yesu. Jesus. Jesus. How many of you've ever heard the little drummer boy?

Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum. Remember the next verse. Baby yesu, pa rum pum pum pum. That's how you would say it in Greek. Yesu. Yesu. And you see that it's the iota, ata, makes the yay sound.

Yay, because it's EA, and you would just say yay, yay, and then su. Yesu. Yeah. And you could, well, and in certain, a sus. There is a sigma at the end, so you say a sus, but there are times where the ending changes depending on how the noun is being used.

So it might be yesu, yesus. Yeah, so the ending may change, but yes, it's yesus, typically. Yesus. And it's the same word as Joshua. Jesus and Joshua are the same Hebrew word and the same Greek word. Joshua and Jesus are the same word, same in Greek and Hebrew.

And then this last one, hugely important word, is the word ek. It means out of, and here's how you remember it, ek, exit, out, exit out, right? So look at these two words together on the list. You have the ace and the ek.

Ace means into, ek means out of, and the way you remember that, you good Bible students who took my other class on how to study the Bible, you have isagesis, or isagesis means to read into the text, exegesis means to read out of the text what's there.

Remember, we don't want to do this, we don't want to read into the text something that's not there, we want to take out of the text what is there. And so ace and ek is easy to remember if you remember exegesis is out of, asegesis or isegesis, depending how you pronounce it, is into.

Okay, so there you go. Memorize these, you will have memorized the top words used over 900 times. This is a very helpful tool. So that being said, let's open, turn that same page over, let's look and let's see if we can actually find some words.

Hold on, we're gonna go through each one. We're gonna do a little translating on the fly, have a little fun. Let me get a pen. Okay, okay, so let's start with the first one. What's the first word? And.

Yeah, Apen, don't know that one yet, right? So move on. What's the next one? The. What's the next word? It's, remember we talked about this in the first class, when there's, when there's, there's two gammas.

Angalos, the first gamma gets an N sound. That's the gamma nasal. So when there's two gammas or two gammas side by side, the first one gets the N sound. So this is angalos, which would be angels. And the angels.

Altay, we just looked at that. Altay, you can use your cheat sheet. All right, where is it? Altay. Huh? It's the fourth word down. Remember, because the endings would be altay. Altay. All right, so it would be the pronoun referring to the angel.

And then what's may? No. Now this next one, this, this next one, or not, yes, not, will be the word not. What's the next one? You, I will say it and you'll know it as soon as I say it. Phobu. Fear. Fear.

That's where we get the word phobia, right? So not fear or fear not. Mariam. Who's that? Mary. Mary, right? All right. Ores, gar. Karen, pasa, to, the, o. Well, what is gar? We'll jump past ores for now and say gar is?

Four. Four. Karen, you might not know, but Karen means grace. That's where we get the word for grace. Para is a preposition, which means with. And then to, the, o is? God. It's to, the, o. It's, it's, the, o is God.

It's, it's, it's, yep. So the, o is God. And since we're in English, we don't need to translate the article. It would actually say she found grace with the God, but we don't need to translate the word, the article.

So we would simply say she found grace with God. And so this is the angel visiting Mary, right? This is the, the, the passage where the angel visits Mary. And he says, it says, the angel said to her, fear not Mary, for you have found favor with God or grace.

Right? So what's, what's the second word? I actually have to look. I, I didn't bring my Greek New Testament. Some of these, I mean, I didn't bring mine today either. A-pen. Yeah. Yes, because the, the Epsilon Iota is A and then the P Epsilon Nu is pen.

So it'd be A-pen. And as soon as I see it, I'm going to remember it, but I'm drawing a blank right this second. So I apologize. I can get you one. Oh yeah, we have them right here. Sorry. That's okay.

We're not going to do all of these because of time, but I want to do the next one. Actually, you know what I want to do? I want to go down to the, to the, to the third one. John 8, 58. John 8, 58 is one of my favorite verses of the Bible.

We'll skip over the first two words. What's the third one? What's the third word? Jesus. And what's the next word? Uh, yep. But, but did he say amen, amen? It's really, in, in King James English, it's verily, verily.

In modern English, it's truly, truly. In Hebrew, it's amen, amen. But it means I am speaking the truth and he's saying it twice. So you could say truly, truly. Right? And then Lego. Amen. Yeah. I say to you, Prynne, that is a reference to time before.

Prynne would be before. Abraham, that's Abraham. Genestai, remember what I said? The word gene means exists. It's the word for being. So genestai would be before Abraham existed, but we would simply say before Abraham was, right?

And then we see ego, a me, which is I am. So that's two of those. I just want you to, this is sort of like a, an activity sheet for you. Take it with you. Look through and find the words that you know, you should be able to do.

John 1, 1 is the next one. We've done that one already. You can, you can take these when you have trouble. If you can't find them, go to your Bible and see if you can figure out which word is which. I tried to pick simple sentences, ones with words we've already looked at.

So this is just a helpful tool for you to use. Maybe next week we'll look at a few more of these. All right, moving on, moving on. Before we get to our books, I have one other important thing I'd want to share with you, but we do have to get to the book eventually.

One of the things that we've looked at, and you've probably begun to notice, and you may already be, find yourself somewhat frustrated at times, is that words will have different endings. And you're like, well, that's not the way I think that's supposed to look, right?

Probably the most good. That's not even the right way to say that. The best example, most good, is theos, and then we see, theon, right? And we see, theu. All right. And so we've seen it all of those different ways.

And it's amazing that all of those are the same word. But they're all being used in the sentence differently. And you say, this is so confusing. We do it in English. We change words very little, but it's the same word.

And we know it's the same word. And it's easy for us because we have phonetically grown up hearing it as the same word. I'm trying to think of an example and write off. I can't. But it'll come to me. But what I want to share with you tonight is how nouns and verbs...

Yeah, those are phonetically the same. Yeah. And that messes up a lot of people. A lot of people mess that up. Yeah, well, I'm thinking more words like house and home. House and home both have a synonym.

They're synonymous. Now, they don't mean exactly the same thing, but they both have that H-O at the beginning. And sort of in a sense, your mind goes to understanding that house and home are synonyms, right?

And in the same way, they all have that they at the beginning, and they they are sound. It lets you know that's what the word means. And like there's other words that will take that, like the word theanoustos.

Theanoustos means God breathed. But you see the thea in it, and that's the prefix. And you understand that pneuma means breath. And so theanouma, theanoustos, means God breathed. That's the word in 2 Timothy 3 .16, which says all Scripture is breathed out by God.

All Scripture is inspired. The word inspired is the translation of theanoustos, right? So that's what I'm simply saying is they're in English. We have these, and we don't realize it because we've been using English all our lives, and we don't notice it.

But once you become more familiar with the words, the endings won't bother you as much. But it's important, in a sense, to understand why we have these endings. And I want to, for a moment, just give you some thoughts.

I am not giving you this. It's like eight pages, and I don't have the ability to photocopy that for you. This is all available online at ntgreek .org. But basically, what I want to share with you is how nouns and verbs are broken down.

Now, this is not something I'm expecting you to memorize or even really remember. It's something I'm introducing you to because it's going to help you understand why there are all these different endings.

Right? Greek words have roots, stems, and endings. Your roots and your, what we would call in English, your prefix and suffix. Right? Struct. Structure is a word. Put the prefix con at the beginning of structure, and it becomes construction.

No, it doesn't. It becomes construct. Right? You put the prefix ion on the end, it becomes construction. And that's how you build a word with prefix and suffix, and it changes its use and meaning. Well, same way in the Greek.

You have the root, that source middle word, and you have words at the beginning, and words, or a prefix and a suffix, what we call stems and endings. Okay? So, in regard to nouns, you have what are known as, you have the noun number, or the grammatical number.

And in that regard, it's the question of is it a singular noun, or is it a plural noun? Right? That's the only two really options that you're going to have. And we've already looked at this, that like in English, you have you and you.

It can be singular and plural, but in Greek, it will be two different words, giving you the singular and the plural. You also have the gender. Now, we do not do this in English. We do it somewhat when we talk about he and she.

Those are gender. But if you've ever studied Spanish, anybody here speak Spanish? They have a Spanish background, maybe a little? Well, the way that you would say certain words, amigo is a friend who is a male.

Amiga is a friend who is a female. You see how the ending changed? Because the gender changed. Right? Did it? As well. Okay. So, masculine, feminine, and neuter will determine endings. So, not only do you have the number that determines singular or plural, you also have the gender.

Masculine, feminine, or neuter. But then you have something called the case. And the case is how you understand how the noun is being used. The cases are, there are basically five of them. There's some debate on this, but I'll just give you the easiest.

It's the five cases are nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative. Do not write that down. Don't even try to memorize it. I'm telling you. I'm not saying you can't. But I mean, you go to the website and get it.

It'd be much easier for you to just download it. No, not provocative. Vocative. Think of the word vocal. The nominative case is the case of the subject. So, in English, how do you know that something is the subject?

Sometimes, but generally it's word order. Right? So, if I say, the boy threw the ball, the boy is the subject. But if I say, the ball was thrown by the boy, the ball is now the subject. So, it's word order in English that typically defines subject and predicate.

However, in Greek, it's not. The word order isn't as important as the endings. The endings will tell you if it's the nominative or not. If it's the subject or the predicate. Right? Does that make sense?

So, this is why the endings will change. This is why in John 1 .1, In that part of the sentence, it's part of the predicate. It's not the subject. Right? Now, it's the nominative, but it's a predicate nominative.

And that's a little bit more to explain. But the point is, the difference in the endings is how the noun is being used in the sentence.

In some endings, you will add a word like of or something.

Yeah. Theou is typically with the article of God. You know, to Theou is of the God or of God. So, I'm not going to go through what these mean, but the nominative, the genitive, the dative, the accusative, and the evocative are all cases.

And when you get into more of the interpretation, at this point, you're learning vocabulary. And the only reason I'm sharing this with you tonight is because this is going to affect when you say, wait, that word looks different.

It's because it has a different ending. Because it's being used differently. It's still the same word. It's still the same word. It's just being used differently in the sentence. And you can look these up.

Like I said, the genitive case is the case of the class or kind of God. It's that. The dative case is the indirect object. The accusative case is the direct object. And the evocative case is, and you think of like the word vocal, is the word of address.

Like, for instance, when Lord Jesus received my spirit, and Stephen said that, the Lord Jesus would be in the evocative. It's the case of address. He's addressing someone, you know. And some people debate whether or not the evocative is genuine.

It should be a genuine case. But if you take the five, which is fine for where we are at this point, the evocative would be the fifth one. Now, the nouns, though, are not as important. The more important words are the verbs.

That's right. Look at you, just Schoolhouse Rock. But it is. You're right. Verbs are where the action is. And verbs are hugely important when you are trying to understand what's being said. And in English, you know, we have different tenses of verbs, but we're most familiar with past, present, and future.

Right? You had ran, you had run, or you have ran, run, running, and will run. All of those are examples of the same word, but being used in different tenses. You know, I ran, which I didn't because I don't, but I only run when things are chasing me, and I don't like to run.