Matt Slick Bible Study, Basics of Greek

All right, who cares what you guys think? That's right, who cares? All right, everybody. So Laura's in, I don't know who else is in. Is anybody else in? How could you be in? There's zero count, it doesn't make any sense.

Introduction to Basic Greek

All right, so what we're gonna do tonight is go through a little bit of Greek and I'm gonna give a Greek lesson. Oops, here we go, I'm gonna put this on, I almost forgot. And we're gonna go through a little bit of Greek.

This is very, very, very basic Greek. I'm gonna give a rough outline for what Greek is. Nouns, verbs, declensions, conjugations, grammar structures, things like that. And I'll show you, you'll learn a little bit about English on the way.

And what I'm gonna do here for the feed is I've got an experiment, I'm doing this on my laptop in front of me. See how I can make it go like that. And I can also do this. Let's see if this is working right.

See, there you go. And I can do this because these are the lessons, the sheets that I have here that we're using. And there's seven pages. And most of it is just like seven pages, just this. All right, so can you hear me?

Just wanna check, make sure you guys can hear me okay. In the stream yard and the feed and all that kind of stuff. So, I'm gonna get a confirmation you can hear me and then we'll go on. Can you hear me?

Okay, yes, check. I didn't check the sound on it. I want your pages. I can email them to you if you want. It's not a big deal, but can you hear me? Here you go, thank you very much. All right, let's pray.

Okay, Lord Jesus, thank you. Just ask Lord for your mercy and your grace that you would cleanse us of our sins, Lord, that you would give us an open mind, clean hearts, open hearts, that we would approach your word and the truth of your word with reverence and the tools, even the small bit of tools that we're exposed to here, I hope it helps people as they learn a little bit about the language that you chose to have the New Testament written in.

We give you thanks, Lord, and we praise you and just ask for blessing on this, amen. All right, so let me just tell you that I graduated from seminary 30 years ago and I had, up to that point, I had four and a half years of Greek, three years in college and a year and a half in, excuse me, three years in seminary, a year and a half in college.

And in college, we studied classical Greek. In the New Testament, though, it's written in what's called koine. It's called common Greek. And so classical Greek is more uppity kind of Greek, a lot more complicated and more difficult.

And I think, but koine is quite difficult as well in certain areas. So what we're gonna do is just do this. We're gonna just go one thing at a time and you have your sheets and we'll go through this. Just wanna let you guys know that I'm quite rusty at Greek.

What I do use on a regular basis, though, is my Bible programs. And I know what passive is, active, perfect, pluperfect. I know about declensions. I know about dative and accusative. Way to go over this stuff.

So I can read these things. I can look at tools that'll tell me what parts of speech things are, sentences, and I can go to lexicon. So I have a lot of experience with that. And so the tools that I've learned have leveled out at a certain level to keep me good enough to what I need to do.

But I'm not teaching Greek. So I don't need to know a whole bunch more. All right, so what I'm gonna do here is just introduce you to the Greek alphabet. And I'll read the letters. It's pretty easy. There are 22 letters in Greek.

Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, p, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, kip, xi, omega. And those are the letters. And on the right, you'll see how they're pronounced.

And it's not hard to learn these letters because, and incidentally, you'll notice in the left column that they're capitals, in the right column, they're smaller. So we call the left column unceils, and the right column are called minuscules.

And some biblical Greek manuscripts are written entirely, for example, in unceils. And so that's what I understand anyway. So that's it. So, you know, the first thing you gotta do when you learn Greek is learn the alphabet.

And you'll see, like, alpha, beta, if you look at the right column, because most of it is, you'll ever read is in the right column. So you see an A, a B, that's pretty easy. The Y-looking thing is a G, you gotta learn that.

That weird D-looking thing, it's not too far from a D than an E. And that Z-looking thing is a zeta. And the, this is the one that's kind of weird, the N is really an eta, and it's the long sound of A.

And if you go down to, go up to epsilon, it's an E, and it's eh, but eta is the long A sound. And it's always the long A sound whenever that eta occurs. Theta, so the theta is TH sound combined. And then the Yoda, which is an I, a K, kappa, lambda.

It doesn't take much to figure that one out. The Mu, that's an M, and you kind of not see that from the English. And the V is actually an N. And then the Xi, it's pronounced K, you know, K-S, like Xi.

And then the O is Omicron, pi, you guys shouldn't have any problem with the P. The R is a P in English, but it's called a row, R sound. And the sigma, notice it has two, it says this or that. And the reason it does that is because the first one is the form of the S or the sigma that occurs inside of a Greek word.

And the final, it's called the final, occurs when it's the last letter. So the agathos, we'll go into it later, has an ending with that long, the S that we're familiar with, but inside of the word, it's that first one.

The tau is a T, oops-a-lon, oo. Phi, that's a phi, the F-P-H sound, or the F. Ki, it's like the kappa. And psi, P-S, is how, you know, ps, lips, and omega. Now, so you'll see in Revelation, I forgot the verse where Jesus says he's the alpha and the omega.

And so now you understand more. I love saying things like more better. You'll understand more, even more betterer, why, as said, it's the first and the last, the alpha and the omega, and that's what's going on there.

And so if you guys wanna learn how to read, read, that's, I should say, read to pronounce. It's not that hard. You'd actually be surprised. The word baptism is B-A-P-T, that's the root, or beta, alpha, P, tau, B-A-P-T.

And so you can see bapt, baptizo, baptismos, and you can see the bapt root in different words. You go, that's the baptism. It's simple. And, but then it gets hard. So let's go to the next sheet. Okay, and I'm gonna move it to the next sheet over here.

Greek Nouns, Cases, and Declensions

All right, let's see. I hope this is visible on the screen. Let's see. Okay, where's the, oh, I know what I gotta do this way. Okay, so I'm giving you a sentence in English. So here we go. Wow, Frank threw his son's ball to me.

I picked that sentence to kind of devise that sentence to show you different things. Wow is what we call the vocative. It's an exclamation. Wow. Frank is what we call the subject. But we, and when we do Greek, you learn this kind of vocabulary.

You learn it's the nominative, and that means it's the subject of a sentence. So my wife, Anique, she speaks French, and she studied French like this. So I could say to her, I could say to others, I could say, in your language, what's the present active indicative first person singular of, and then give the verb.

And they'll go, and I'll know. And so you have to, when you study Greek, and you study languages like this, not so much Spanish, when I learned Spanish, you don't have to do all that, but you do perfect, you do past, you do present tense, things like that.

But in Greek, you really do it a lot. Oh man. Anyway, so wow, Frank, through, that's the verb, that shows action. His son's, that shows possession, that's the genitive. It's called the genitive. That's what it's called.

And through his son's ball, that's the direct object, accusative. To me is the dative or the indirect object. So the object being spoken of is ball, and who it's thrown to is the indirect object. So wow, Frank, through his son's ball to me.

So we have vocative, nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative. These are all nouns. And here's the thing, is that there's only one verb in this sentence. Now some sentences can have multiple verbs, and stuff like that, and that's fine.

But just notice, one single verb, but it's the nouns. The nouns are what more or less give you trouble for a while. Then the verbs rear their ugly heads. And I learned there's a rule in Greek that whenever the dative of means is behind a genitive, genitive absolute, it always to be translated as an absolute this or that on Tuesday.

But on Wednesday it changes. Especially if you're facing south, then it's a new rule. And that's what it was like. And I will just tell you this, that in seminary, the seminary I went to was the fifth most difficult graduate school in the entire country of the United States at the time.

And so I had a friend named Gary, and we're in Greek class. 18 ,000 rules, you gotta know for one thing. And Gary snapped. And Gary stood up in class and, I agree, I like it, and we just sat around. And the professor just was nodding, and then he walks out.

And the professor just goes, okay, so on page 14, he just kept going, right? And so afterwards I talked to Gary, he's a friend of mine. I go, Gary, what happened? He goes, I don't know. It was just too much for me, I couldn't handle it.

I went, well, you know, no one thought anything. They get it, because it's incredible deep study. About three or four weeks later, I snapped. In Greek, in the whole Greek, like that, the Greek, this and that, and the seminary, this church, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I storm out. Gary told me later, he goes, okay, page 18, you turn to the, they didn't care, right? And so I went to apologize to the professor. He goes, it's okay, it happens. He says, you're not the only one.

And he says, yeah, it was very grueling. It was very, very grueling. We would get these tests, and it would be, you know, a sentence, and it would be, parse this word, relate it to this or that, and what's the rule?

What are we talking about? You know, it's like that sometimes. And so he just did the best, you know. We passed, and it wasn't that cruel. But we went through step by step, and it was just a lot to learn.

It was a fire hose. Then you went to the Hebrew class. Instead of going left to right, you go right to left at a different set of things. You know, a furtive patah, a silent shawah. I discovered, though, that no one ever actually spoke Greek back then.

Oh, no one ever did, no. What I discovered was they invented it to torture people in the future. That's what I discovered. And these guys were sitting around a campfire going, no, no, no, no, don't make it regular, make it irregular, and do it like this.

This will really, you know, freak them out. Hey, that's a good idea. Stercoulias, which is the god of feces in Greek. But anyway. So, okay, anyway. So, now, number three here, nouns decline. Verbs conjugate, I go, you go, he goes.

But nouns decline. We have a little bit of declension in English. Actor, actors, actress, actresses. Declension in a noun is a change of the form of the noun. And it carries with it, in English, not so much, but it carries gender, sometimes gender, and number.

Boy, boys, table, tables. It's a very short declension. But there is no such thing as a male table or a female table. But in Spanish, you do have gender for basically all objects. And so, you can have gender, in Spanish, you have gender and plurality, or it's called number, or gender and number.

So, nouns decline, and we'll get into that stuff, too. But nouns do what's called, have the nominative or the genitive or the dative or the accusative, or they can have the vocative. And, like I said, number four, they can be masculine and feminine.

They can also be neuter. And they can be singular and plural. Now, if you will go down there and you will look, and let me get this, scroll this up a little bit, and you look at this thing here, I copied this from a book, all right?

So, autos is he. So, look at the singular, S-I-N-G, N-O-M is nominative, and it's masculine. So, autos is nominative, masculine, singular. If you go down below, autoi, masculine plural nominative.

So, if you go to singular nominative, it's he. But if you go, say, autoi, which is plural nominative, it's they, and that word, in its form, functions as the subject. Or, if you threw the ball to them, it would be the bottom one there in the masculine column, autois, which is the dative.

Threw the ball to them. The ball would be the accusative. I did threw it to him, no, excuse me. Let's stick with this. Autois would be the dative, to them. But, you could have, go just straight over to the right, autais, that's to them, but that means females.

And autois, and here's a fun part, that is, to them, neuter. But notice that autois, neuter, and autois, masculine, are the same spelling, so it can be masculine, or it can be neuter. And then you determine which one it is by looking at the context of other stuff.

And so, notice how many forms there are of the single word, he, which takes singular or plural. We have four times three, which is 12, times two rows, which 24 different ways the word can appear. 24. The word the does this.

The word good, the word man, the word bad, all of them do this. And this is just one kind of declension. I'm not gonna get into other ones. You have other patterns, and you gotta learn these. And yeah, you gotta learn them.

Okay, so this is what, you go into class, and you read this, you go to your assignment, you go to book, I mean, you go home, you start reading the book, you get the alphabet memorized. And then you start doing things like osuon, that's how we used to do it.

We'd go nominative, genitive, accusative, or dative, accusative. This does it differently. In our manual we have, we'd go in a masculine singular, we'd go osuon. It would be, they have osuon, but we would do it the other way, osuon.

You know, oi, us, on, oi, us, oi, on, and you go like that. And you just do these different declensions, and you just say the word, because it was easier to remember patterns of sounds, and then write them out.

That's the fourth one, I mean, just the, you learn all kinds of tricks to get stuff for the exams. After a while, you just got it. But it was really a lot of work. So that's just the word hymn. And we're gonna go through some stuff about John 3, 16 later.

Greek Verb Tenses, Voices, and Moods

Now, on page three, so let me come over here. Page three, verbs conjugate, all right? And so verbs have tense, voice, and mood. So let's go over those. Tense deals with time. And in Greek we have the aorist, the present, the future, the perfect, the pluperfect.

And there are variations of these. These are the basics. This is what it is. Aorist, for example, I ate. It's an action that's in the past. Now, aorist in Greek is a little bit different than the past in English.

It's a little bit different. It has an element of kind of an action going on in the past, but not. The present, I eat, is, look down there at number six, a participle. So if a present is I eat, participle is I am eating.

If the present tense, I eat, is number one, and the participle, I am eating, is number 10, then in our equivalent of English, it has a slight ongoing action. It'd be like a two. The value of present tense, a little bit of an ongoing action kind of a thing in it.

Not a big deal. Anyway, basically, aorist is I ate. Past tense, present tense, future, I will eat. The perfect tense, I have eaten. So you could also say, I have been eating, which is a perfect participle.

I have been eating. So here we have the perfect, I have eaten. It's a past action that's continuing in the past and continuing in the present. I have eaten. Doesn't say I stopped. I have eaten. But sometimes we mean it as though I've already eaten, but we say I already have.

But we do use it like that. But keep it simple. The pluperfect, I had eaten. It is an action in the past, absolutely completed in the past. There's a terminus in it. Now that can happen in the perfect also, but it has that idea of its continuation possibility in the present.

And with the participle, then it's most definitely, I have been eating, which means I still am. So you can have a perfect with a participle, and you can have a pluperfect with a participle. A participle is an ING form.

I am eating. Action is ongoing in the present, expresses both verb and adjective. For example, the eating of the apple. So the eating is a noun form of the verb. So pluperfect, I had eaten. So let's look at voice, active, passive, and middle.

Active voice, I hit. The subject performs the action. I hit. I'm doing the hitting. Passive, I was hit. The subject receives the action. In the middle voice, I hit myself. The subject is affected by his own action.

And we have all these in English. We're just not used to, we don't talk about them like that. We just learn the language. We move on, you know, and stuff like that. Now, I've told you guys this before, but I'm gonna say it again.

Look at the pluperfect above. I was at a computer store. 20 years ago, Southern California, and I was talking to a guy. He had an accent. And he was from like Romania or Yugoslavia. I forgot which country, but over there.

And he'd been here for two years at the time. And his English was pretty good. And I said, you know, where are you from? Because I could tell your accent. He says, oh, from wherever. I said, okay, let me ask you, what's the most interesting thing you've learned about America or something that stands out?

Like big cars, big roads, or rude people, or whatever. And he said, the pluperfect tense. And I knew what it meant right away, because he didn't, nobody knows, you know, she's a Greek student. And he said, the pluperfect.

I said, what? I said, I know what that is. And I said, what about it? He says, we don't have it in our original language. I said, you're kidding me. And we talked about the pluperfect tense for a while.

It was a lot of fun. And I said, how could you not have the pluperfect? He goes, I know. And he told me it took two months before he understood what a pluperfect was in English, before the concept went to him.

He goes, oh, I get it. And then he immediately recognized, why don't we have it in our language? And yeah, there's, yeah. With my daughter, we're here speaking Japanese. She could tell you there's these weird things about Japanese too.

Okay, so anyway, I went to active, the passive, and middle. Then we have what's called mood, the imperative. Eat, it's a command. Exhortation expresses possibility. It's a command to do something. The indicative, it's just presented as being real by the author, okay?

It's just a, it means it's happening. It's a reality, it's an actuality. But the subjunctive, however, is not so. It's expressing possibility, not actuality. Indicative demonstrates actuality with a subjunctive possibility.

So he said to them, let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby so that I may preach. That's in the subjunctive in the Greek, Mark 138. That I may preach there also, for that is what I came for. That I may, it's in the subjunctive.

And we, that's what it is in English, a subjunctive. It's expressing an intended action and possibility, but it may or may not occur, okay? And optative, may it be according to your word. It's more uncertain than the subjunctive.

It shows intention of desire and a possible action. It's like the subjunctive, except weaker than the subjunctive. The subjunctive is an intention in the possibility. The optative, well, hopefully it'll be like that.

And we just don't know. And so when we do verbs, we parse a verb. So I've talked to people online, and they say, I've been studying Greek. And if it's a Christian, I don't hassle them. If it's an atheist, I know Greek.

I go, really, you study Greek? Yeah, and they'll say, I've had people say to me, that's why I know you don't know what you're talking about, Matt. I said, okay, maybe I don't. I don't know everything.

Lots of things I gotta learn about Greek. And I said, but can you parse ego, a, me for me, which is basic Greek. And none of them have ever been able to do it. So ego is simply the word I, but a, me is from the verb to be.

And ego, a, me is I, I am, literally. And I am would be the present, active, indicative first person singular. And so if I ask someone, can you parse that, present, active, indicative, first person singular?

I go, yeah, you've had Greek. If they were to say to me, present tense, first person, and I believe it's active, what's the rest of the stuff? I know they've studied it, okay? And I can look at stuff and go, what the heck is that again?

And I don't remember a lot of stuff. So I use my Logos program, which is sometimes why on the radio I'll say, when people ask me something, I'll read the Greek. I'm reading the, what the parsing tool is.

And I'll tell them, I'm reading the parsing tool. I'm reading what the Bible program says. I don't have this memorized. I don't want people to think I'm smarter than I am. So then that's what I'll do.

So that's what that is. Now let's go to page four. This'll be lots of fun. Okay, so this is John 3, 16. And we're gonna go through this slowly, all right? And I think maybe I can make this bigger for the screen.

Let's see if I can do this. Yeah, I can over here. And hey, go away, hide. There we go. Oh, you slime bag. Okay, do that. There we go. Let's see how that looks. Come on, there we go. Okay, so I hope you guys can see that pretty well on what we're doing here.

Let me see. I'm still here. Okay. Now. What? All right. So what we're gonna do is you'd notice that I was able to get this on one sheet and it's pretty balanced. It kind of worked out nicely. So what we're gonna do is go through this.

I'm gonna show you this. So John 3, 16, I picked because everybody knows it. And it's got a lot of verbs, a lot of nouns. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Yes. That all the believing in him not shall perish but have eternal life.

So let me read it in the Greek, pronouncing it. Gar hatheas autos agapesen ton kasmon huste, edoken ton monogone ton huyon ina paschopistuon eis auton me apoletai ala eke aounion zone. Joine. That's what it sounds like.

Okay, I'm not very good at pronouncing it, but okay. So you'll see, I was reading the Greek. Actually right underneath it, it says, gar hatheas autos epagasen. You can see the transliteration underneath it.

That's what's called a transliteration. So gar hatheas. Now also you may have noticed or may not have noticed in the Greek alphabet when I gave you the list, the letter H is not there. They don't have an H sound in a letter.

So what they do is look at for God, look underneath the word God and has the O which is actually an omicron and see the little comma above it. That's called a rough breathing mark. And it goes from, it goes like this, it goes this way.

And that means the H sound. That's what it means. That's how they make the H sound is it's called a rough breathing mark over the first letter. Okay, hatheas autos. And notice loved. Notice the opposite direction, egapason, egapason.

Okay, I'll show you that word, egapason. The first letter's an eta with a smooth breathing mark over it. There's no H sound. And then the G, which is a second letter. And then you see the A with a little accent mark.

So it's egapason, egapason, egapason. So you get the word agape. So how about pronounce it agape? Someone coming in? Is it, we'll see who it is. Hey, here's a, hey, how are you guys doing? Where's the other?

Oh, here we go right here. You wanna hand that to them? We have a little, we're on, going through John 3, 16. I went over declension and conjugation a little bit with a tense voice mood, active voice, middle voice, passive voice, operative, subjunctive, went through stuff.

See, she knows some Greek. She's had, you were? Oh, you were? Okay, nevermind then. So here's the lessons. There's the stuff right there if you guys want it. So now we're going over John 3, 16. And I'm just showing them a little bit of stuff.

No, as long as it's latched, the cats are upstairs. So the first line is in English, all right? The second line is the actual Greek. Now, I took out the line that shows what's called the basic or the limbo or the root, what it is, what the actual word form is.

Like it might be to be, might be the form, but it might be in the form of was, I was. But anyway, I took that out because it was confusing. And then the fourth line, this is what I'll do online or I'll be on the radio or I wanna do my research.

So for example, four in that fourth line, C-L-X, all I do in Logos Bible program is put my mouse over it and a little window pops up, conjunction logical explanatory. I put my mouse over, now notice it says ha-theos.

And ha is the first word, theos is the second word. And we're just gonna go with the second one, N-N-S-M, nominative, masculine, singular. Nominative is the subject, masculine is the gender, singular is the number.

And so, so this is an adverb, loved, for example. It's the aorist active indicative. Aorist is past tense, active is the voice that it's occurring, that God is the one. See now, here's how it works. God is the one who is performing the action of loving.

So that's why it's in the active voice and the verb goes back to the noun. So for God, so loved, it's pretty simple. And it's third person singular. So first person singular is I am, and second person singular is he is, third person singular is he, she, or it is.

And that's a bad verb because it's an irregular one to use in English. The, there's the word the, and notice, see it says the, God's the love of the world, the world, right? That's the word tan, okay?

And that's an accusative form of the, it's called a definite article, the word the. But go back over to the word God, for the God, that also, that ha, that o, is also the word the. The same word, different declension, that's all it is.

So the, and a word God is nominative, which mas, mas, excuse me, matches theos, which is nominative. And then the, which is in the accusative, and look at this, the word world, if you look down, is also in the accusative.

Notice the O-N ending, or it looks like an O-V, but it's actually a O-N, Aramacon, new. See how they match, the endings? And so you go, oh, well, they're related. It's not that hard. It can get hard.

Oh, man. But we can, you know, it's actually possible to learn the basic level of Greek so that you can get around. Just get around, take a couple, three months of, you know, once a week study, twice a week study, and you can get around.

All you gotta do is learn how to read the alphabet, and then just memorize some vocabulary, and a couple of things about some words, like oy, it's plural masculine, and os is plural thing. There's, there are different declensions, or different forms, you won't get them all.

But, you know, you'd go, oh. I can remember in college, the first time when I was able to do that, I took my Greek text to a church, and they're preaching, and I followed along in the Greek, and I could understand what was being said in the Greek all the way.

And it was awesome. It's awesome the first time it happens, right? It's like, yeah, I can see it. I've talked to my wife, but, hey, you know what? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that means this. She's going, okay, whatever you say.

And it was a lot of fun. And then you start seeing things in the Greek that they can't, they don't say in English. And we'll get to that as an example in here. Okay, so the word that, okay, it's just a conjunction.

He gave, so already you know it's gonna be an aorist, hopefully, in the past, right? And so the V-A-A-I -3-S. So it's the aorist, active. It's a verb, the V's a verb. A for aorist. The second A is active.

The I is indicative, third person singular. He gave. His only, tan monogone. It's the article, accusative, singular, masculine. And tan, and you can see stuff in there, and huyan is, I always like the word huyan.

And huyas, that means son, S-O-N. I just like the word. And my favorite Greek word, however, is splognizomai. Splognizomai, compassion. That's a word for compassion. Guess what the Greek word for pearls is?

Throw your pearls before a swine? Margaritas. Margaritas are biblical, okay? They're biblical, okay? Of course, you're supposed to give them to pigs, but I guess that's what it is. But margaritas, I was reading through the Greek a couple of years ago.

I was going through, I went, hey, margaritas. Good, anyway. So, his only begotten. Now, I'm gonna show you something about the word only begotten. Now, look at the, in the English, okay? The third line, it says tan monogone, all right?

Tan is just the word the. So we're gonna look at the second word, monogone. So, mono is only, and gone comes from gono, to beget. So, when you have, remember this, and if I don't quite get it right and you remember, then, okay, tell us.

But when you have two words, and you have a word that ends with a vowel that is right up to a word that begins with a vowel, depending on the situation, they can change into what's called a diphthong.

So, you have these rules you gotta learn, where when you have this before that, after that, then it becomes an O, and then it becomes an A, and then it becomes a, you know, whatever. You gotta know these.

But, sorry, long since gone. And, except after C, yeah, the neighboring way. That's true. So, it's not the same, but there are these weird rules that apply. And so, monogonese is only, and begotten from gonao, to beget.

But I would remember in Greek that the word for unique is also monogonese. So it's a play on words to some degree here, because if I remember correctly, I remember from a long time ago, the spelling for monogonao, only and begotten, and monogonese, unique, when the word unique is the same spelling as when mono and gonao come together and a diphthong forms, they become the same spelling.

And so, that's what's going on here. So, unique, only begotten, or it could be legitimately as unique, but we know that he's begotten of the father, which is why you say begotten. You could say he's only and unique begotten.

That's loose, but you could get away with it. Because if you understand what that play is on that word, you could say that, but we don't really wanna do that, but you could, okay? So son is tanhuyon, all right?

And it's the accusative, all right? The accusative case, and that all the believing in him, all the believing. So it's pas hapistoun. So all the believing is what it literally says in the Greek. It does not say whosoever.

Let me move this up a little bit. Okay, there we go, sorry about that. So the word for whosoever or whoever in Greek is hos. It's an omega with a rough breathing mark over it, and a sigma, hos. So it means whoever.

It exists, it's used in the Bible, New Testament, but that's not the word used here. What it's saying, is something else coming? No? What it's saying is the only begotten, all the believing one. Because what it literally says here is all the, and notice what it's saying.

All the, which is singular, and it's masculine. Nominative means it's the, it's the subject, right? Okay, and then what we have here is believing. Notice what it is. It's a present active participle, the believing one.

And it's singular. So it's literally believing, but in the singular form. Notice it's nominative of all the, pas ha, all the, pas ha is nominative singular. Believing is also nominative singular, but it's a participle, ing word.

All the believing. Now, because it's singular, we say all the believing, but it's in singular, one. So all the one believing. How do you, you don't talk like that in English. So all the one believing.

We don't, that's just not how we talk. So they translate it as whoever. Unfortunately, what happens is people will say to me, and I'm a Calvinist, and they'll say, well, when it says all the believing, or excuse me, when it says whosoever, it means they have the free will choice to be able to make a choice for God, because that's what whosoever means.

And they don't realize that's not what the Greek is saying. And even if it did, that's not what it means. It just says whosoever. It doesn't say how they come to believe, only that they are. And this is the same thing.

All that believe, but it's literally that all the believing one. That's literally what it's saying. All the believing, but it's literally singular, one. Because all the is singular, pas ha, are both, pas are two words, right?

Nominative, singular, masculine, both of them. And pastuon is a noun form, is also singular nominative, but it's a participle. Remember, a participle is I-N-G, eating, walking, going, okay? So God so loved the world that that gave his only son that all the one believing is what it's literally saying, or all the believing one.

That's what it says, but we don't talk like that, so we say whosoever, and that's fine. But if we're in a Greek class and you translate it literally as all the one believing, that's fine, that's correct.