How To Study The Bible

One of the things that we covered many weeks back, and I wanted to revisit it a little bit. One of the things that I had ordered a couple months back, but it took a while for them to get it reprinted, is a 1611 King James. Most folks who have a King James don't realize that it's a revision about six generations after the 1611. So anyway, I have a 1611 there. It's one of those things with all the little stickies hanging out. And I just, I wanted to... Let me see if I can get it better adjusted. That's a little better. What's that? Keep going? Does that help? Okay. Alright. One of the things that... I understand that. See, the priests...

Here, the F is in the middle of a word. look like F, and so that's one. And then the Roman numeral one, if it's the last Roman numeral, in this case the only, actually looks like a J. And here it says the first and the last, and it looks like the first and the last, right? And that's the title.

So they have these various titles up above, and sometimes they're a little bit startling. This one here, the uppercase isn't too bad, but one of the things you'll see as you look, and we'll take a look in a minute, the U's and the V's in the lowercase are switched. And that's one reason why we'll have this strange anomaly in our alphabet where we call it a W and it's really a double V, right? But one of them as well that's interesting is I's are, excuse me, J's are I's.

So John is spelled yond. And Jesus is Jesus. And James is James. So some real interesting changes there. One of the other things, if we focus a little bit more on the first verse there, here is kind of the chapter summary. Eon, again not John, Eon writeth his revelation. to the Seowin churches of Asia, signified by the Seowin golden candlestick, see the E-K-E-S, and the coming, a couple of M's there, of Christ in His glorious power and majesty, with an I-E at the end of majesty. Yes, in majesty, the J is an I. Yeah, that's right.

And I think that's one thing a lot of folks, boy, it's got to be, you know, King James, well, which version, see? The reality is that the English Bible was changed from the time, you know, Tyndale, first translated from the Greek and the Hebrew, was changed with several different translations. And then the King James of 1611, and you can take a look at more details there on your own, the King James of 1611, was modified about a half dozen times.

What most people are reading is actually a 1769 version. That was the latest revision. And the other thing too, it has included in it, as was included in the original, the Apocrypha. And it wasn't actually for roughly a couple centuries before the Apocrypha was dropped out of the King James Version.

So anyway, you might be fascinated to look at it. Oh, I got one flag in there where it talks about unicorns. And there's an interesting history behind that. It has to do with an extinct species of wild ox that died out about the time the King James Version was being translated, and they didn't know what it was.

What is this word? And so they looked at the Greek translation of the Old Testament that had been made centuries earlier, and it said, monokeros, one horn. And so they said, well, let's put it in Latin, since actually the translators of the King James were really Latin specialists. They weren't as much Greek and Hebrew scholars as they were Latin specialists, so they converted to Unicornus or Unicorn.

Anyway, you'll take a look at that and have some fun with that as well. I want to take a look at several things this morning, so we'll be covering a lot of ground. I want to hand out That's out this one here. One to Cheryl. You're good. Just take one so I can read.

All right, let's take a look at this item on Greek cases. And that's not little suitcases made by Greek people, OK? Greek cases here has to do with, in English, in order for us to tell somebody what part of the sentence the noun belongs in, we rely on word order, don't we?

For example, the boy hit the ball with the bat. If I switch the word order, the boy hit the bat with the ball, or the bat hit the boy with the ball, all these different switchings, we keep our nouns the same in English, don't we? And we understand what hit what with what because of where we have the words.

In Greek, the word order is far less significant because what did what to what is determined by little changes in the word itself. And so just like they do with their verbs, they'll put tense, voice, mood, person, and number in the verb, five different things built into the verb, the nouns will not only be masculine, feminine, and neuter, but what is doing what to what is all determined not by the word order, but by small changes in the word itself.

The same principle applies, if you can kind of think of that. So my reason for going over this this morning is not so much that you're going to need to sit there and know what each of these are in order to make any sense out of the Greek. We'll go over it, and this will be maybe a handy reference, but that's not my point. so that you understand where I'm going with this.

If you look in your inner linear New Testament and you're looking up a word, say, you think, all right, this looks like agape, but I notice the ending has changed, or agape, okay? I notice the ending has changed. The reason it's changed is not because you have a different word per se, but they have modified the ending so that it fits the case. You see that? Okay? So if you're looking something up and you say, well, I don't understand this. I thought this was agape. And I'm trying to look it up, but the ending's a little different. Is it a different word? What's wrong with these people?

The point being, as we go through these, if we understand that, then what we'll be doing is saying, OK, I know that that means, because it has a different ending, that it must be a different part of the sentence. But that shouldn't confuse me when I do a word study. It doesn't have a different word meaning. It just has a different indication as to what part of the sentence it's in. You see the difference there?

All right, so let's go through these. This is basically out of one of my Greek books, and I just made some notes off to the side as was helpful for me as I was going through the class there. The first case is nominative, or one way to think of it, it's the naming case. It's just a statement, a fact. It's the subject. Let's see, off to the side. The other one is genitive, and that is of, and let's take a look at the examples below.

Nominative case, there would be, underlined in blue, the apostle knows. It's just simply, the apostle is a subject, right, of the sentence. The next one is genitive case, has to do with basically a description of possession. So you see the example underlined in blue, the apostle's house, or the house of the apostle.

The ablative, and boy, some of these words are strange. You wonder who came up with them. But the ablative is a sense there of from. So the example there underlined in blue, the apostle sends the servants from the house. Everybody following me here? Okay. from the house.

So what's going to happen is I'm going to have a different form of the word apostle for each one of these instances. And don't be confused, it's not a different word. When you go to look up the word apostolos, you're looking up the right word. The different form is not from a different meaning of the word, it's because it has a different case, just like the examples we're going through. Yes?

It is the ending typically in nouns. When we get into verbs where I have all these different, you know, tense, voice, mood, person, and number, those can be changed at any place depending on what the form is. In nouns, the cases, you're typically looking at the end. So the first part of it will look recognizable and then the end will be a little different. Good point. All right, the next one, locative, has to do with, this says in, okay? So where is it? It's located in. So here's an instance where you'll have another ending when it's used in that way.

I'm sorry, thank you. Yeah, dative. Dative is the case of reception and that is to, so the example being the apostle is speaking to the crowd, okay? If you said the apostle is coming from the crowd, the word would have a different ending than speaking to the crowd. Now here's the squandrel to locative. The apostle is teaching in the house. So that location is going to have a different ending as well.

Instrumental. The instrumental also uses the same form as the dative and expresses means or instrument. It's by means of or with. Yes? How do you know between dative and instrumental? You aren't going to tell by the form of the word. You're going to tell whether it's dative or instrumental by the context. Sometimes the word form may not be different in each individual case, but you're going to tell by the context.

That's what it's talking about. The example is that the apostle teaches with laws, and frankly I think that's a lousy example because I don't think the apostles were real big on teaching law, but anyway. The next one there is the accusative. is one of limitation, and their example there, the apostle is teaching the Son. In other words, it's limited to the particular object that it's referring to. And the last one is vocative, and that's just calling out, you know, boy, brother, Sister, teacher, you know, whoever it is you're calling out. Pardon?

Behold, yes. Any statement that is calling out a noun in a kind of getting their attention, yelling out, you know, brothers and sisters. If Paul was writing to the saints, he might say saints. And that would be in the evocative voice. Behold is a verb. Okay, so that's actually a little different, okay? So in this instance, it's the noun used as a calling out. And there's some nouns that would be rather strange to imagine somebody calling them out. Just like we wouldn't yell for a car, right? Car! Okay, we wouldn't do that, okay? So some of these you're going to find more commonly in that case than others just because it's more normal and usually a person, right? Yes, Tom?

Ah yes, I was having all kinds of computer and printing fun and what happened is the graphic went and overlaid on the printout but not on the screen. So, but yes it's actually by Thomas Sawyer, the revision here. This is adapted from Essentials of New Testament Greek. Cut off on the bottom there.

So, again, my point is not that you're going to look up each one of these cases. I think that's a greater level of detail than we're intending to get into here. But my point is that you be aware of the fact that you've got, you know, it's the same noun, but different, and as Dave pointed out, as this question indicated, different endings. And those endings will indicate different cases, but the word, the base word meaning is still the same. Example. Apostle is a special messenger. No matter whether I put them in this or that or some other part of the sentence, it still means special messenger. Get the point?

So the word meaning will remain the same. Its place in the sentence and its part of the grammar structure will be different by the case ending. But the core and root word meaning will be the same. So for that, let's take, for instance, Here's a case on the back side of the same sheet that you have in front of you there. Here's an instance where you have the word basically appearing twice in the sentence.

The Apostle sends the Apostle. Right? Ha Apostolos Pempeton Apostolon. And a couple of things. One is the article matches the noun. Although both of these mean apostle and both of these are the, it's different because of the part of the sentence that it's in. You see that? It still means apostle in both places. The ending change is simply to indicate what part of the sentence it's in. See that?

So don't be confused if you go look that up. I'm interested in your comment on apostolic speeches with laws, and I appreciate your comment. But my guess is that the apostates are all Jewish, and there are the arguments that the Gospels don't apply to us because they're really Jewish books. James is a Jewish book. I don't want to confuse anybody. Your preacher's gospel was really Jewish.

I mean, when Paul got mad at him, you know exactly where that happened. Right. Galatians 2. I mean, it seems to me that there is an argument that the apostles thought it was, except in Paul. But Paul being a believer, our apostle, if you will, you see what I'm saying? Yeah. So I mean, is it possible that this is okay? Well, yeah, again, we could spend the morning on this and then talk.

But in fact, you see, using or with laws, I guess you could even take an instance where Paul did. But notice, for example, where he talks about, you know, honor your mother and father. And he says it's the first, you know, commandment with a promise. So even he used it.

My point being, I didn't sit there and beat him over the head with the law, as opposed to... Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, there is a place for making some important distinctions there, more than we have time to go into this morning. But the laws are not to the place of being just toss them out.

But we need to look very carefully at what what fits and what applies. Paul was willing, for example, to take the instance of here's a commandment with a promise and take that aspect of it without telling people, live by this stuff. As a matter of fact, when the Galatians tried to do that, he was quite adverse to it.

Anyway, does that in brief answer your question? Okay. Somebody else have a hand up here? Okay. So anyway, this is about as far as I'm going to go into this case thing. But again, the point being, don't let word endings confuse you. It is simply the Greek folks' way of differentiating between words that mean the same thing in different parts of a sentence, just different than English. And if we can get that out of it, I'm happy.

OK? Yeah, Tom? I'm sorry, what? Oh, I see what you're saying, yeah. That was just the way it came off the overhead. I'm pretty well stuck with it unless I want to go modify it. But I get your point. OK. Let's take a for instance. Will the real agape please stand up. You look at this.

This is off what we talked about last week as an analytical Greek listing or lexicon. And as Wayne pointed out, there's actually a number of different publishers that have put these things together. And in truth, a lot of them are real similar. Pushbacher is the one I listed when I handed out some things to you. But there are others. And I think, Wayne, who was the publisher of the one you got? It was one of these no-names things. Zondervan. Zondervan, but nobody claims it.

So, yeah, but the bottom line is various people have published and it's the same basic idea. What you're doing is realizing the fact that there's all these different verb and nouns, you know, forms. In English, you know, if we try to apply English grammar to it, it sounds confusing.

But, so I wanted to put this before us and let me get this in front of you. When I put this before us, we have a chance to look at it and to understand what it is that this analytical is going to do for us here. Now, the truth is the truth is that the the listing of what words that look like I got pay is actually longer than what I've put on here. So it gets worse. But but here is here is one of the things to take note of. Here's this word. Agapeis, okay? It's a dative, plural, feminine noun. Okay? But notice, you hear these dots come across, and what does it say? Agapei. Agapei.

So this is, and this is the number you see over here is the Strong's number that correlates to that. So what this is telling you, what's listed on the left is the specific form of that word. What's listed on the right is the general form. So, you know, we'll hear Christians talk about, you know, agape love, okay? And the truth is that's the general form. All the specific forms, depending on where it is in the sentence, are listed on the left. So if you're looking up your inner linear and trying to figure out what this thing is, and you say, that looks like agape, but it's spelled a little funny, Then you can go up here, you can look it up in the analytical and say, oh, OK, the general form is over there.

And that way, if I have some kind of lexicon, I can look it up. The lexicons are typically, when it gives you all the detail about what this means, are typically not written with all these variations. They're going to give you the general form for you to look up. Because when you're doing a word study, you're trying to find out what does the word mean. but it's not giving you information about where does it fit in the sentence. This is to lead you back to how can I look this up? Yes, Tom.

Which one is this derived from? Which book? This one here is the Hirschbacher, here it is, Analytical Greek Lexicon, OK? Now, this top one that I showed you here, we talked about first, agapais, is a noun. The next one down, what do you notice about it? Ah, OK. See, if it's a noun, you're going to see this at the ending. This is present active infinitive, agapan. That is the verb. And the general form of that verb, and when they give you the general form of a verb, it's the first person singular, Agapou. Okay? So, when you're... What's that? I love. Yes. I love. And that's the simplified form, right? Because the Greeks had all these different words for love. But yeah, the simplified form, I, first person singular, love. Okay?

So that's where it's going to direct you. And that way, if you look up this word in the lexicon, you might not find it. But you might be asking yourself, how do I look that word up if I can't find it? Then you go to this analytical, and it's going to lead you to this word. And if you've got anything else like Strong's Concordance or anything like that that has Strong's numbers listings, then you're going to look at this number. And notice, see, these are just one apart in terms of the strong numbers, but this is a noun, that's a verb. We have words that are used in a noun and a verb form too. Can you give some examples? Can you think of some? Love. Hey, good point. The word love is a noun in English. It's also a verb. In our modern era, one of them that's become both is facts. fax this off for me, would you? Or did you get the fax? And we use the word both ways.

Similar here, where the general form of the word looks so close that they're listed right next to each other. And the only way you can tell the difference is just a couple of letters at the end. See that? So just like in English, we've got verbs and nouns that are real similar. Same thing in Greek. The verb and the noun may look real similar, which is another reason If you see it and it looks like agape but I'm not sure, look it up and find out what it is. Find out which one. See that?

This is basically a ditto. So all these are verbs based on the same agapao. Wayne, does yours by chance have the same, does it do this for OK, yeah, it's basically a ditto mark. Only they use it as an abbreviation for Latin. Yeah. Now, notice, see this number 25?

Now, I'm going to come down here, and now I've got that listed out here. Here is the kind of base word that all these variations come off of. And this base word here, it lists Agapao. Now it gives me some information about what that means. So I can actually use the analytical to get some insight, but I've got to go first to find out what that base word is and then look it up. Now here's another for instance. Here we've had a form of a noun, several forms of the verb, agapao, and now here I am. Here is the base word agape.

And then it defines this as love, generosity, kindly concern, devotedness, love feast, and then gives an example. Before we get down to the end of this sheet, and it actually goes beyond the page. I cut it off just because it was getting to be too much. Before we get down to the bottom there, notice several more variations. This is, again, And then this gets real complicated.

Look how many extra letters are in there. All the extra letters are in there, although that's the same verb as Agapao. It's almost twice as long, and the reason is they're building all the information into the one verb. Everything about tense, voice, mood, person, and number is built into the verb.

They've got different kinds of accent marks which will slightly affect pronunciation, not to the point that we're going to get concerned about it. Typically, those accent marks don't have to do with variation in pronunciation per se as much as, I'm trying to figure out how to describe it, minor points of inflection. And even whether you put an H sound in front of it. There is no letter H in Greek.

What they'll do is they'll have this, you notice how it looks like a sort of a comma? If the comma is reversed the other way, then you pronounce the A with an H sound. So that's where it tells you it's one way and not the other. Here's an example. Sin is hamartia, right? There is no letter H. So what they'll do is they'll reverse that what looks like a comma over the A, and that's the H sound. So that's a brief explanation.

You see these little marks, and it can make a difference in the actual meaning of the word. The spelling by letters may be identical, but it may have slight nuance of meaning based on that. Yes, Tom? In my generation, going backwards, Most of us took Latin just because. When you actually took scholarly Latin, you had to remember to use those long marks. The accent marks in some cases can make a difference in the meaning.

It's something to take a close look at if you're looking something up. It also can have an impact on how things are pronounced, but we won't go into that level of detail in this class. But just keep it in mind, and your point's well taken, that if you see two words and they look like they're spelled identically, and you see those slight differentiations and those accent marks, look at the difference, because it may well make a difference in what it means.

Two questions on the 26 down here. Yes. You have a couple of the different endings, I assume that's for the case? What they've done here, this is singular feminine noun and they've given it in the neuter and masculine as well. So just showing different ways that it could show up? Yes. Not necessarily to match? The case they've given is a feminine form. The definition matches any of those.

Again, the definition isn't changed. And that's part of my point in going over this. It's not that you get really into trying to analyze which case is it. But if you can understand that there are variations in the word, it doesn't change the root meaning. But it does have to do with how the sentence goes together.

Yeah, Donna? So a noun can be masculine, feminine. They can actually switch them. Yes, they can actually switch them. It has to do with, for example, who is doing it. Is it a man or is it a woman? So they can actually change it, but the ending changes. An example from German would be the word teacher. Yes. If it is a man teacher, it's Leve. Yes.

If it's a woman, it's Leve Lin. So in this case, love is the noun. Why would you have it show me a feminine and a masculine? These are all feminine. In the form that they're shown. But here's a for instance. In English, We have a waiter and a waitress, an actor and an actress. I think a lot of the feminist drive is to get rid of those differentiations, but the truth is we actually have some of that in English.

The word is the same, but the gender gets switched depending on who it's associated with. My guess is, from where I'm coming from, with love, if it's he loves or she loves, then you're a jerk. Would this be like her love, his love? Yes, there you go. It has to do with what is the gender of the one it's associated with.

That's right, the rest of the action in the sentence. And again, my point is not that you become experts in all the detail of the Greek grammar, but if you recognize that I'm going to have variations in the ending, depending on how the sentence is put together, don't let that throw you. If I can look at that and recognize, okay, I've got a variation in the form, but the bottom line is it really is this, then I can still look it up and use the tool. That's my point.

But yeah, it's one thing about Greek that will drive people crazy is because in English we can most of the time let something remain in the same form. Greek, you've got to change it all the time. Whereas in English, it's very critical where you put it in the sentence, but the form of the word can stay the same. Greek is the other way around. I don't have to be too careful about sentence sequence sometimes, but I got to look real carefully at how I ended it.

And I'll have a whole bunch of different forms. So what I've selected from here is a short listing of verbs and nouns that all have a similar start and there's actually more than what I selected because the variations are so great. But they're all rooted in the same verb and all the nouns are rooted in the same noun. And because this tells you what the root is, you can go look that up. I make the point? I can look up that root word even though I've got a gazillion variations. on this, and they all look real similar.

Yeah? It's kind of like if you look at it from a different scholarly standpoint, you see an element in the periodic chart like gold. OK, but there are radioactive forms of gold, and there are also just plain forms of gold that don't emit radiation. But it's still gold. OK. Yeah.

The bottom line is we have a lot of instances, and you bring up the chemistry instance, if we say Boy. Well, I could put a lot of adjectives in front of that, couldn't I? Fat boy, big boy, strong boy, weak boy. I could put a lot of different adjectives, make a lot of choices.

And the reality is we use extra words and word order to make the difference. Greek builds everything into the word. And if they add extra words, typically that's for emphasis. Here's a for instance. You can build into the verb and say, I love, and then complete the sentence, right, in Greek. The I love, it's all built into the word. If you add the word I in front of it, that emphasizes I love, because you're doubling it. In English, you wouldn't want to do that.

I love, that sounds funny. In Greek, that's how you do it. Here's the place where it matters. Jesus would say, ego emi, which means I, I am. It's the Greek way of saying what God said to Moses. Tell them I am has sent you. And so when Jesus used those words, he said ego emi, they picked up rocks. Because he wasn't just saying, you know, I am the way, the truth, and the life. He says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. That means I alone. And I, being the one who was there in the burning bush, am the way, the truth, and the life.

See that? So this is not only a way of looking up the words, but by seeing a repetition, you understand that that means emphasis. And it has a strong significance that comes out. Same way in English, we teach people not to use double negatives. In Greek, that's how you emphasize something. I won't not. Okay? And so there are senses there in which our kind of English thinking, we've got to back out of and get a sense of, okay, how are they using this language?

By just understanding these few things, now we have available to us a bunch of tools that are real valuable. That shifts to our next point here. I've got more different books than what I brought last week that you can take a look at in terms of some Greek reference tools. Let me go quickly around the circle here. Those of you who may not have gotten a handout last week, I've got extras of those. This is Dana and Manti's Grammar of the Greek New Testament.

It's frankly probably a little bit more than we're going to get into, but it's one that's commonly available. It's been around for decades and it's sort of a standard of Greek grammar. This is one, this was printed back in the 1800s and this is actually like a fourth or fifth edition that's still printed in 1875. So it's been around a while and this is actually one of about a half dozen volumes. But he goes and lists the Greek for each passage and then gives explanation, mostly in English, but again the value of what we're doing here this morning is just being able to recognize some letters and trace that so that it's not totally lost on us. And then give the description of the words, the word meanings, how the sentence fits together.

So real handy, even though it's over a century old. Another one here is Roberts and Nicole. This one was done roughly 100 years ago and similar to this one. Several instances, other things for you to look at, including the 1611 King James I have several copies of things that may be valuable.

Some of you, if you haven't been here before, got the alphabet, Greek alphabet, so you can continue to bone up with that. It's also on the back of some of these, although I had trouble with the printer, and so you may want to grab an extra if the Greek on the back is a little tough. One question that somebody had is, do you have anything that will help me bone up on English words? Because if I say things like preposition and noun and adverb and stuff like that, I've got several copies here of a reference to let me know if we run out, but it's just two sides of one sheet, you know, English grammar. So it'll give you some instance. And then further details on this, you know, the different parts of speech in Greek, just a quick summary. So anyway, feel free to have at any of those. And, you know, if we run out and you want one, let me know.

Okay, so let's pray. Lord, we've been through a lot of details in language this morning, but still it is marvelous how you have so arranged history and the timing of your Son's coming that this language, which was so very precise, the one that the gospel was spread on and in. And thank you for the depths and riches and precision that's in it. And Lord, as we look at these things, we ask that our minds would not settle so much on the fine details of the Greek grammar as on the truth that you've laid out in your word. We just pray this in the name of Jesus, our Lord. Amen.