Author Archives: New Testament Greek

Contract verbs are one of the most important verb groups in New Testament Greek. They are called “contract verbs” because their stems end in a vowel that contracts with the vowel of the ending. This contraction changes the visible form of the verb. As a result, students may fail to recognize a familiar lexical form when it appears in an inflected form.

For example, the lexical form ἀγαπάω may appear as ἀγαπῶ. The lexical form ποιέω may appear as ποιῶ. The lexical form πληρόω may appear as πληρῶ. These forms are not irregular in the ordinary sense. They are contracted forms produced by predictable vowel combinations.… Learn Koine Greek

Greek participles are among the most important and most frequent verbal forms in the Greek New Testament. A participle is a verbal adjective. It has verbal qualities because it comes from a verb and carries tense-form and voice. It also has adjectival qualities because it has gender, number, and case and may modify a noun, stand substantivally, or describe circumstances connected to a main verb.

Students often struggle with participles because they contain more grammatical information than most forms. A finite verb is parsed for person and number, but a participle is not. A participle must be identified by tense-form, voice, gender, number, and case.… Learn Koine Greek

The Greek infinitive is one of the most important verbal forms in New Testament Greek. It is not a finite verb. It does not have person or number. It does not say “I,” “you,” “he,” “we,” or “they” by itself. Instead, the infinitive is a verbal noun. It carries verbal meaning, tense-form, and voice, but it functions in noun-like ways within the sentence.

Students often struggle with infinitives because many of them look similar to other forms. For example, λῦσαι may be an aorist active infinitive, while λῦσαι can also resemble an imperative form depending on accent, context, and voice. The form λύεσθαι is middle/passive, but context decides whether it should be understood with middle or passive force.… Learn Koine Greek

Greek personal endings are among the most practical tools for reading and parsing New Testament Greek verbs. Once students learn how to recognize personal endings, they can quickly identify person, number, and often voice, mood, and tense-system. A single ending can tell the reader whether the subject is “I,” “you,” “he,” “we,” “you all,” or “they.”

For example, the present active ending -ω usually identifies first person singular, while -ουσι(ν) usually identifies third person plural. The ending -εται often identifies third person singular middle/passive. The ending -θησαν identifies third person plural aorist passive indicative. These endings are not decorations added to a stem.… Learn Koine Greek

Greek mood is one of the major categories of verb identification. When students parse a Greek verb, they must identify not only tense and voice but also mood. Mood tells how the verbal action is presented: as an assertion, possibility, command, wish, verbal noun, or verbal adjective. Without recognizing mood, students cannot fully understand how a verb functions in a sentence.

New Testament Greek uses six major verbal moods or mood-like verbal forms:

The indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative are finite moods. They can show person and number. The infinitive and participle are non-finite verbal forms.… Learn Koine Greek

Greek voice is one of the most important features of the verb system. Voice describes how the subject relates to the action of the verb. In English, students usually think mainly in terms of active and passive voice: “the man sees” versus “the man is seen.” New Testament Greek, however, also has the middle voice, and many common verbs appear in forms that look middle or passive but function with active meaning. These are often called deponent verbs.

To identify Greek voice accurately, students must learn more than English categories. They must recognize active endings, middle endings, passive markers, middle/passive forms, deponent patterns, and the role of context.… Learn Koine Greek

Learning to identify Greek tenses is one of the most important steps in mastering New Testament Greek verbs. A Greek tense-form is not identified by one clue alone. Students must learn to observe the stem, augment, reduplication, tense marker, voice marker, mood, ending, and context. Once these features are recognized, many forms that first appear difficult become understandable.

Greek tense-forms communicate more than time. In the indicative mood, they often include time reference, especially past time in augmented forms. But Greek tense-forms also communicate aspect: the way the action is viewed. A present form often presents action as ongoing, repeated, customary, or viewed from within.… Learn Koine Greek

One of the greatest breakthroughs in learning New Testament Greek verbs is understanding that a verb form is not built randomly. Greek verbs are formed from stems. A stem is the part of the verb that carries the basic verbal idea and provides the foundation to which tense markers, voice markers, mood markers, personal endings, infinitive endings, and participle endings are attached.

Students often begin with the lexical form of a verb, such as λύω, γράφω, πιστεύω, ἀγαπάω, or λαμβάνω. However, many Greek verb forms do not look exactly like the lexical form. A student who knows only λαμβάνω may not immediately recognize ἔλαβον.… Learn Koine Greek

One of the most important skills in learning New Testament Greek is the ability to identify verb forms accurately. A student may know many vocabulary words and still struggle to read the Greek New Testament if he cannot recognize whether a verb is present, aorist, perfect, active, middle, passive, indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, or participle.

Greek verbs carry a large amount of information inside their forms. A single Greek verb may communicate lexical meaning, tense-form, voice, mood, person, number, aspect, and sometimes even clues about discourse function. For this reason, students must learn not only what Greek verbs mean but also how to recognize their structure.… Learn Koine Greek