Mounce Archive 24 - God and Jesus

Bill Mounce is traveling this month and is taking a break from his weekly column on biblical Greek until April. Meanwhile, we’ve hand-picked some classic, popular posts from the “Mondays with Mounce” archive for your Greek-studying pleasure.

In one of his first posts, Mounce helps us take a deeper look at Paul's introduction to the book of 1 Timothy. By looking at the grammar in the Greek, we can see how Paul referred to the Trinity. Mounce calls this a "christologically sensitive grammatical structure."

You can read the entire post here.

“Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord” (1 Tim 1:2). Paul begins his letter to Timothy with a somewhat normal greeting, and yet sometimes familiarity can hide significant truths from English eyes.

One of the joys of Greek is in seeing the nuances of grammatical constructions. Albeit, it can take some time in the language to develop this level of sensitivity, but that’s the joy of the journey.

In this verse, there is one preposition (“from,” apo) that governs two objects (“God” and “Christ Jesus”). Grammatically, this means that Paul is in some way thinking of the two objects as acting in unison, as one. If “God” and “Jesus” were two distinctly different entities, normal Greek grammar would require the preposition to be repeated (“from God and from Jesus”). But the single preposition means that the two objects are to be seen as a single entity.

But what is the precise nature of that single entity?

(Continue reading the entire post here.)

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William D. [Bill] Mounce posts about the Greek language, exegesis, and related topics on the ZA Blog. He is the author of numerous works including the recent Basics of Biblical Greek Video Lectures and the bestselling Basics of Biblical Greek. He is the general editor of Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary of the Old and New Testament Words. He served as the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version Bible translation, and is currently on the Committee for Bible Translation for the NIV. The Mounce Reverse-Interlinear™ New Testament is available to freely read on Bible Gateway.

Learn more about Bill's Greek resources at BillMounce.com.