Hello, this is Pastor Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.
Today we're going to be going over John 1, verse 8 from the Greek New Testament.
Let's go ahead and look at it in Greek here.
Uch in echinos tophos, alina martyrisi peri tu photos.
Now in English, this verse says, he was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of
that light.
Talking about John the Baptist.
He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light.
Let's look at this word by word in Greek.
Uch is another form of the word that we've already seen, u.
Uch means not.
In means was.
You should remember that from John 1.1, in the beginning was the word.
And our he in ologos.
So uch in means was not.
Uch in echinos tophos.
Now we know tophos means the light.
Echinos, we briefly mentioned in the lesson on demonstrative pronouns for John chapter
1, verse 2, when we talked about utos in and our he proston theon.
Utos was that demonstrative pronoun normally translated as this or this one.
Echinos is actually the opposite of that because it means that or that one.
You know in English, the opposite of this is that.
Well in Greek you have utos and you have echinos.
Now notice the ending here of echinos is the masculine singular nominative case ending.
So what this is saying here literally in Greek is that one, talking about John who we just
mentioned, that one was not the light.
That one was not the light.
Well means but, okay?
And notice it has an apostrophe right here because actually the word is alla.
Alla means but.
But because we've dropped the alpha and run it together with the next word, there's an
apostrophe there showing that something's missing.
So this gets run together as allina martirisi.
So but in order that, we learned this word in the lesson on John 1.7.
But in order that martirisi, we've got the telltale yota subscript telling us that this
is a subjunctive verb, in order that he might bear witness, peri tu photos, about the light.
So literally word by word what this is saying is that one was not the light but in order
that he might bear witness about the light.
Now that does not sound right in English.
That is not a proper English sentence to say that one was not the light but in order that
he might bear witness about the light.
The second part of that sentence is not grammatically correct in English if we were to do it that
way.
Which is why in the King James Version again you will see italicized words added was sent.
Remember in English the verse said he was not that light but was sent to bear witness
of that light.
But was sent to bear witness.
Now the verb bear witness is right here, martirisi, in order that he might bear witness about
the light or of the light.
But there is no verb sent in this passage which is why sent is in italics in the King
James Version.
It's not just a word that's just been added to the Bible, randomly adding words to scripture
because the word sent is found earlier in the passage.
Remember there was a man sent from God whose name was John.
So it's not that the King James translators have just randomly added a word here.
What they're doing is they're repeating the word sent from a few verses ago in order to
make the sentence in English make sense and to be a grammatically correct, easily understandable
See always taking just the most rigidly literal word for word translation is not right.
For example for those of you who speak Spanish if you want to say in Spanish my name is Steven
normally you would say me llamo Esteban.
But me llamo Esteban is actually literally translated as I call myself Steven.
But if somebody showed up in America and said hello I call myself Steven you would
instantly know hey this person is a foreigner they're not speaking very good English.
So when the Bible is translated into English obviously we don't want to change the meaning.
Obviously we don't want to add or take away from God's word and corrupt God's word in
that way.
But it does need to be translated into proper English and it needs to be translated in such
a way that it is understandable in our native English tongue.
Otherwise we could just put the whole Greek New Testament into Google Translate and say
well there you go we've translated the New Testament.
But it would come out sounding awful.
And by the way a lot of these new versions like the NIV the New American Standard they
sound awful because they're just poorly translated.
So the great thing about the King James is that they make it sound good without changing
the meaning without corrupting God's word giving a one hundred percent accurate perfect
translation not changing the meaning at all not taking away from or adding to what God
is saying but putting it in good beautiful poetic English.
So what we have here akinos meaning that one referring to the guy that we just talked
about that one was not the light but in order that he might bear witness about the light
is what those words mean individually.
But in English we have he was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light.
And we get the exact same meaning in an English sentence that sounds good and makes sense.
The word sent that is in italics and the King James is coming from the earlier verse where
the word was apestalmenos if you remember that word sent in the original Greek.
So the word sent is in the original Greek it's just a few verses earlier.
It needs to be repeated in this verse in order to make a good English sentence.
So again let me read the whole verse for you next lesson we will work on John one
verse nine.