Hello, this is Pastor Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona,
and today we're going to talk about Mark chapter 1 verse 1 in the Greek New Testament.
This is the third verse that we're going over, and it has some elements from the other two
verses that we've looked at.
But first of all, let's just read it, arhi tu evangeliu, isu fristu iu tu theu.
Now the first thing you're probably going to notice about this verse is that everything
seems to end in u, except for the first word arhi, everything else ends in that u sound,
which is made by the omicron ipsilon diphthong that we talked about in the video on the alphabet.
So again, arhi tu evangeliu, isu fristu iu tu theu.
So let's go through this word by word, arhi, we should remember that from John 1-1.
John 1-1 started out, en arhi in ologos, in the beginning, en arhi.
Well this doesn't have the end, so this is just arhi, the beginning, alright?
This verse in English says the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God.
So arhi tu evangeliu is the beginning of the gospel, the beginning of the gospel.
Now notice the word gospel, evangeliu.
This should remind you of our English word evangelist, or evangelical, someone who preaches
the gospel.
Notice the two gammas right next to each other.
When there are two gammas next to each other like that, it makes a sound like ng, or nigama.
So arhi tu evangeliu, alright?
And then isu is a form of Jesus, cristu is Christ, iu, son, tu theu, of God.
Now these two words here are the word the, okay?
But because those words are in the genitive case, it becomes of the.
Now let me stop and explain the genitive case.
In the other videos we learned about the nominative case, we learned the accusative
case, and we learned the dative case.
Well there's one other case that you need to know, and that is the genitive case.
Those are the four main cases with Greek nouns.
Now there is a vocative case also, but it's not very common, it's pretty easy, not anything
to worry about.
The four that you need to worry about are accusative, nominative, dative, and genitive.
Let's just do a quick review of those cases.
The nominative case is when a noun or pronoun is the subject of the sentence.
And when we say the subject, we mean it's the one who's doing the action, okay?
So the nominative case is the subject of the sentence.
The accusative case is the direct object of the sentence, okay?
The dative case is the indirect object, and we went over this in detail in the other two
verses that we did.
But the genitive case is one that shows possession, okay?
So for example, in this verse, it says the beginning of the Gospel, okay?
Another way of saying this would be the Gospel's, apostrophe S, the Gospel's beginning, okay?
Because the beginning of the Gospel.
So the genitive case often in English is expressed with the word of or the word from, okay?
In the English verse, Mark 1-1, there are a lot of ofs.
The beginning of the Gospel, of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Well, you don't use the word of in this Greek verse.
Instead, you just put it in the genitive case and then you know it's of because it's in
the genitive.
Because the genitive case is one that shows possession, right?
The Son of God.
What's another way of saying the Son of God?
We could use the possessive, God's Son.
What's another way of saying the beginning of the Gospel?
The Gospel's beginning, okay?
So this is one that shows possession.
Now, we talked about in the other videos that often prepositions in Greek will take nouns
in the accusative case or nouns in the dative case.
Well, also they can take nouns in the genitive case, okay?
But in this case, all our genitives are pointing to the word of, all right?
They're all showing possession, okay?
Now again, in Greek, the word the is not used the same way we use it in English, okay?
For example, we would have said the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus, Son of God.
Here it just says arhi, all right?
The word the is implied.
To a bangeliu, of the Gospel.
Both the word the and the word Gospel are put in genitive case because it's the beginning
of the Gospel, okay?
Then we have isuhristu, and the reason that these are in genitive case is because it's
the Gospel of Jesus Christ, okay?
Jesus Christ's Gospel would be another way of stating it just to help you understand
the possessive nature of the genitive case, okay?
Arhi tu evangeliu isuhristu, okay?
These are nouns, Jesus and Christ, that have been put in the genitive case because they
are the object of that English preposition of, all right, genitive case.
Now there's a comma here and then we're going to restate who Jesus Christ is.
So it's the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but then we're going to tell you who
Jesus Christ is.
Jesus Christ is the Son of God, all right?
So because we are restating Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is in the genitive case, we're
going to stay in the genitive case when we restate who Jesus Christ is, the Son, all
right?
That is why this word iu is in the genitive case, okay?
Now the nominative case for the word Son is ios, ios, okay?
But because we're in the genitive case, it becomes iu.
Just as isusristos becomes isuhristu, all right, ios becomes iu, all right?
To hear the word the and then theu.
Now remember in the other videos, we already learned theos and theon, right?
Ios was the nominative case of God, theon was the accusative case of God, and theu is
the genitive case of the word God, all right?
And again, we see a different use of the word the in Greek than we would use it in English,
okay?
Because in English, we say the Son of God, so we would have a the in front of iu, okay?
To theu of the God, you know, we wouldn't put a the in front of God there.
We wouldn't put a the in front of Jesus Christ, but there was a the in front of Jesus in John
14.6.
So just remember that the word the is used differently in Greek than it is in English.
It's just not the same language, just two different languages.
So don't let that bother you that the word the occurs differently.
It still has the identical meaning in Greek as it does in English, okay?
So let's go through it again.
Now that we know what each word means, this is a pretty easy verse to memorize.
It's pretty short, and if you memorize it, you learn a lot of genitives.
You're memorizing a lot of words in the genitive case, and you're learning this great genitive
ending, which is the u ending, which you're going to see a lot when you're reading the
Greek New Testament.
So this is a great verse to really drive in that genitive case, that it's often expressing
what we would express with the word of in English.
You know, the of God, of the Gospel, okay?
It's expressing that without the word of, instead it just uses the genitive case to
express that, okay?
And it also will help you understand the idea of possession that the genitive case carries
with it.
In the next video, we're going to be learning John 15, verse number one.