Hello, this is Pastor Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona,
and today I want to go over John 15.1 with you from the Greek New Testament.
In English, this verse says, I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman.
Let's go ahead and read it in Greek.
Ego, eimi, eambelos, ealithini, cheo patirmo oergos esti.
Let's read it again.
Ego, eimi, eambelos, ealithini, cheo patirmo oergos esti.
Now let's go through this word by word.
Ego, we should remember from the lesson on John 14.6 means I. Ego, eimi, I am.
Ego, eimi, eambelos.
That means I am the vine.
Now ambelos is a little bit tricky to pronounce because there's an exception here with this
P that I want to teach you about.
Usually this letter makes the P sound, but whenever P comes after me, it actually makes
a B sound.
That's just an exception to the rule.
So every time you see a P following a me, you always pronounce it like a B. Therefore,
this word is pronounced ambelos, ambelos, okay?
Now notice it's eambelos.
In Greek, words have gender, masculine, feminine, or neuter.
We've already seen this in some of the previous lessons, but masculine words, when they use
the word the, it's this word right here, o.
In the nominative case, the word for the, if it's masculine is o, if it's feminine is
e, all right?
If it's neuter, it's to, but we haven't gotten to that yet.
So we've got ego, eimi, eambelos, ealithini.
Now this word, alithini, should remind you of in John 14.6 when Jesus said, I am the
way, the truth, and the life.
The truth was ealithia, okay?
So when truth is a noun, it's alithia.
When it's an adjective modifying a feminine noun, eambelos, it's going to be alithini.
So you should be able to see the similarity between ealithia from John 14.6 and alithini
in John 15.1, okay?
And by the way, it's very important that you memorize these verses, you know, as you go
through these lessons, you need to learn the lesson, understand the verse, and memorize
the verse, okay?
So ego, eimi, eambelos, ealithini means I am the true vine.
Now you notice that the word order is different in Greek than it is in English.
We would say I am the true vine, but what this literally says is I am the vine, the
true, okay?
And that's one way that Greek sometimes handles adjectives.
It states it in that way, the vine, the true, eambelos, ealithini, doesn't sound normal
in English, but of course it sounds perfectly normal in Greek to say eambelos, ealithini.
So that's I am the true vine, ke means and, opatermu means my father, okay?
Literally it's the father my.
When you see this word mu, it comes after the noun that it modifies, okay?
So if we want to say my father, we say opatermu.
Now notice that the word mu does not have an accent on it, okay?
It gets run together with the noun that it modifies.
So we put our accent on pater and we basically pronounce this as if it were one word.
So to say and my father, we say ke opatermu, okay?
Ke opatermu, that means and my father, o gergos, okay?
Now this means the husbandman, gergos, esti, all right?
Esti means is.
So instead of saying and my father is the husbandman, it basically says and the father
my the husbandman is.
Notice the Greek word order is different than in English, words get moved around.
And in Greek you can actually say things a lot of different ways because the word order
is not as set in stone as it is in English, okay?
So gergos, what does this remind you of in English?
Well if you were to take these two gammas and just change them out for English letter
G, you'd have the name George.
And this is actually where the name George comes from and this is still a popular name
in Greece today, gergos, all right?
So basically you can remember the word husbandman by remembering that that's where we get the
word George, the name George today in English, okay?
Now the letter gamma is a letter that is pronounced not exactly like in English G, okay?
Now if it comes in front of sounds like alpha or omega or omicron or the oo sound that omicron
epsilon makes, it's pretty similar to an English G sound.
So like when we pronounce the name of the letter gamma, it's pretty close to being a
G, it's just a little bit softer of a G, almost like partway between a G and a Y, okay?
Pretty much sounds like an English G in front of letters like that, just a little softer
approaching a Y sound, okay?
But when it comes in front of your E sounds like yota, eta or epsilon or when it comes
before an epsilon like this, it's more like a Y sound, okay?
So this word is pronounced gergos, gergos, all right?
And you'll notice that when you make a Y sound and a G sound, your mouth is almost in the
same position.
These two sounds are pretty similar, believe it or not.
So this word is pronounced ogergos, esti.
So again, in Greek, the word my comes after the noun that it modifies when we use the
word mu, opatermu, ogergos, esti.
So for example, if I wanted to say my wife in modern Greek, my wife would be ijinekamu,
all right?
Again, it starts with a gamma, sounds like a Y sound, ijinekamu, that's where we get
our word gynecologist, okay?
Ijinekamu, okay?
Notice how the my is after jineka, all right?
So ijinekamu, opatermu, ogergos, esti.
So let's read the whole verse again.
Ego, imi, iambelos, ialithini, che opatermu, ogergos, esti.
So what did we learn in this lesson?
We learned that the P after mi makes a B sound, okay?
We learned that sometimes adjectives are dealt with in this way, iambelos, ialithini.
And we also learned that the word mu, which means my, comes after the noun that it modifies.
It has no accent on it and it gets run together, opatermu, opatermu.
And then we can remember the nouns, alithini, we already know from i alithia in John 14.6,
gergos, reminds us of the word George, gergos, okay?
And then pater, reminds us of the word paternal, the father.
Ambelos, I can't really think of any connection between that and our English word vine.
If you think of one, leave it in the comments.
But again, ego, imi, iambelos, ialithini, che opatermu, ogergos, esti.
In the next video, we're going to go over 3 John verse 1 and review the dative case.