Hello, this is Pastor Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.
Today I want to talk about 3 John, verse number 1.
In English this verse says,
The elder unto the well-beloved Gaius whom I love in the truth.
In Greek this is,
O presviteros, geo, to agapito, on ego agapo en alithia.
Alright, now let's go through this word by word.
This first term, o presviteros,
we know that o means the of course,
presviteros means the elder.
Okay, and it's easy to remember because you can think of Presbyterian churches.
They are ruled by elders, okay.
Throughout the New Testament this term is used quite a bit.
In the King James it's elder.
This term is also used just to talk about one person being older than another, okay.
So, o presviteros, the elder, geo.
Now geo in English is Gaius.
It's a proper name.
Now you're probably not familiar with this letter right here.
This is the uppercase gamma, alright.
That's a lowercase gamma.
And then the uppercase gamma is made by just making basically a right angle like that.
Now I haven't taught you the uppercase Greek alphabet
because honestly learning the lowercase alphabet is most important in the beginning.
And you can pick up these uppercase letters just as you go.
They're pretty easy.
There aren't that many that are that different or that crazy.
So just for this lesson, just be sure to memorize your uppercase omicron and your uppercase gamma.
But this name, Gaius, that's who he's writing to, Gaius, okay.
He's saying, o presviteros, that's in the nominative case.
This is the subject.
This is the one who's doing the action.
Because it's the leader unto the well beloved Gaius whom I love in the truth.
So, the letter is being written by John who is calling himself the elder
and it's being written unto Gaius.
Which is why this word, Gao, is in the dative case.
Now if you remember, in another lesson I explained to you that the dative case answers the question to whom or for whom.
It is like the indirect object in English, okay.
So because the letter is being written unto Gaius or to Gaius, that is expressed in the dative case.
And if you remember I told you that when you're in the dative case with nouns and pronouns,
the telltale sign of the dative case is this iota subscript.
You'll see that little marking underneath the omega.
And that is a telltale sign when you're dealing with nouns and pronouns of the dative case.
So when you see that name and then you see that iota subscript right there,
that tells you that it's being written unto Gaius, okay.
O presviteros, Gao, to.
And then you notice that to here, the word for the, is still in the dative case, right.
Because we're still talking about Gao.
We're still talking about Gaius, okay.
Gao, to, agapito.
And notice agapito is also in dative case.
You can see that iota subscript under the omega, all right.
Now agapito is pretty similar to this word right here, agapo.
And most people know the word agapo.
It means I love in Greek, all right.
This word agapito in the dative case, because we're still talking about Gaius.
So it's Gao, to, agapito.
Gaius, the, beloved, okay.
Because this is an adjective in the dative case that's talking about Gaius, okay.
So basically this is saying the beloved Gaius, all right.
So we've got O presviteros, Gao, to, agapito.
So agapito is describing Gaius.
In English this is the adjective well beloved, unto the well beloved Gaius.
In Greek it's agapito.
Gao, to, agapito.
So it's Gaius, the, beloved.
And then it says here, on, ego, agapo, okay.
In this case, this on here is basically saying whom I love, okay.
Whom I love, en means in, just like our first verse that we went over John 1, 1.
En agi in ologos, on ego, agapo, en, whom I love, in, alithia, the truth.
Now notice there's no the in front of truth.
We've talked about it before, but just the word the, the definite article,
is used at different times in Greek than it is in English.
It doesn't change any meaning, it's just used differently in the two languages.
Now this is yet another form of alithia, because if you remember in John 14, 6,
when Jesus said, I am the truth, he said, e alithia.
And the accent was on that middle eta sound, alithia, e alithia,
when it was in the nominative case, okay.
But here it is in the dative case.
There's that telltale yota subscript, because it's following the preposition en.
So because he loves him in the truth, and it's following the preposition en,
it's in the dative case, so it is alithia.
So it's pronounced a little bit differently because the accent is following on this later syllable.
That accent marks right above the yota there, and also you have that yota subscript.
Now remember, the yota subscript is not pronounced.
It doesn't change pronunciation, the fact that there's that little mark.
It's just a spelling.
But it's a handy thing because whenever you see it on a noun or a pronoun,
it tells you a dative case, so it's pretty helpful.
So right here again, o presviteros, the elder,
geoto agapito, unto, because we're dative,
unto the beloved Gaius,
on ego agapo, whom I love, en alithia, in the truth, all right.
In the next video, we're going to go over James, chapter 1, verse 1.