Inspecting 1 John 1:1

Would you agree that verse 1 in the NASB:

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life—

is incomplete as it stands, and that it needs something else to complete it? If so, what do you think that something is?

Andrew

No. Why would John pen an incomplete verse , at the beginning of his epistle at that ?

It seems rather obvious that the relative pronoun ὃ in 1 John 1:1 is a reference to the λόγος in John 1:1. During apostle John’s final years on earth, the 1st century Gnostics (or proto-trinitarians) already had turned his gospel’s prologue on it’s head, preaching the notion of an eternally existing personal Divine logos side by side with the Father by it. To counter this , the apostle penned this epistle, the prologue of which intended to be a commentary on his gospel’s prologue, and by which, through the route of Greek grammar ( constructio ad sensum), he meant to demolish the emerging Gnostic reading of his text, for the elect’s sake. The apostle uses the neuter form of the pronoun ὃ to refer to the masculine λόγος multiple times in the first sentence to send a striking grammatical message.

In this regard the connection between John 1:14 vis a vis 1 John 1:1-4 is also undeniable, to all but perhaps the spiritually blind :

Καὶ > ὁ λόγος > σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ > ἐθεασάμεθα > τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός, πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας·

Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν, ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν, ὃ > ἐθεασάμεθα> , καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν περὶ > τοῦ λόγου > τῆς ζωῆς.

Peace to all,

Aren’t verses as we have them now a modern creation?

That’s surprising. Did you appreciate that I was asking about the verse in English as translated in the NASB? If I said to you ‘What I saw.’ would you not think that was strange and ask me what I meant by it?

A relative pronoun marks a relative clause, and a relative clause is a form of subordinate clause. See eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_pronoun; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause. Verse 1 is a relative clause (or perhaps one should say a series of relative clauses, combined into one in effect), and it needs a main clause to complete it. I say that the main clause in the NASB is ‘we proclaim to you also’, or perhaps it would be more precise to add the object: ‘we proclaim to you what..’. (I hope the grammarians here will correct me if this isn’t right).

[NA 28]:

1Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν, ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς–

2καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἐφανερώθη, καὶ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ μαρτυροῦμεν καὶ ἀπαγγέλλομεν ὑμῖν τὴν ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον ἥτις ἦν πρὸς τὸν πατέρα καὶ ἐφανερώθη ἡμῖν–

3ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν, ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν,…

Likewise in the Greek, verse one contains several relative clauses, combined into one in some way, which I am not quite sure how to define, and it/they needs a main clause to complete it. This is really by definition of a relative clause - it needs a main clause to be relative to, so to say.
Again, I say that the main clause is ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν or more precisely perhaps ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν (ὅ). From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause:

A relative clause is a kind of subordinate clause, one of whose arguments shares a referent with a main clause element on which the subordinate clause is grammatically dependent.

The ‘argument’ is like the complement, and here is the subject or object of the clauses. Basically, and this may be imprecise, the relative term - here the pronoun - has a position in both clauses - here it is the object of the main clause, and it is the subject of the first relative clause: 1Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, and the object of the other relative clauses: ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν κ.τ.λ.

From the wikipedia article, it looks like this is what is called a ‘free relative clause’. Actually this is helpful:

A > free relative clause> , on the other hand, does not have an explicit antecedent external to itself. Instead, the relative clause itself takes the place of an argument in the matrix clause. For example, in the English sentence “I like what I see”, the clause > what I see > is a free relative clause, because it has no antecedent, but itself serves as the object of the verb like in the main clause.

Andrew

This translation arbitrarily adds a second main verb (“existed”) and does not really follow the Greek. If this translation was done with the intent to separate “life” from “word,” with the implication that only the life was seen and touched and reported, not the word, then I think the translation is intentionally misleading. I still don’t understand, though, what Isaac is getting at.

Andrew Chapman,

I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to do here but this is what your own source asserts:

Typically, > a relative clause modifies a noun or noun phrase> , and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments within the relative clause has the same referent as that noun or noun phrase. For example, > in the sentence I met a man who wasn’t there, the subordinate clause who wasn’t there is a relative clause, since it modifies the noun man, and uses the pronoun who to indicate that the same “man” is referred to within the subordinate clause > (in this case, as its subject).

This is about what we have at 1 John 1:1. I cannot stress this enough, but that 1 John 1:1 is a complete sentence, and nothing is amiss from it. It is not “complicated” or “poor” Greek, at least not to me. Let’s print out the Greek again before dissecting it:

Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν, ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα, καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς.

It is rather a straightforward sentence, and in fact the epistle 1 of John possesses arguably the simplest Greek in the entire New Testament. That is why it often boggles my mind when certain orthodox “scholars” castigate the opening verses of this epistle as being enigmatic, or worse . For instance C. H. Dodd ,who spoke Greek with an Erasmian pronunciation (most do) and who probably couldn’t conduct a conversation in Koine at the level of a five year old (most can’t), had the audacity to go on record to assert that “the sentence is not good Greek, and it is only by paraphrase that it can be rendered into good English.” (C. H. Dodd, The Johannine Epistles, p. 2) . J. L. Houlden , another Greek “specialist” proclaimed with unabashed gumption that the first few verses of 1 John “can only be described as, formally at least, bordering upon incoherence..lapsing into grammatical impossibilities.” (J. L. Houlden, A Commentary on the Johannine Epistles p 45). Yet another “expert”, R. Brown thinks that “the initial four verses of I John have a good claim to being the most complicated Greek in the Johannine corpus." (Brown, The Epistles of John, p. 152)

The fact of the matter is that like the rest of the epistle, the opening verse is very elementary and pure Greek, designed as it were for the lay person . The relative pronoun Ὃ here refers to τοῦ λόγου which is in apposition to τῆς ζωῆς. That is all. So a good English translation would be as follows:

“I’m writing about the Word , that is, the Life which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we gazed upon and which our hands touched.”

The problems associated with this translation are mild in comparison to Wallace’s rendition; the latter quite literally invents an entire phrase and adds it into the original text, by his own admission , “The phrase ‘This is what we proclaim to you’ is not in the Greek text, but has been supplied to clarify the English.”

As someone who is neither a scholar, nor interested in theology, may I be permitted to comment?

To recap, the text (as per Westcott and Hort) is as follows:

Ο ΗΝ ΑΠ᾽ ΑΡΧΗΣ, ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν, ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν, περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς,— καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἐφανερώθη, καὶ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ μαρτυροῦμεν καὶ ἀπαγγέλλομενὑμῖν τὴν ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον ἥτις ἦν πρὸς τὸν πατέρα καὶἐφανερώθη ἡμῖν,— ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν, ἵνα καὶ ὑμεῖς κοινωνίαν ἔχητε μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν …

I have ignored verse breaks as being much later and potentially unhelpful (as in some other ancient texts).

To me the likeliest explanation seem to be that the various earlier instances of ὃ are finally brought together as the (resumptive) ὃ in ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν. I’m not sure whether (as has been said) this should be regarded as ‘ungrammatical’; even if it is, that doesn’t necessarily invalidate this interpretation. Thucydides (who certainly pushes, if not exceeds, the bounds of grammar) sometimes does something similar, in that, after the start of a sentence, he has incorporated so many subordinate clauses (explaining circumstance and context), that, when he is ready to resume the main thrust of the sentence, he adds an additional pronoun before the main verb.

The ‘God’s Word’ translation simply breaks the whole thing up into short, staccato sentences by inserting an extra main verb; it reads like a rather (too) free paraphrase. From what has been quoted of the Wallace translation, it looks as if that is not really inserting an extra verb in the same way, but is merely repeating ‘This is what we proclaim to you’ at the start to clarify the structure, which is less common in English than in Greek.

Anyway, that is just my own view at this stage. Opinions will - as with many other ancient texts - no doubt continue to differ.

Best wishes,

John

I agree with your reading, John, which is what mwh said, too.

The somewhat disjointed sentence, with its long parenthetical and recapitulation of the first words after it, reflects the author’s brimming and palpable enthusiasm for what he has to say.

John W.,

Experience has taught me that whether or not we have an theological ax to grind becomes rather apparent by the content of our posts, sometimes over time, and not by a summary proclamation.




To me the likeliest explanation seem to be that the various earlier instances of ὃ are finally brought together as the (resumptive) ὃ in > > ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν. I’m not sure whether (as has been said) this should be regarded as ‘ungrammatical’; > even if it is, > that doesn’t necessarily invalidate this interpretation. Thucydides (who certainly pushes, if not exceeds, the bounds of grammar) sometimes does something similar, in that, after the start of a sentence, he has incorporated so many subordinate clauses (explaining circumstance and context), that, when he is ready to resume the main thrust of the sentence, he adds an additional pronoun before the main verb.

An ungrammatical translation is for me a non-starter.

The ‘God’s Word’ translation simply breaks the whole thing up into short, staccato sentences by inserting an extra main verb;

What is that extra “main” verb which has been added ?

it reads like a rather (too) free paraphrase. From what has been quoted of the Wallace translation, > it looks as if that is not really inserting an extra verb in the same way, but is merely repeating > ‘This is what we proclaim to you’ at the start to clarify the structure, which is less common in English than in Greek.

Actually, by his own admission Wallace says that he “supplies” a sentence not in the original Greek text for “clarification.” – “1tn The phrase ‘This is what we proclaim to you’ is not in the Greek text, but has been supplied to clarify the English.” I find that quite alarming. ἀπαγγέλλομεν only occurs once in 1 John 1:1-4 but Wallace literally invents another one . This is very serious tampering and distortion of the text. Wallace has a tendency to do that when it comes to the “Christologically significant” texts, for example, in 1 John 1:1c he adds the verb “fully” into the original text out of thin air. – “and the Word was fully God.” This is unjustifiable.


Anyway, that is just my own view at this stage. Opinions will - as with many other ancient texts - no doubt continue to differ.

Best wishes,

John

What do you think of the translation offered by Carl W. Conrad (Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus) ) :

“What was in existence from the outset, what we have heard, what we have
seen with our own eyes, what we gazed upon and our hands have felt-to-touch
– (I’m talking) of the WORD which is LIFE”

Which echoes mine quite well:


“I’m writing about the Word , that is, the Life which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we gazed upon and which our hands touched.”

An ungrammatical translation is for me a non-starter.

I don’t think John W. is asserting that the sentence is not grammatical–it’s perfectly natural Greek. You have only to read some of the Attic orators (this is a plug for Demosthenes) to encounter sentences like this that are broken up with parentheticals–it’s rhetorically effective.

And I think mwh is right that περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς reads more naturally as a genitive dependent on a genitive, not as two genitives in apposition. It wouldn’t be impossible in Pindar: ὁ δὲ χρυσὸς αἰθόμενον πῦρ . . . But this isn’t Pindar–it’s supposed to be prose. If the two nouns were in apposition, I would expect what mwh suggested or perhaps περὶ τοῦ λόγου, περὶ τῆς ζωῆς–something to make the point clear.

Again, I think the disjointed character of the sentence reflects the enthusiasm of the author and conveys it to the reader.

I, too, disclaim any interest in theology, and I have every right to do so. I’m not from a Christian background myself, but I do find this sentence engaging–I feel like this author is communicating his enthusiasm to me.

I said an ungrammatical translation (which is what Wallace proffers) is a non-starter for me.

Thank you for your response. With regard to your points above:

(1) Pesonally, I regard it as both more courteous and more charitable to assume good faith in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, but we’ll have to agree to differ on that.

(2) ‘existed’ - where is that found in the Greek?

(3) Why is this ‘quite alarming’? The structures of Greek and English sentences can be very different, and in translating it is sometimes helpful to repeat a verb, especially as English lacks many of the features (e.g. inflections) which in the Greek help to signal the relationship between the verb and the various other parts of the sentence. To return to my favourite Thucydides, for example, in translating a lengthy sentence I occasionally repeat phrases such as ‘you must’ which occur just once in the Greek, governing a whole series of infinitives; this relationship may be clear in the Greek, but would be much less so in English. The repetition of ‘you must’ merely aids the English reader; it is not falsifying or distorting the sense of the Greek, but actually bringing it out. It seems to me that Wallace is essentially doing the same thing, in recognition of the fact that the structure of the Greek, with the main verb appearing after a long series of relative clauses, is more difficult to achieve in English. Where I think he may perhaps fail is in reproducing what Qimmik has aptly termed the sense of urgency and excitement achieved by beginning the sentence with a succession of relative clauses; I think it would be good to preserve that effect in translation.

(4) I’m unclear where you get ‘I’m writing about’ from - could you please clarify?

One further point occurs to me. The punctuation in the Westcott and Hort edition of the Greek text, which I quoted in my previous post, parenthesises verse 2, and appears to support the interpretation for which I and others have argued; a similar punctuation appears in the United Bible Societies edition, edited by Aland et al. (my copy dates from 1968 - I don’t know if it has been revised since then). Do you know of any edition of the Greek New Testament which is punctuated in a way which would support your view?


Best wishes,

John

Not that this has anything to do with the question at hand, (does anyone know what IS the question at hand?) but I have read enough of John W.'s posts to know that he routinely avoids the irrational pressing of a position, on matters of theology, Greek, or anything else. I could learn a thing or two from him myself.

Hi john W,

I can only speculate why GWT used “existed” (my own translation doesn’t, and I even commented in an earlier post that it should have used “was” instead), but I think the translation is simply substituting “existed” for “was,” – ἦν. After all, “to be” (εἰμί) is “to exist,” isn’t it ? So I think it’s a stretch to say that the translation adds an “extra main verb.”



(3) Why is this ‘quite alarming’? The structures of Greek and English sentences can be very different, and in translating it is sometimes helpful to repeat a verb, especially as English lacks many of the features (e.g. inflections) which in the Greek help to signal the relationship between the verb and the various other parts of the sentence. To return to my favourite Thucydides, for example, in translating a lengthy sentence I occasionally repeat phrases such as ‘you must’ which occur just once in the Greek, governing a whole series of infinitives; this relationship may be clear in the Greek, but would be much less so in English. The repetition of ‘you must’ merely aids the English reader; it is not falsifying or distorting the sense of the Greek, but actually bringing it out. It seems to me that Wallace is essentially doing the same thing, in recognition of the fact that the structure of the Greek, with the main verb appearing after a long series of relative clauses, is more difficult to achieve in English. Where I think he may perhaps fail is in reproducing what Qimmik has aptly termed the sense of urgency and excitement achieved by beginning the sentence with a succession of relative clauses; I think it would be good to preserve that effect in translation.

(4) I’m unclear where you get ‘I’m writing about’ from - could you please clarify?

One further point occurs to me. The punctuation in the Westcott and Hort edition of the Greek text, which I quoted in my previous post, parenthesises verse 2, and appears to support the interpretation for which I and others have argued; a similar punctuation appears in the United Bible Societies edition, edited by Aland et al. (my copy dates from 1968 - I don’t know if it has been revised since then). Do you know of any edition of the Greek New Testament which is punctuated in a way which would support your view?


Best wishes,

I’m averse to Wallace’s translation, as I pointed out earlier, because I do not think it is grammatically legitimate to pick on a verb that governs a relative clause and argue that it governs another set of four relative clauses detached from it. At the very least there is no such precedent in the entire bible. Why go to such lengths, when there is a perfectly sensible, straightforward translation and interpretation available to us ?

Is there a Greek word for existence over and beyond simply εἰμί (in this case the imperfect ἦν)?

ὃ ἦν ἀπ᾿ ἀρχῆς - what existed (“has been existing, been in existence”) from/since [the] beginning

The question is, though, what ἀρχή the author has in mind. Does he mean ἡ τοῦ κτίσεως ἀρχὴ the beginning of creation, as Matthew 19.4 has ὁ κτίσας ἀπ᾿ ἀρχῆς he who created from the beginning [of the world] and 2 Peter 3.4 has ἀπ᾿ ἀρχῆς κτίσεως since the beginning of creation? Or, does he mean ἡ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου ἀρχή the beginning of the gospel message, as John 15.27 has Jesus saying that the disciples were with him ἀπ᾿ ἀρχῆς from the beginning. It doesn’t mean “from the beginning of the world,” but rather something like “from the beginning of my ministry” or simply “you have been with me all along.” Acts 11.15 uses ἐν ἀρχῇ in the beginning to refer to the beginning of the church, the day of Pentecost as found in Acts 3.

When it says “what was from the beginning,” does it mean “we are announcing to you the message about what has happened since the beginning of the period of the gospel”? Or, does he mean “we are announcing to you what existed in eternity, from the very beginning of existence itself”? I would assume that he means something closer to the former and doesn’t have pre-existence in mind, but that might just my own reading of the text.

Either way, I’m sure that the relative clauses are all tied to ἀπαγγέλλομεν as the verb in the independent clause.

As it is, I think that the second verse is turned into a parenthetical in all modern critical editions of the GNT. You can find it in the UBS5, the NA 28 and the SBL GNT (all linked here). I don’t think you’ll find a Greek scholar that would suggest that it’s anything but parenthetical.

Regards,
Jason

You’re “averse” to Wallace because he’s a Trinitarian. Let’s be honest. You don’t have a base from which to determine what is grammatical and what is ungrammatical in Greek. As it is, you’re simply arguing that because something is ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, then it cannot be what everyone agrees that it is.

The pattern of this discussion has a certain consistency. Many of us have offered explanation of how the Greek works, while Isaac is committed to a certain theological understanding of its meaning, rendering our grammatical explanations futile (as I discovered at the outset). No-one is getting anywhere. Seems to me the discussion has run its course.

Hi jaihare,

Thanks for your post, and I hope this day finds your well.

The clause ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν in verse 3 is the object of ἀπαγγέλλομεν . Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς in verse 1 (for starters) is not the object of this verb. You need another such verb (in it’s immediate vicinity) if you want to argue that Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς has an object . But unfortunately there is none. So you sort of will it at 1 John 1:1 by inventing it in your English translation, or else you’re making an ungrammatical argument. So this finds you between a rock and a hard place. This isn’t difficult. You seem to be making it more difficult than it is, I’m afraid.

In the peace which is in Christ’s Father, who is the only true God,