Biblical Greek - Lesson 18

Dr. Bill Mounce
Biblical Greek
NT201-18
Present Middle/Passive Indicative
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:00] Well, welcome to chapter 18. In chapter 18, we're going to learn the present middle pass of Indicative. In other words, we're going to stay in the same time and same tense in the present, stay in the same mood in the indicative. But we're going to learn a new voice, the passive. Now, the chapter's entitled Middle Passive. We're going to just kind of ignore the word middle for the time being and concentrate on the passive. If a verb is in the active, that means the subject does the action of the verb. But if a verb is in a passive form, it means the subject receives the action of the verb. So if we were to say Bill bit the cat. Which is active in its form and changes to passive. We say Bill was bitten by the cat. Some of you may have a little trouble with English at this point just because. Okay, how do I say something is present and passive and continuous and and that kind of idea. There's a chart of the back of the book that is fuller than this chart. But sometimes what you have to do is just kind of close your eyes and say, okay, now the Greek is present. The Greek is passive, and the context requires a continuous translation. How do I say that in English? And sometimes you have to kind of just think and go through and how you see that. But it's an issue of English and not so much of Greek. How do you form a present, passive indicative, or you form up with the present tense stem? The same one we've seen so far. Then you have a connecting vowel, which we have already seen. And then you have the primary passive personal endings.

[00:01:53] In other words, we're going to learn the second of the four parts to the personal ending chart. And the primary passive is the lower left hand corner part of the chart. And again, you need to learn the true personal endings and then learn what happens to those endings when you stick them on with a connecting vowel onto a verb. And unlike the active and the passive, you generally see the true personal endings except in the second person singular. So the two endings are my say tie mitha. The tie. And then when you stick them on to a verb with a connecting vowel, you have lu am I lu a lu at ty Lue almost lu us. And lu on ty. Notice on the second person singular. What's happened? The Sigma's dropped out and all the vowels have contracted and there is an iota subscript. It's explained in the textbook. And so you have your normal paradigm. Lou Oh, my. I am lost or I am being lost. Lou a Lou, a tie, so forth and so on. In this chapter, we're also going to learn something called deponent verbs. Now, these are very simple deponent. Verbs are verbs that are passive in their form. But are active in there. Meaning. In other words, these are words. That for one reason or another, lost their active form and so their passive form had to be used. Even though the verb is always active in its meaning, for example, irksome is deponent, verb in its ending is Oh my, which is a primary passive personal ending, but it's a deponent verb. So even though it's passive in its form, it's always active in its meaning. Erika My means I come or I go. Peru Omisore. From the lexical form per room i.

[00:04:01] It's another deponent verb. And even though it's passive in its form, it's active in its meaning. And so we translate it as we go. You'll notice if you try to translate either of these as passives, you can't. It doesn't make any sense. Now, how do you know if a verb is deponent or not? It's very simple. You memorize it. In other words, look at the lexical form that you memorize. Does that lexical form end in? Oh, my. Is that lexical form passive? If it is, then you know, you have a deponent verb. And so, for example, when you see Peru I.M., you go it's first person, plural present. And at that point you have to stop and figure out what the lexical form is. Is Peru my old opponent? And what I want you to say then is that it's a first person plural, present deponent indicative from Peru of my meaning. We go, okay, now there actually is a third voice in Greek. There's active and there's passive, and then there's something called the middle. And I've put off for a few chapters any in-depth discussion of the middle. But let me just tell you a couple of quick things up front that you need to know to get through these exercises. First of all, one, there is a third voice in Greek, and we call it the middle voice. Second of all, in the present indicative, the middle and passive are identical in form. In other words, you see Erica Thai there's no way for you to know whether that's a middle or a passive. And thirdly, I've kind of controlled what verbs and what sentences you're seeing at this point, and all the middles that you're going to see are in fact middle deponent and therefore they're all going to be translated as actives.

[00:06:06] Now, that's really all you need to know at this point. And if you're curious, just put the curiosity aside and wait till later chapter. Okay. So there is a third voice called the middle. But in the present, it's no big deal. It's identical, informed to the passive and all the middles that we're going to see in this chapter are in fact middle deponent and therefore active in their meaning. And now that you know that I can fine tune your definition of what a deponent is properly defined or I should say fully defined, a deponent is a verb that is middle or passive in form, but active in meaning. And finally, we have another line on our master verb chart. Remember, y'all. There's a lot of lines to this chart, and if you don't learn it as you go, as you don't learn one or two lines per chapter, the chart becomes overwhelming. But not as overwhelming as learning all the paradigms. But in this chapter, we learn just one more line to the master verb chart. How do you form the present middle passive? Well, it's formed with the present tense stem, with a connecting vowel and with primary passive personal endings. And the paradigmatic form is Lou. Am I?