Monday with Mounce

I received an email the other day that reminded me that we all need to remind ourselves to have a little humility in doing our Greek exegesis. I'm not talking about arrogance as the opposite of humility, but humble caution. The question had to do with the translation of three participles in Mark 16:16, and why the NASB is the only translation to get it “right,” and why the other translations got it “wrong.”

Sometimes we have to change the order of words to accurately convey the meaning of a Greek sentence, and sometimes this is because of how Greek can pile up modifiers.

When the Greek is ambiguous, it is always nice to maintain that ambiguity in English. But usually you can’t and you have to make a decision. However, in this verse the ambiguity is essential to the meaning of both the verse and the passage.

2 Tim 1:3–5 is one long Greek sentence, and it illustrates the dangers of breaking up a long Greek sentence into shorter English sentences, and also the danger of connecting the phrases merely sequentially. Why was Paul so thankful, despite the fact of his imprisonment and coming execution?

When Greek lays out a sequence of events, it tends to use anarthrous participles followed by an indicative verb. The question for the student is how to translate the participle into proper English. In our passage, the participle is actually telling us why the false teachers turned aside to error.