Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
John 1:1a, 3
Was, and came to be. Two verbs one verse apart, and the whole prologue turns on the difference.
John 1:1, in every translation this tool compares.
The house was there. The shed came to be there. Both sentences put something in a yard. The first one does not tell you the house ever started. The second one tells you the shed had a beginning. English can say this if it works at it. Greek says it with two different verbs and never has to explain.
Because the difference between existing and beginning to exist is the entire argument of the prologue, and John makes it with two ordinary verbs rather than with an adjective. It is also the pattern that makes verse 14 land, where the Word finally takes the becoming verb.
In the beginning was the Word… All things were made by him.
English uses was for the first and were made for the second, which hides that both are ordinary verbs of being and becoming.
εἰμί eimi · G1510 / γίνομαι ginomai · G1096
Verse 1 uses en, the imperfect of eimi, to be. Verse 3 uses egeneto, the aorist of ginomai, to become or come into existence. John keeps them apart with complete discipline through the whole prologue: everything created gets ginomai, and the Word gets eimi. Verse 14 is the hinge, where the Word finally takes egeneto, became flesh.
English was covers both existing and starting to exist. Greek has separate verbs, so the distinction is built into the vocabulary rather than argued in a footnote.
Watch which verb a writer uses for existence. If a Greek text alternates between eimi and ginomai in the same passage, the alternation is almost never accidental.
No translator disputes the parsing. The difficulty is that no English rendering can keep the two verbs visibly distinct without paraphrasing, so every version loses the pattern and study Bibles have to point at it in a note.
- The pattern across John 1:1-14: en at verses 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, 15; egeneto at 3, 6, 10, 12, 14, 17
- Standard commentaries treat the alternation as deliberate: Carson, The Gospel According to John (PNTC), at 1:1-3
