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 1:9
Coming into the world. Nothing in the Greek tells you whether that describes the light or the man.
John 1:9, in every translation this tool compares.
I saw the man with the telescope. Who had the telescope, you or the man? Nothing in those seven words decides it. English does this constantly and you usually work it out from context. When the context does not settle it, a translator has to.
Because it is the clearest place in the chapter where translations differ without a single word changing. Learning to spot attachment ambiguity means you stop reading a rearranged sentence as a neutral update and start reading it as a decision.
That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
Modern versions almost all attach it to the light: the true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.
ἔρχομαι erchomai · G2064
The participle erchomenon can attach to the light or to every man. Greek word order is flexible enough that position does not settle it, and the participle's form fits either. This is attachment ambiguity, the same phenomenon as an English sentence where you cannot tell which noun a trailing phrase modifies.
English forces the phrase to sit next to one noun or the other. Word order in English is what carries grammatical relationship, so the moment you write the sentence in English you have decided.
When a modern version rearranges a King James sentence rather than changing its words, look for a participle or a modifying phrase that could attach in more than one place. The rearrangement is the decision.
Attaching it to the man produces the King James reading, every man that comes into the world, which is a Jewish idiom for everyone born. Attaching it to the light produces a statement about the incarnation and fits the next verse, he was in the world. The second has the better contextual case and the first has the older tradition.
- The Jewish idiom, all who come into the world, meaning all humanity, in rabbinic usage
- Carson, The Gospel According to John, at 1:9, on both attachments
