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 7:39
The Holy Ghost was not yet given. The word given is not in the Greek.
John 7:39, in every translation this tool compares.
A sentence reads he was not yet. Three later copies read not yet there, not yet given and not yet come. The variety of the repairs is evidence of what the original said.
Because the bare Greek says the Spirit was not yet, which is theologically awkward, and the manuscripts show scribes adding words to fix it in several different ways.
The King James supplies given in italics. Modern versions supply given or had not yet been given, usually without marking it.
οὔπω γὰρ ἦν πνεῦμα
The best manuscripts read oupo gar en pneuma, for the Spirit was not yet. Various manuscripts add given, holy, upon them, or come. When copies disagree about how to fix a difficulty, the unfixed reading is usually the original.
English cannot print the Spirit was not yet without it reading as a denial, so every version supplies something.
Italics in a King James New Testament mark words the translators added. That convention is a gift and most readers have never been told what it means.
Given is the majority supplied word across English versions.
- The shorter reading in P66 and the earliest witnesses
- The variety of scribal additions in the later manuscripts
- Metzger, Textual Commentary, at John 7:39
