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 8:58
Before Abraham was, I am. The verb is wrong on purpose.
John 8:58, in every translation this tool compares.
Before the war started, I am here. Your ear rejects that, and rightly. A speaker who says it in front of you is not making a grammar mistake. They are doing something with the mistake.
Because the crowd picks up stones in the next verse, which means they heard something the English barely registers. The offence is in a two-word phrase and a tense that does not agree with the rest of the sentence.
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.
Nearly every version reads I am. A handful render I have been, which repairs the grammar and removes the reason anyone reached for a stone.
ἐγώ εἰμι ego eimi · G1473 + G1510
Ego eimi is present tense against a past clause, which is ungrammatical in Greek as it is in English. The same two words render the divine name in the Septuagint at Exodus 3:14, and they run through this Gospel as a formula. The crowd's reaction in verse 59 is the commentary.
English can print the clash, but English readers absorb it as odd phrasing rather than as a claim, because English has no formula attached to those two words.
When a sentence is grammatically broken in the original and the crowd reacts violently, the breakage is the message. Translations that repair the grammar delete the evidence.
I have been is smoother and loses the formula. I am is rough and keeps it. The stones in verse 59 are the argument for keeping it.
- Septuagint Exodus 3:14, ego eimi ho on
- The absolute I am sayings at John 8:24, 8:28, 13:19, 18:5-6
- The reaction in John 8:59 is the internal evidence that something was heard
