Why New Testament Greek is a Pain in the ---

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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Or, why it’s impossible to be so vigilantly stubborn on the accuracy of a single specific translation of the New Testament.
Meaning, the point of this is to show how the translation of the New Testament texts are not nearly as stable of a foundation of reliability as we simply commonly consider them to be…even for the skeptic.

To illustrate, I will be citing Matthew 4:3, which in the King Jame Version reads:

Now, let’s first take the Greek, as they all say at the start…like there’s only one…lol.
Alright, let’s…

Most translations are based on the Alexandria text-type manuscripts and not the Byzantine text-type manuscripts.
Why?
Generally, because the Alexandria text-type manuscripts are a bit older and there’s more of them…oh, and their from the areas in contact with Alexandria method of Greek writing…which somehow indicates accuracy in textual quality.
Sure…

At any rate, there’s two basic formats the Greek comes out for this verse, is the point :
Alexandrian:

Byzantine:

Well, let’s check around some more.
For those that like online “do-it-yourselfing-it”, there’s some resources out there; blueletterbible.org, net.bible.org, and greekbible.com will be cited for examples here.

Blueletterbible.org shows this as:

Net.bible.org shows this as:

Greekbible.com shows this as:

You can probably already see the variations and which lines up with which already.
So which do we choose?

shrug There’s no right answer.
We have absolutely no idea which one is more authentic.

Does it matter?

shrug That depends on who’s belief we talk about…and here’s why.

Let’s just take the usual doctrinal approach that more or less translates this verse as relating to a tempter or the devil telling Jesus to make rocks into bread.

Alexandrian:
And came the Tempter saying himself, “if you are the son of God, command these stones to turn into bread.”

Byzantine:
And came to him the Tempter saying, “if you are the son of God, command these stones to turn into bread.”

So what right?
If he came and said something himself, or if he came to him (which would be Jesus obviously right) and said the above…the point surely stands the same either way.
Sure…it would be…if the words actually translated this way, and oh the hell that unleashes when you try to make sense of this one verse in translation.
(2 months…2 months on just this one verse I’ve taken…good lord)

At any rate, let’s just start with the Alexandrian and work it word by word and I will explain every single word along the way.

So…let’s go.
We’re going to go with the transliterated format so I can paste it…it goes like this:

Alexandrian manuscript formats:
[size=150]kai proselywn o peirazwn eipen autw ei uiov ei tou yeou eipon ina oi liyoi outoi artoi genwntai[/size]

Word by word grammar (keep in mind, what constitutes a conjunction or verb in Greek is not the same rules for English):
kai - Conjunction
proselywn - Verb, 2nd Aorist Active Participle, Nominative Singular Masculine
o - Subject, Nominative Singular Masculine
peirazwn - Verb, Present Active Participle, Nominative Singular Masculine
eipen - Verb, 2nd Aorist Active Indicative, 3rd Person Singular
autw - Pronoun, Dative Singular Masculine
ei - Conjunction
uiov - Noun, Nominative Singular Masculine
ei - Verb, Present (Active) Indicative, 2nd Person Singular (this “ei” is not directly the same as the previous, the previous is , while the second is , and that tiny little accent makes all the difference; also, the “Active” is in parentheses because this word lacks a voice notation, which is commonly accepted as “Active” when such occurs by default; anyway, on with the rest of it)
tou - Subject, Genitive Singular Masculine
yeou - Noun, Genitive Singular Masculine
eipon - Verb, 2nd Aorist Active Imperative, 2nd Person Singular (now, those with a quick eye noticed this is the same as the previous “eipen”, but in a different form, and again, the augmentation makes the world of a difference)
ina - Conjunction
oi - Subject, Nominative Plural Masculine
liyoi - Noun, Nominative Plural Masculine
outoi - Pronoun, Nominative Plural Masculine
artoi - Noun, Nominative Plural Masculine
genwntai - Verb, 2nd Aorist Middle Deponent Subjunctive, 3rd Person Plural

Translation, without grammar, word by word:
kai - and/also/even/indeed/even
proselywn - to come to/approach
o - this/that/these/the/his/her
peirazwn - to try whether a thing can be done/to test/to try/to tempt/to examine (as in by philosophical weighing)/thoroughly vexed by and thought strongly upon a thing (alright…there’s going to be some upset about this word…see below after all the translation bit and you’ll see why)
eipen - to speak/say
autw - himself/herself/themselves/itself
ei - if/whether
uiov - a son/son of Abraham/son of man/generally used of the offspring of men
ei - to be/to exist/to happen/to be present/is/are (keep in mind, this EI is different than the “if/whether” EI)
tou - this/that/these/the/his/her
yeou - refers to the things of God/of the divine/“the god”, or “the divine” (when coupled with “tou”, the emphasis is in singularity)
eipon - to speak/say
ina - that/in order that/so that
oi - this/that/these/the/his/her
liyoi - a stone
outoi - this/that/these/the/his/her
artoi - bread/food
genwntai - to become/to be made

So, if we translated this without any grammar, we would end up with something like (which means for every “this/that/these/the/his/her” you ignore the “his/her” options, and treat all as singular):
And to come to the tempting to speak himself if a son is the god to speak so that this stone this bread to become

Problem is…this is grammatically wrong all over the place, obviously.
So…we have to account for grammar.

Let’s see what happens.

Applying Grammar word by word:
kai - and/also/even/indeed/even - Conjunction
Well, this is probably just going to be “and”…it really doesn’t matter on this one actually…YAY! a freebie, how rare!

Final Result: and

proselywn - to come to/approach - Verb, 2nd Aorist Active Participle, Nominative Singular Masculine
Alright, verb is easy to see, 2nd Aorist Active Passive though…what the hell does this do…well, it’s a combination lock…best way to think of this.
See, a 2nd Aorist is the Tense (like our present, past, future) and so we have to find out what the heck that means…now, most will tell you 2nd Aorist just translates like past tense…mmm…close, but that can easily steer you in the wrong direction, because the Aorist, while indeed quite like past tense, does some things differently depending on what it’s Voice and Mood are…but to explain this, I have to first explain the Voice and Mood, so we’ll come back to this.

The voice is Active voice…what’s voice? This is the best description I’ve seen of it so far (from ntgreek.org/learn_nt_greek/verbs1.htm), “Grammatical voice indicates whether the subject is the performer of the action of the verb (active voice), or the subject is the recipient of the action (passive voice). If the subject of the sentence is executing the action, then the verb is referred to as being in the active voice.” That more or less sums it up well enough. So voice more or less lets us know if it’s “pushed out”, or “pressed upon”; “given” or “received”.
Check!

Next, the Mood, which is Participle…firstly…Mood essentially tells us if something ACTUALLY did happen, is happening, or will happen, or if it’s only a POSSIBILITY that it did happen, is happening, or will happen. (in short)
There are quite a few Moods, but we’ll stick to which one this is…Participle; which means …well…that this isn’t much of a mood at all. Wait what? There are always rule breakers in language…this is one of them. It basically doesn’t officially belong to the “Mood” family, but it can be used in the “Mood” slot…it’s modular, so to speak. So you can slide a Participle value up in place of the typical Mood options (Indicative, Imperative, Subjunctive, Optative).
Basically, a Participle “mood” means the Verb is like a Verb Adjective, something in English which ends with -ing, like “Running”, or “Jumping”, or -ed like, “Jumped”, or it can be like “Ran” to “Run”, or “Came” to “Come”.

So…the Voice is Active, which means who or whatever is the subject of the sentence is the performer of this Verb; and the word is tempt/examine, more or less. And the Participle value means it’s -ing in English, so that’s came/coming/approached/approaching, so far.
Then we still have that 2nd Aorist, which we have to swing back around to…
Remember, I said it’s like a combo-grid-lock in a Myst puzzle game…
Let me just explain it this way…
The Tense + the Voice place you in given matrix, which runs in rows by 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, and columns by Singular or Plural.

2nd Aorist Active :

Singular Plural 1st Person: I threw we threw 2nd Person: you threw you (all) threw 3rd Person: he threw they threw

Now, we don’t have to be too bothered by the Nominative Singular Masculine part, as that’s mostly for when we are the writer…as in, which ending to put on the root word.
But, we do need to watch them as they do tell us things, like in this case, Nominative links the word to the subject of the sentence, the Singular obviously means it’s non-plural so it’s only one instance of the Verb here and not many instances (coming/approaching, vs, comings/approaching’s), and the Masculine attributes this to being actively pressed (Active voice is pretty commonly Masculine).

So…we have mostly everything to make our choice, we just need to pay attention to our person; which is…missing?
Well crap, now what do we do.
We can’t tell if is an “I came/coming, you came/coming, he came/coming” sigh.
But…that’s because it’s none of them.
What?
Right, again…a rule breaker, it’s a Verb that is more or less, self owned.
Meaning, there is no 1st, 2nd, or 3rd…it’s just “threw”.
Since it’s Aorist, we can throw out the -ing options as Aorist is past tense in format, so that leaves came and approached.

Final Result: came/approached

o - this/that/these/the/his/her - Subject, Nominative Singular Masculine
HEY! It’s our SUBJECT! Weee!
Hold on…it’s not.
It is, but it’s not. It’s directly implying our Subject (in this case a person), but it isn’t the subject itself…like “he” is not the subject when later “John” exists in the sentence more specifically identifying that “he” is “John”, but “he” still refers to the same thing as “John” refers to.
Or more similarly, “the box of John’s”. The word “the” would be a subject in NT Greek because BOX is the subject and the word, “the” belongs to the subject, BOX; it is “the box”.
So the same thing is occurring here.
This one isn’t all that exciting, Nominative Singular Masculine because it follows suit with the trend of the sentence’s overall Nominative Singular Masculine stance, so here, we just pay attention that it’s NOT a Pronoun, and NOT Plural, and so select from this/that/the options…we’ll pick all three for now.

Final Result: this/that/the

peirazwn - to try whether a thing can be done/to test/to try/to tempt/to examine (as in by philosophical weighing)/thoroughly vexed by and thought strongly upon a thing - Verb, Present Active Participle, Nominative Singular Masculine
Phew! That’s a mouthful!

At any rate, let’s start with our grammar.
Present Active Participle.
We’re already familiar with the Participle function, so we already know we’re looking for -ing, or if past tense, -ed, or another a past tense variant.
But, this is Present tense, so we can look forward to -ing only; yay for simplicity!
And finally, it’s Active, so we know it’s being done by the subject and not upon the subject.

It’s Nominative Singular Masculine, so it’s, once again, belonging to the subject (which makes sense since it’s Active).
It’s Singular, so it’s only one instance of the Verb, and not many instances of it…thinking vs thinkings.
And the Masculine is more or less to show that it’s a consuming verb, as opposed to a Feminine, which would be odd to see with an Active voice…typically Feminine is coupled with Passive voice, and would make this verb suggest the tempt/examine as idle passing, like waxing in thought.

So, we know it’s a consuming function of tempt or examine that is being done by the subject in the present format.
That means our choices are (in simple format) Tempting or Examining.

We’ll stick as close to tradition as possible and make this verb, Tempting (even though a strong argument can be made for Examining as it carries with it the concept of the critical weight of the instance more than the word Tempting, but for consistency to tradition, we’ll use Tempting instead).
(also, -ion is another possible variant that is acceptable here, Temptation)

Final Result: tempting

eipen - to speak/say - Verb, 2nd Aorist Active Indicative, 3rd Person Singular
Oh boy…alright, even though this is less than the previous word in components, it’s far more tricky than the last one.
Oh Greek verbs…the joy you bring…/sarcasm.

2nd Aorist Active Indicative
(Brains just exploded, I’m sure)

Alright, we kind of already know what’s going on with 2nd Aorist Active from the previous, but let’s see what Indicative has for us as a Mood first.
Again, I like the definitions that ntgreek.org provides (which I didn’t find until writing this post, so I’m glad I did because I don’t think I could have explained these things as articulately as they do! :smiley:)
Basically, it’s this:

Alright, so it’s a fact; essentially…according to the author at least, and that’s all that matters here.
What is a fact?
That someone spoke…it’s not a guess, hope, or possibility; it is a fact.

Alright, indicative gives us a fact, check!

Now on to the 2nd Aorist Active part…but wait, we need our other part because here, we have 3rd person singular.
2nd Aorist Active :

Singular Plural 1st Person: I threw we threw 2nd Person: you threw you (all) threw 3rd Person: he threw they threw

Again, like a matrix combination system we see pretty quickly, that it’s HE THREW, or rather, when applied to our current word, HE SPOKE or HE SAID.

Final Result: he spoke/he said

autw - himself/herself/themselves/itself - Pronoun, Dative Singular Masculine
Alright, we have a Pronoun, so immediately we can toss out “itself”, and it’s Singular so we can also toss out “themselves”, and it’s Masculine so we can throw out “herself”.
That leaves us with “himself”, but we aren’t done…there’s the Dative.
(again, I like the work done over at ntgreek.org)

So, we know this word is part of our indirect object, or possibly instead, refers to the means by which something is done…
We’re starting to get an idea formed here that our person may actually be the indirect object and that what they are doing may be the direct object, instead of the other way around (like we were imagining previously above).

So, though the Dative doesn’t affect that this is still, “himself”, it MUST be kept in mind as it tells us that “himself” is an indirect object, so we’ll make a note of that so we don’t forget.

Final Result: himself (indirect subject/means by which X is done)

ei - if/whether - Conjunction
Hey, this one is easy…we can just go with “IF” and call it good for now. “Whether” or “If” is more about flavor preference at this point, so we’ll go with simplicity here.

Final Result: if

uiov - a son/son of Abraham/son of man/generally used of the offspring of men - Noun, Nominative Singular Masculine
Alright, this one is ever so much dependent on the doctrine you translate for as to which concept is implied.
See, if you take it as just “a son”, then great, Trinity doctrine preserved. However, if you take this as “son of man” or even “son of Abraham”, well…all hell get’s ready to break loose because this is one of those verses that contains the “Son of God” word combinations.
To avoid ruffling too many feathers and because all others refer to speculation, we’ll take the simple, “son” with no further implications approach.
The Nominative Singular Masculine is simply in suit with the sentence motif and doesn’t help in picking which definition we choose here.

Final Result: son/a son

ei - to be/to exist/to happen/to be present/is/are - Verb, Present (Active) Indicative, 2nd Person Singular (keep in mind what I said about this EI being different than the previous due to accents…alright, let’s go on)

Indicative, fact, right?
K, check!

Next, Present Active (active because the voice is not marked, which by default falls to active when occurs…now whether that was intended to be the voice or not…no one gets to know; yet another hole, but we’ll follow suit with the standard and default to Active)
So, this follows much the same as we’ve seen already, a matrix of sorts:
Present Active

Singular Plural 1st Person: I see we see 2nd Person: you see you (all) see 3rd Person: he sees they see
We can see that we have 2nd Persona Singular, so that means we have a YOU for this word, and that this word means exist, or is…or are, the state of being as.

So we have YOU ARE as the most likely here, and it’s Indicative, so it’s fact according to the author; or, rather, more accurately, the statement being posited is being posited in an affirmative, as we do when we say, “Are you a man?”
Though it is a question, the “are you” (you are) is not a variable because the concept of “man” is not a variable.
The agreement that one is a man is the open variable, but not the components of the question itself.
The question itself only holds facts, You are a man?
Which, properly, is actually this, “You are a man, yes?” (in fact, many other languages still operate this way; even English does in “proper” form in Britain; just not in America.)
So the entire statement is an assertion of a fact that you either confirm or deny.
This is the format here.
(from the previous, “a son”, “a son you are”, which…so far…could be phrased equally as, “a son you are, yes?”…the Indicative does not imply that the author inherently believes the answer is, “yes”, instead it simply means the charge is listed as fact for the subjects of the context to agree or disagree with, but that it is stated as a fact firstly and we’ll get to find out in the following sentences (which we are not covering here) whether agreement or disagreement is chosen.)

Final Result: You Are

tou - this/that/these/the/his/her - Subject, Genitive Singular Masculine
Alright, we’re not going to do much with this word on it’s own because it’s actually a combination word with the following, but we’ll establish that it’s Genitive, which is new to us.
So let’s get our ntgreek.org definitions out and learn what this one means:

So it means that something is belonging…we’ll come back to this later, but for now…just keep that in mind.

We have to now grab the following word before considering a final result…you’ll see why.

yeou - refers to the things of God/of the divine/“the god”, or “the divine” (when coupled with “tou”, the emphasis is in singularity) - Noun, Genitive Singular Masculine

Alright, this one is another doctrinal breath-holding moment.
Does it say, “God”?
Well, at first glance, no…it just refers to things of the divine concepts really, and that’s about it.
BUT, we took note that the TOU was used prior and that makes this a limited application to “THE god”, which still doesn’t tell us directly WHICH “THE god” we’re talking about, but we can assume for traditions purposes that this is “THE god” of the Judaic concepts.
So we’ll steer away from ruffling feathers and follow suit here and class this as “the god”, but we’re going to leave the “god” lower case because nothing here is in capital (which, by the way, doesn’t reduce the value; we just want to keep our own minds from jumping to biased conclusions so we’ll steer clear of our customary comfort of seeing “god” as “God”)

Also, take note…this is Genitive as well. Wait, how does that work? How does God “of” anything else?
Kind of…but remember, previously we had “a son”…well, it works in somewhat reverse here.
Remember the “of” is the best way to explain Genitive in English?
It’s equal to “a son of the god”
Or, “a son you are of the god”, more exactly.
So we’ll plop an “of” in front of “the god” to show the English equal of the Genitive casing of “the god”.

Final Result: of the god

eipe - to speak/say - Verb, 2nd Aorist Active Imperative, 3rd Person Singular
Alright, this particular word and it’s grammar confused the crap out of me for weeks on end (hey, when you are doing this on your own…sometimes you simply can’t translate the concepts right in your head…it just gets stuck…it’s a pain in the … well…hence the thread, lol)

At any rate, here we have the same word as before, to speak or to say.
But this time it’s in the 2nd Aorist Active Imperative…grown
Alright, let’s whip out the matrix again…
We’re in 2nd Person Singular…so…
2nd Aorist Active :

Singular Plural 1st Person: I threw we threw 2nd Person: you threw you (all) threw 3rd Person: he threw they threw
That means it’s YOU SPOKE.
Let’s look at the Imperative mood…

Oh boy…what the hell is going on here?
See, we’re used to this, remember?
“If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

The underlined part is where we’re currently at.
But we can see this is 2nd Aorist, which means past tense not future tense.
It’s also in the 2nd person Imperative which means it must contain the word, “YOU” in the word “spoke” or “said”.

Alright…well…whatever the hell is going on, we have to continue forward with what the Greek is stating obviously…because this is a definite deviation from the Greek to put down, “tell these”…sigh

Alright, maybe it was done to make it easier to read…who knows, but we have to stick to our Greek here.
Further more, it’s not even just “spoke”, it’s a command of sorts, like, “You Command”, but for now, to avoid translation errors, we’ll just stick with “spoke” and bold the words to indicate the strength of the charge to have done so.

So ours is “You Spoke”.

Final Result: You Spoke

ina - that/in order that/so that - Conjunction
This one is is fairly simple, and it’s mostly a word of personal preference as to which form in English we pick.
YAY! Another easy one, phew!
Well, I like “so that”, so we’ll just go with that.

Final Result: so that

oi - this/that/these/the/his/her - Subject, Nominative Plural Masculine
Alright, this one is part of our subject so we can toss out “his/her”.
It’s Plural, so we can toss “this/that/the”.
So that only leaves us with “these”.
The Masculine will make sense in a moment…just keep in mind that this word belongs to the next word and it will make sense.

Final Result: these

liyoi - a stone - Noun, Nominative Plural Masculine
This is pretty straight forward, it’s Nominative, which is just to say that it belongs to the subject (like all the other nominative’s of the sentence) and the Plural tells us it’s more than one stone so it’s “stones”, and it’s Masculine because stones are a protrusion. Ground is feminine, rocks and stones are masculine in Greek.
Therefore, when we say, “these stones”, these is also masculine because it belongs to the word “stones”.
Keeping in mind that these both belong to the Subject of the sentence.

Final Result: stones

outoi - this/that/these/the/his/her - Pronoun, Nominative Plural Masculine
Oh hell…here we go again…another headache.
Why?
Because…the KJV has this as, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
I didn’t underline anything because…well…this word is omitted completely from the KJV.
It just skips to the next two words.
Dammit…see, it sucks when this happens because you don’t want to sound like a prick or whack nut spouting inaccuracy of the tradition because too many people flip out…mostly because some massive belief stances bear incredible weight on some verses existing just as they are in the tradition…for instance…this right here…this is a word that makes me uncomfortable to translate because I can hear the critical recoil immediately when we translate this word back into the verse.

Alright, so let’s see what this means and see if you can spot the danger here.

It’s a Pronoun, so we have to throw out “this/that/these/the” and only keep “his/her”.
It’s also Plural, which means we’re not looking at “his/her”, but instead, “their”.
It’s Nominative, so it’s tied to the subject of the sentence, and it’s Masculine, which means it’s a standard, “they”, which typically carries the Masculine form.

Final Result: their

artoi - bread/food - Noun, Nominative Plural Masculine
This one is mostly straight forward.
It’s plural form of the word for bread…or you could translate it as food since bread is the base word used for food in a general sense, but since that even applies in most cultures today we can easily just as well leave this as “bread” without losing any translation of the idea.
But it is plural, so it’s breads.

Final Result: breads

genwntai - to become/to be made - Verb, 2nd Aorist Middle Deponent Subjunctive, 3rd Person Plural
This one is bit conceptual, so translating into the English can be seen in many, many forms.
But the general idea is the concept of creating or making something; the act of creating or making itself.

It’s 2nd Aorist Middle Deponent Subjunctive…ah man…come on! We’ve been on easy street for so long, can’t we be done with these things?
Almost…this one is the last doozy…but it is a tricky doozy.

Alright, let’s tackle that Middle Deponent first head-on.
Deponent is a bit of a debate because it’s a giant mess of a declaration where basically, (without going into the length of the standing debate) the Voice is treated as Active even though another voice was declared, in this case, Middle.
The reason this was largely done in notation of the translation format is that many actions that exist in the NT Greek that are attributed in the Middle or Passive only exist in the English as an Active action.

Well, so what do we do here?
Active or Middle? Or possibly the other option, both side by side.
Well…I’m a simple guy.
I like it to remain simple, and I like sticking to the author and not our grasp of the author.
So to me, I see Deponent as a way of saying, “Um…I’m kind of at a loss as to which way to translate this word to our language, so I’ll make a conversion method to get it working in our language.”
shrug
I’m going to throw out the Deponent since I don’t see this as needed.
We don’t need to dismiss the Middle voice to make sense of this word, so I’m going to take this as just Middle voice as the author(s) wrote it as such.

Firstly, Middle voice:
Again, the fine folks at ntgreek.org

More or less, it means something like the concept of making money; “I make money to provide for my lifestyle.”
The word “make” in this sentence would be classed as, “Middle voice” in Greek.
Or, “The Sergeant makes them train hard for their good.”
This is a bit harder to notice, but the Sergeant benefits from the soldiers doing well, and is actually acting upon himself because the soldiers will be his army through assimilation; thereby the Sergeant’s “making” of the soldiers would also be “Middle voice”.
Middle voice, therefore, is a right pain in the backside to interpret the intention of.

So now we have 2nd Aorist Middle Subjunctive.
Right…need our matrix again.
2nd Aorist Middle :

Singular Plural 1st Person: I became we became 2nd Person: you became you (all) became 3rd Person: he became they became

We see that it’s 3rd person plural, so it’s firstly HE BECAME and then because it’s plural, it’s THEY BECAME.

So our word to be made is now standing as They made/They became…well…They became is weird in English to use this way, eventhough it’s conceptually accurate; the activity of “becoming” something doesn’t indicate inherently that it’s the people that become, but that they are taking the action of becoming…and that’s why we’re not going to use that word right there…because you STILL can’t help but think of this as bread variational werewolfing.

At any rate, that leaves us with They Made, but we still have that Subjunctive mood left.
GO-GO-ntgreek.org (I’m loving having found this cite…so much easier to explain this crap! :smiley:)

A word comes to mind…“might”.
The Subjunctive could be summarized by the word, “might”, “possibly”, or “may”.

So this is, “Might they made”, “Possibly they made”, or “May they made”.
Well…since we’re doing this variable function, we have to rephrase our English to more correct English so it’s, “Might they have made”, “Possibly they have made”, or “May they have made”.

The context of the previous words seems to suggest the concept of “allow”, as in, permitted.
As one “may enter the restricted access area” after being allowed in.
The “may” is Subjunctive here; it’s a possible suggesting that you are not automatically granted the access, but that you have gained grant and are therefore on the side of the probability whereby access exists.

So, we are going to go with the “May they have made”, which to clean up, we’ll go with, “they may have made” so that it rides English.
Let’s double check…the word is referring to the creation or making, “make”.
It is Aorist so past tense, “have made”.
It is 3rd person plural, “they”.
And it is Subjunctive so it is only a possibility where on the side of the “made” is the suggested concept true, “may”.

Final Result: they may have made

FINALLY!!!
WE’RE DONE!!
WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!

Wait…alright, let’s back up and gather everything and throw it together in one line now.

and came/approached this/that/the tempting he spoke/he said himself if son/a son you are of the god you spoke so that these stones their breads they may have made

We’ll go with this set of options.
and came the tempting he spoke himself if a son you are of the god you spoke so that these stones their breads they may have made.

So…let’s see…just a guess here, but there’s probably a comma after “himself” and we can at least start the quote there.
And came the tempting he spoke himself, “If a son you are of the god you spoke so that these stones their breads they may have made”.

Well…it’s a bit awkward to say the least…it still needs some English grammar polish, so let’s pull some more on it.
That “tempting he spoke” really needs a “whereby” between “tempting” and “he”, but that’s not in there, so we can’t.
So, let’s throw the punctual equal, the semicolon.
And came the tempting; he spoke himself, “If a son you are of the god you spoke so that these stones their breads they may have made”.

So that leaves us needing to clean up the quote part.
Now, we don’t really know enough to start adding words freely, so that “the god you spoke” part could be implying several things.
For instance, we could be meaning, “…you are of the god and you spoke…”, or “…you are of the god if you spoke…”, or “…you are of the god then you spoke…”, or … you get the idea. Heck, it could easily just be two related and separate tangents, “If you are…; you would have…”

So, we’ll just plop another semicolon in there to work out the problem.
And came the tempting; he spoke himself, “If a son you are of the god; you spoke so that these stones their breads they may have made”.

Now, there’s an argument here.
It goes like this, “The Aorist isn’t to be taken in literal past tense because the context is being said by someone written about as already having had happen…therefore, the quoted section of what they said is written in the Present tense.”

shrug
Alright, sure, we’ll try that out too.
And came the tempting; he spoke himself, “If a son you are of the god; you speak so that these stones their breads they may make”.

shrug
Either way could be valid…it’s up for debate really; as you may have noticed…the NT Greek doesn’t have quotes, so …shrug.

Me personally?
I like the way the “Aorist for the non-quote, convert Aorist to Present in quote” stance because it rolls much smoother in English.
I honestly think either is accurate perfectly fine…I actually think they say the same thing.
Just that the first says it in a way from OUR stand point and the other tells it much more like it’s IN the story of the telling.
Since we are used to the IN format in English, this is why I like the Aorist conversion to present when in quotes of a “said” version.

So that’s either:

And came the tempting; he spoke himself, “If a son you are of the god; you speak so that these stones their breads they may make”.

Remember what we started with.
I’ll put them back to back just for comparison.

KJV Matthew 4:3

Well…the first thing we can see is what I meantioned previously…“tempter” vs “tempting”.
Look…I’m not the one who wrote the Greek.
Someone else did that.
They wrote a verb, not a noun, and they wrote a verb adjective even…I’m sorry it’s not Tempter (a noun) but it’s not.

Next we see that “him” is in the wrong spot.
Then we see that hole for “their” we discussed previously.

So that leaves the “him” placement.
Now, keep in mind, our translation is Alexandrian and not Byzantine, but…thankfully, all we have to do to make it Byzantine is slide the “him” over; the same words exist.

So:
Alexandrian:

Byzantine:

Now, why the “to”?
Alright, the word, “to come” is also “to come to”, when in the Aorist we translated it as “came”.
We left out the “came to” variant because it wasn’t needed to get the same idea, “And came to the tempting…”, but when we slide over to the Byzantine, we suddenly have need of it again because now it’s “And came himself the tempting…”, which is odd, but we know the idea of the “came” is to arrive at or approach to, so it’s “And came to himself the tempting…”.
This could also be, “And came unto himself the tempting…”, which would be even more clear and equally correct function of the came/approach word in it’s meaning of “coming into the area of” concept.

And that also means we have to add a comma because it would be in English common as, “And the tempting came unto himself”, but here it’s flipped so we need a comma, “And came unto himself, the tempting…”

So…at the start I said slide that himself around and problems pop-up.
Well…to be honest, so many other problems pop-up along the way that this seems hardly interesting at this point, but it’s still pretty large difference.

In one, the time or instance of “tempting” came and we could even argue that, metaphorically, the Tempting is a force that causes the statement, so it’s like the Tempter speaking…so it could be the Tempter if we believe the Tempter can invade the mind.

In the other, Byzantine, format…this is nearly an impossible grasp of a perspective.
Instead Jesus comes upon his tempting and speaks the following quoted section…causing all hell to break loose in the doctrinal perspective.

Jesus is now doubting himself it would seem and is making some strange philosophical debates in his mind that are pretty deep and heavy chanced.

Which one is accurate?
People of a time long gone only know.

So…wait…where the hell did the KJV get their version then?
Good question, well…we can see that the KJV is probably taken from some text that used the Byzantine format because of the placement of the “him”.
Well…what was their source?
Their source was the Textus Receptus.
To which, Wikipedia kind of sums the lengthy discussion well…

I marked up the “Byzantine text-type” part.

So there you have it…right there, you have, at one of the largest kick-off’s of the founding and largest version of the later Western cultural Christian growth a version that starts out with an open note, “differed markedly from the classical form of that (Textus Receptus) text”.

And as we worked ourselves through the section we have little difficulty agreeing with this assessment.
Indeed, it would appear that it definitely differed from the classical form of the text.

So…back to the start…what a royal pain in the ass!
In fact, it’s just nuts.
There are so many things standing in the way to make it just impossible to come to a conclusion on what the “original” text wrote.
Hell…we don’t even know what “original” is in this giant mess.

Why?
Well…KJV was based on Textus Receptus, which was largely based on the Vulgate, which relied on the Vetus Latina, which (again, because it summarizes well enough) Wikipedia accurately accounts…

(Jerome wrote the Vulgate.)

So there’s your reliable Bible.
A gigantic collection of scattered ancient Greek disaster, later translated into Late Latin in parts, then into a single revised copy in Latin, then translated again into Latin, and then into English with the third time being the KJV, which was specifically done to rectify the ecclesiastic discrepancies with the first two English translations that were causing problems.

So there you have it.
Like I said…a big giant … mess.

And that…
it Why New Testament Greek is a Pain in the —

2

I’m sorry nobody else responded to this, and I’m sorry I’m only responding to this portion. And I’m also sorry that my response is brief, and that it’s a criticism.

But ‘tempting’ in the above IS a noun. You know, cause verbs can’t come. A gerund, specifically. I’m no expert, but I don’t understand why The Tempter can be a personified devil, and The Tempting can’t, especially in another language, and especially given that it’s saying something.
It all changes with or without a capital T, and I don’t think you got the decision on that from the Greek, right?

3

In the Gospels of the New testament there are different accounts of Jesus’ betrayal, His fate before Caiphus the amount and mindset of the crowd when Jesus is before Pilate etc… from the different authors in the Bible.

That alone could be from the varied times of their transcription, perspective of the epistles and actual personal accounts could affect translations made by King James’ scribes. I will concede bias could have been a part of how those scriptures finally laid down by those involved.

4

The word, “come”, here is a word that I could have easily wrote, “drew near”, instead.
It’s not a word that only applies to nouns as an action.
It is also a word that is used many times to show when times and conditions arrive as well.
One would say that the time for fasting had come, for instance.
Fasting is not a noun either, but instead an intransitive verb.

πειράζων
That’s the word that’s used for what is translated as “Tempter”.

The word occurs 4 times in the New Testament, and 38 total times in all variant endings using the same base of πειρά.
In each form it is always a verb.
There simply is no noun form of this word.
It would be like taking our word for, “Run”, and saying it meant, “Pursuer”.
And when the word was written down as “Running” it would be the same as translating still the same, “Pursuer”.
Past tense form, “Ran”, still translated as “Pursuer”.
Imperfect past tense verb to adjective form, “Had been running constantly…”, still translated as “Pursuer”.
(See, the Greek…that “Had been running constantly” is just another variation of the word, “Running”.
You simply modify your ending to get all of the other words.)

This is effectively what’s happened to this word.
It’s most basic levels of grammar are largely dismissed outright.
Shrug
Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t even pretend to have an answer for that.

But it’s a straightforward and simple fact.

πειράζων is a verb, not a noun…you can look in any lexicon, concordance, dictionary, what-have-you.
They will all class the word as such.

Here’s it’s base form:
πειρά and this cardinally relates to the experience of a thing, or experience.
For instance, if I lived in Greece today I would write on my resume: Επαγγελματική πείρα (Professional Experience)

Or we can also find it instituted in words that regard a condition of experience or experiences:
πειράμα - experiment
πειράματα - experiments

So the word we are brought back around to is πειράζων.
That’s where we started.
Well…I left this word here as “tempting” out of consideration for not steering so far off from tradition as possible, but on the other hand, this word in all reality is not so much about temptation, but about examining or testing thoroughly; as many do around here.
That is the definition.

It’s basically, an examination (as an action, not as we think of it; a thing…and this is because it is considered part of an experience and experiences are non-tangible conditions or states of man, so the Greek holds them as verbs [which personally, I think makes far more sense than our English concept)), and in this text, closest properly; examining.

So one could well say, “then came the examining”
Sure, you could try to plop in “examination” (our noun) in there, but it would give a false impression as to the transitive form of the experiential idea the Greek uses.

I don’t know what to tell you if you don’t like that it’s a verb rooting, but it is.
I can’t even really explain why it’s a verb much beyond that it involves the concepts of intangible experiences that man partakes in within life, and by extension, the concepts thereby one can contain categorically within; (examine - the experience of deeply considering, experiment - the experience of critically testing, and of course, experience itself; such states as these).

Beyond that it would be as to ask me why Run or Running is not capable of being a personified Pursuer.

5

Times and conditions are nouns, man. In “The time for fasting has come”, ‘fasting’ may be a verb, but “The time for fasting” is the subject of the sentence. It’s only a coincidence of your sentence that “the time for fasting” is more than one word. You could just as easily have said “Lent has come”…and Lent is obviously a noun.

 In your sentence, 'the time for tempting' isn't what's said. 'the tempting' is.  "And came the tempting" is a phrase in which 'tempting' is a noun. Like I said, a gerund. Just because a verb may be used as a gerund in some sentence doesn't mean the word isn't a verb (indeed only verbs are gerunds)...so I'm not sure what your "It's a verb, ask anybody" line really has to do with anything.  If you look up the word 'running' in an English dictionary, they will all tell you it's a verb.

Which doesn’t change the fact that in “I enjoy running”, it’s a noun.
So yeah, I understand that it’s a verb. Being used as a noun in that sentence. Because verbs can’t come. Alternately it seems your position is that the sentence doesn’t mean anything. Which seems like an odd position for someone translating such a well known text to take.

Which to me immediately raises the question, “If somebody DID want to talk about a personified Tempter, how would they do it in Greek, given that the word ‘tempter’ didn’t exist?”
Why not ‘the tempting’? Seems like the next best option given the tools you just told me they had to work with?

6

The issue is that the word is not a word that is a noun itself, and it is not given a single casing of any of the rest of the nouns in the sentence.
I could easily have given you the example simplified; “Fasting has come”.
Fasting is not a noun, I do not mean it as a referential time frame known by implication.

I could equally say, “To puke has come upon me”

It’s just that in the Greek, if I wrote that “To Puke” in the Participle mood, then the closest approximation to such in English is typically going to be “-ing”.
It is, however, still considered quite anchored to the action “to puke”, but we now write this out as “to puking”; which of course sounds crap in English.
If again, I wrote this in the Present tense and Active voice I would be stating it as already put when combined with the Participle mood, “to puking”.
But if I, on the other hand, place this in the 2nd person (no such ownership of the πειράζων exists in the passage, so don’t mistake me for saying such), then I would be altering this to “You puking”.
If, in the Greek, I followed this with the word εἶ (the word for exist/is/are/etc…), and placed this in the Present Active Indicative (indicative means a fact) 2nd person, then I would be saying, “You puking you are.”
In English, once we turn this around a bit, we could trim it to, “You are puking”.

The concept is that there is no entity standing there called the “Puker” outside of whom this addresses with the charge, “You puking you are”.
In fact, “you are a puker” would be a sloppy variation to say the least; though conceptually within the ballpark.

See, the point isn’t JUST that it’s a verb, as you are correct.
Many times a verb is conjugated into a working noun, but the issue here is that this is a Participle on top of being a Verb.
That means it’s just not a noun at all in the Greek format at all…it’s left completely as an action.
That is the key part of this.
It means this isn’t a “to try a thing” (which is the base root of the meaning when stripped down) wrapped up into a personified entity.
It means that the word is now a relatively non-finite form of the action; examining/tempting/trying.
Hell, I could translate it as “critically thinking” and still be relatively on mark with the concept; though not with the literal.

So there’s little room for the word to evolve into a person-thing easily.

In the above 4:3, you have:
and came the examining/tempting having spoke himself…

Now, you have to grab 4:2 as well to grasp this:
and fasting days forty and nights forty and after he was in hunger

Firstly, 40 days and nights of fasting is pulling on Hebraic numerological values and meanings.
When 40 is used in reference to fasting, it refers to a product of 8 and 5, which means to enter into the fasting for Renewal and to leave it with Grace.
One could easily substitute this concept in the verse instead of the number 40 and better convey what was being expressed at that time to today’s audiances that largely have no understanding regarding this fasting value of 40.
Most just think it means something like, “a long time”.

At any rate…
and fasting days forty and nights forty and after he was in hunger
and came the examining/tempting; he spoke himself…

Now, this is up to the reader at this point.
If you want to consider this to be an outward force pushing upon Jesus, and that this outward force has a voice separate from Jesus himself, then that is a stance of entire belief on the position.
To which I have no comment one way or the other.

I can only assert that the above literally moves in regards to Jesus by the grammar and words that are there.
It was about Jesus, and it came next that the examining/tempting came upon him, and it does not directly state that the examining/tempting is independent of Jesus, and the sentence suggests Jesus is the 3rd person possessive and speaks to himself in the 2nd person possessive as one in deep consideration/examination/temptation.

Again, it doesn’t really matter a whole great deal whether this truly is the way we would think in English (as we would write, from above, that, “I think I’m going to puke”).
The point is to approximate the Greek more directly in English to what the Greek is describing.

A physical tempter is not being explained.
The ACTION of examining deeply in trial and vexation IS being described.

Sure, but you wouldn’t make it something like a Participle if you were going to do something like that.
In each case used in this manner, the word is treated in the same manner; a participle.

7

In ‘Fasting has come’, Fasting is most certainly a noun. A gerund again. Just like ‘running is fun’.

‘To Puke’ is used as a noun there too.

So, the idea is, “the tempting came to him” is a weird way of saying “He was tempted.” We don’t happen to have a single word for ‘was tempted’ like we have ‘ran’ for ‘did run’, but if we did have such a word, X, then we could have the sentence “He X’ed” in which case, ‘X’ed’ would be a verb, and that’s what ‘the tempting came to him’ means?

But it did according to conservative and skeptical translators alike, so ‘why’ is a fair question, and all I’ve seen you say so far is “It’s a mystery to me”. What makes it even more mysterious is that it doesn’t affect Christian doctrine one way or the other. If Jesus did get tempted to turn rocks into bread just by the fact he was hungry and not because Satan was messing with him, Christianity would be just as it is. So, whatever motivated people to translate it this way wasn’t some need to stick force a supernatural meaning to the passage.

 Woah woah woah. Now you're bringing into it a bunch of interpretation and shit. It's entirely possible that 40 days and nights could just be 40 days and nights.  If you're opening the door to that, it seems to contradict the theme of your whole project. And at the very least, we need to start looking at Hebraic traditions and values that would lead to the interpretation that Jesus was tempted by a being vs. his own hunger and despair...which I'm expecting is precisely what happened to give us the traditional interpretation. 
  As an aside, I don't have as much a stake in this as it might seem- Orthodoxy is pretty vague as a whole about whether temptations and so on are demonic, personal, or somehow both at once etc. You see that thread in talking about interactions with demonic forces pretty regularly, that it's always left open that this was a more psychological experience. So I'm comfortable with your interpretation if it turns out. 
 What I'm taking issue with, especially in that other thread, is how much praise you got, and how the predictable skeptics on here seemed ready to jump on board with what you're saying when I'm extremely dubious that they have any comprehension of your arguments, and, they don't even so much as ask why you're saying the opposite of the rest of human scholarship.

At any rate…
and fasting days forty and nights forty and after he was in hunger
and came the examining/tempting; he spoke himself…

No, that’s not how I would read it so-presented. But, everybody DID read it that way. If I’m taking a stance of faith, it’s faith that their reasons why would justify their position.

And see, now we’re back to strict literalism again, what is directly stated and so on. and that’s what troubles me.

To use your own standard, entering the fasting for Renewal and leaving it with Grace isn’t being described, either. Neither is ‘a long time’, if you want to be super fussy.

Is your position that the Bible has never talked about Satan at any point? Of course I’m reminded of him being called The Accuser in Job. How was/would that be done in Greek? Or are ‘the Accuser’ and ‘The Tempter’ so different that it’s a confused question?

8

Ugh…I’m referring to the Greek.
It’s a real pain to try to explain here, but it doesn’t convert to a noun in Greek like we do in English.
The word, “Fasting” is more a reference to, “to fast” when referring to the instance of such, which in English, we call a noun as we think of the instance of such things as nouns, but since it’s not a tangible thing, the Greek does not.
This is why every case of πειρά-xx(x ) is in a variable form of a verb.
I looked around for a place that has a list…this was the best I could find for you:
laparola.net/greco/parola.ph … F%89%CE%BD

Scroll to the bottom; you’ll see what I mean about the verb bit.

Pretty much, yeah.
In fact, it’s accepted practice to translate the Participle mood of Greek into either -ing or -ed.
So it could easily be written, “examined”, or “tempted”, or “tried” (referring to the “trial” form of “try”), or “tested”.

I’m with you on this.
It’s not so much this word that I think, personally, has any weight.

To me, the part that bears larger weight in the plural pronoun that occurs later in the sentence which is completely ignored and translated into singular in English translations traditionally.
οὗτοι

This word occurs in the Pronoun form, and we could (as I first thought until I realized this was plural pronoun) think this was pronoun possesive in an abnormal grammatical use; meaning it was owned by Jesus; his; but lacking the Genitive in error.
But then I realized, not only was this Nominative, which means it belongs to the examination/temptation that was taking place, but that it was Plural as well as a pronoun.

The word has a very wide range of meanings stretching from “this” to “these” “his/her” to “their”, and some others depending.
And when you make it a pronoun in the plural form, then you make it “Their”.

And the “to make” is conjugated in the form of the 3rd person 2nd aorist, which our best representation in English is something like, “had made”…the use of the “had” is the best way to explain how it works differently from the 1st aorist, which is also past tense but without such an implication as “had” and it’s in the Subjunctive mood means it’s a “may”, or “possible”, or “allowance”.

Suddenly, the temptation isn’t about just showing off, but about providing for others out of what isn’t normally food; in fact is the opposite of; barren.
Now we have:
…you speak so that these stones their breads they may make

To me…I see this as more shifting than the other.
The bit about whether it’s personified or not to me personally isn’t as vital; though to many, for instance the Morons, such shift has dramatic impact as in that doctrinal following the end times are marked as near when the Devil and Lucifer are removed from the Bible; hence their investment in the KJV exclusively.

That’s why I didn’t translate 40 that way, but instead just noted that one could do so.
It would, for instance, be a worthwhile *note in a translation to explain the cultural meaning of 40 in Hebrew when referring to fasting, but to leave such ultimately up to the reader for interpretation.

The other thread…well…lol
I’ve tried as hard as possible to make it as clear as possible that the other thread is NOT ACCURATE TO GREEK GRAMMAR on PURPOSE.
I even said that my methods in that other thread’s OP should not be considered how I do things in OTHER threads.

You’ll notice this translation here deviates strongly from that other thread’s translation of this same verse.
The reason is that in the other translation, I purposefully voided out the conjugations for the purpose of trying to imagine what an Ebionite text based on something like Matthew but without the immaculate conception, without a divine Jesus, and without a divine resurrection.

So I agree…that other OP is pretty far off from what’s written.
That’s it’s entire point.

That, however, isn’t the point here; and hence why this thread has the extrapolated and incredibly lengthy break down of each and every word’s definitions and grammatical forms.

It shouldn’t.
I’m not ever found to state that doctrinal readings are wrong.
I have no basis for saying that.

I am only interested in breaking it down to the point where the literal IS just what is literally written.
From there, everyone can take from that what they want it to mean doctrinally.
But what I am working on most of the time is just digging through the texts with an interest of what is literally written and not doctrinally defined.
As I’ve stated to Felix in another thread, most of our translations today are heavy on translating into the English with doctrinal definitions that were established after the fact of the texts being written; and most of which we have record of those doctrines being created in such a manner.
That’s great…really!

I just think we’ve kind of lost sight of that a bit more than those during that time, and that our current methods of translating are far to bent on inserting the doctrinal standing’s understanding of the words rather than what the word just means in Hellenistic Greek in literal form.
After this, people can interpret it to mean whatever they want; in line or out of line with the doctrinal holdings.

That’s my opinion on the matter.
I mostly do this for my own interest in just seeing what’s written raw time and time again…it’s novel and interesting to me.
Now; that said, it has little bearing on my personal doctrinal life as I don’t follow a Christian doctrinal setup at this point in my life.
But, I still have respect for it.

Yeah, that’s why I just made note of it; rather than translating it into that meaning.
I am that fussy.
There are a great many times I want to throw in what the line makes me think conceptually as it’s meaning, but I refrain because it’s just simply not there in the literal and my thoughts on the matter are more suited for notes off to the side in discussion…not in line as translation.

No, that’s definitely a discussion held; the “accuser” that is.
And yeah…the relation between the two is a bit confusing.
Basically, the “tempting/tempter” bit pops up in the NT and not the OT, probably as a result of using Greek (that would be my guess there).
Before that it’s the “accuser”, and people find themselves tested or in doubt.

The “tempting” bit, if not used as “tempter” slides nicely right back into the same model in the OT, as the NT does actually use the διάβολος in forms conjugated are able to account for both uses of someone being slanderous, having a slanderous position, and being a slanderer/accuser.

There’s even a separate accuser for when it’s fairly judged and not slander, so it’s defiantly covered.

The difference is that no such figure of the accuser or tempter pops up and says, “howdy” to anyone.
The only time such occurs is between the god and the accuser; most famously in Job.

Outside of this, the accuser or conceptually, the prosecutor, is noted as the force of which trials and tests come from; like a Zeus to Lightening.
The accuser/prosecutor is the cited (to borrow a word) “ethereal” source for all things you think “wrong” that push your faith to the limits and test you as a “good” person.