published by Bill Mounce on Fri, 08/08/2008 - 12:00
“Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord” (1 Tim 1:2). Paul begins his letter to Timothy with a somewhat normal greeting, and yet sometimes familiarity can hide significant truths from English eyes.
One of the joys of Greek is in seeing the nuances of grammatical constructions. Albeit, it can take some time in the language to develop this level of sensitivity, but that’s the joy of the journey.
In this verse, there is one preposition (“from,” apo) that governs two objects (“God” and “Christ Jesus”). Grammatically, this means that Paul is in some way thinking of the two objects as acting in unison, as one. If “God” and “Jesus” were two distinctly different entities, normal Greek grammar would require the preposition to be repeated (“from God and from Jesus”). But the single preposition means that the two objects are to be seen as a single entity.