Romans 13:9 provides several interesting points of discussion. Here is the verse with its critical apparatus.

Every once in a while, you have to guess as to what words have been omitted from a Greek sentence in order to explain the form of those that were included. Sentences are often abbreviated, and I have lost count of how many times I was stuck, trying to understand the form of a word, and the answer was that some word (or words) was assumed.

There is a lot of flexibility in the significance of subjunctive. Once you move a statement out of fact (indicative) into possibility or probability, lots of nuances can be present.

What do these three have in common? My life today. What does a normal person do when they are getting ready to drive 2 1/2 days home from vacation? Get a puppy! He is an alpha male German Shepherd, and we named him "Brady," the G.O.A.T. But in between the chaotic times (Brady can find bear poop faster than anyone I have ever seen), I have been thinking about how to teach our children about God's sovereignty.

When Jesus was arrested, did he go to Annas (John 18:13) or Caiaphas (Matt 26:57) before going to Pilate? Mark 14:53ff. does not name the high priest. Luke 22:66ff. refers to “elders of the people ... both chief priests and scribes.” So John is alone in specifying that Jesus went first to Annas.

My nephew Dave Gundlach preached an excellent sermon (at 39:00 in the video) this morning (March 24, 2024) that alerted me to something I had never seen before. It's about singular and plurals. James 4:1 says, “What accounts for the quarrels and disputes among you? Is it not this—your desires that are at war in your members?”

My assumption is that Paul’s use of Greek would have been relatively easy for a native speaker to understand. Peter‘s objection (2 Peter 3:15), I assume, would have more to do with Paul's concepts than his use of Greek. But when I see passages like Romans 7:2–3, I am reminded how much is lost by not being a first-century Jew. Our distance from Paul's context should encourage an element of humility as we attempt to exegete his writing.

I received an email asking me about the translation by the Jehovah's Witnesses in John 1:1. Because there is no article in front of the Greek word for "God," they insist that it's translated, "and the word was a god." This shows a significant lack of understanding of how Greek grammar functions relative to the article, I can think of no better response than Dr. Daniel Wallace's "Exegetical Insight" in chapter 6 in my Greek grammar, "Basics of Biblical Greek."

I was reading in Romans this morning and came across a passage that uses ἄνθρωπος in a totally generic sense. I thought that all the translations would use some generic word or phrase. Well, all but one.

I would guess that most Greek students think of the aorist tense as a general, nondescript tense. In one sense, this might be somewhat accurate. The aorist is certainly the default tense. If you want to describe an action occurring normally in the past and you don't want to say anything else about it, the Greek writer defaults to the aorist. When the writer wants to make a specific point, the other tenses come into play.

However, the aorist can be more nuanced than that. While its basic meaning is to look at an event as a whole from the outside, it can also carry specific meanings that are indicated by context.