Playing the numbers

πάντα δι' αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν ὃ γέγονεν

We were reading John 1:3 at Seminary yesterday and the question came up, "Why do we have a neuter plural subject but an aorist singular verb?"

Panta is plural, but egeneto is singular. I was going to ask Dr. Staats about this last night, but neglected to do so...sorry.

But I happened to think this morning a little about it and I wonder if it is a little like in John 10 where we have "The sheep"(plural) "hear" (singular) "the voice of me." Could panta be considered something like a collective noun in this case?

I found a little more information from a website that has an online Greek class using the Croy text. That site is (www.mythfolklore.net/bibgreek/)

6.39 Neuter Plural Subjects with Singular Verbs

You already know one unusual and important thing about neuter nouns in Greek, which is that the nominative and accusative forms are identical. This is actually true for neuter nouns in all of the Indo-European languages. You can actually see this even in English, which still has gender and case in its pronoun system:

nominative		accusative
She is standing over there.		Do you see her?
He is waiting outside.		Do you see him?
It is in the cupboard.	=	Do you see it?
They are in the yard.		Do you see them?

In addition to the "nominative=accusative" rule for neuter nouns in Greek, there is a very peculiar rule about plural neuter nouns. Sometimes a plural neuter noun will take a singular verb! This is not always the case in Biblical Greek, but you should not be surprised if you see sentences like this:

τὰ τέκνα λεγει.

The children are speaking.

This information is from: http://www.mythfolklore.net/bibgreek/croy/other/039.htm


--- marty ---