The Article

English has two articles, the and a. Greek has one, usually called simply the article, and it corresponds roughly to the. There is no indefinite article in Greek at all. Wherever an English translation says a or an, the translator has supplied it, because English grammar needs it and Greek does not have it. That fact is small and it matters a great deal, because some of the most argued verses in the New Testament turn on whether an a should be supplied.

The Greek article changes its form to agree with its noun in case, number and gender, as the table in the previous lesson showed: ὁ, ἡ, τό in the nominative singular, τοῦ, τῆς, τοῦ in the genitive, and so on. That makes the article doubly useful to a student. It tells you something about the noun's meaning, which this lesson is about, and it often tells you the noun's case more clearly than the noun's own ending does. A third declension noun with an unfamiliar ending is easy to parse when τῷ or τῆς stands in front of it.

The article is also the commonest word in the Greek New Testament, appearing nearly twenty thousand times, so learning what it does repays the effort on every page. Grammarians describe its uses in long lists; Daniel Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (1996), the standard intermediate grammar in many seminaries, gives it a long chapter of its own. A student without that book needs only the handful of uses that change how a verse is translated, and those are what the next section gives.

One caution before going further. English the and Greek ὁ overlap, but they do not match. Greek uses the article with proper names, so the Greek of John 4:21 and many other verses says the Jesus, ὁ Ἰησοῦς (ho Iēsous), where English drops the article. Greek can use the article where English would use a possessive, his or their. And Greek can leave the article off a noun that is plainly definite, as Ἐν ἀρχῇ, in the beginning, in John 1:1 has no article and still means the beginning. So the rule is not that Greek the equals English the. The rule is to ask what the article is doing each time it appears, and what its absence is doing each time it does not.

First, it points out. The article marks something as particular, known, or already in view. In John 4:23 the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) has ὁ πατὴρ (ho patēr, the Father), the one Father the conversation has already named. This is the use English shares, and you will mostly not notice it.

Second, it turns other words into nouns. Put the article in front of an adjective, a participle, an infinitive or even a prepositional phrase, and the whole thing becomes a noun. In John 4:24 τοὺς προσκυνοῦντας (tous proskynountas) is the article with a participle, literally the ones worshipping, so the BSB rightly says worshipers. In John 3:16 πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων (pas ho pisteuōn) is literally every the believing one, so everyone who believes. In Philippians 1:21 τὸ ζῆν Χριστὸς (to zēn Christos) is the article with an infinitive, the to-live is Christ, which the BSB renders 'to live is Christ'. This use is everywhere, and an interlinear that glosses the article as the each time will make the English look absurd until you see what the article is doing.

Third, it can stand in for a pronoun. With the little words μέν and δέ, the article means some and others. Ephesians 4:11 reads τοὺς μὲν ἀποστόλους, τοὺς δὲ προφήτας (tous men apostolous, tous de prophētas), and the BSB renders it 'some to be apostles, some to be prophets'. No English the could do that job. The same verse ends τοὺς δὲ ποιμένας καὶ διδασκάλους, pastors and teachers, one article over two plural nouns. Whether that names one group or two overlapping ones is a fair question, and it is worth knowing now that the rule in section 4 was framed for singular nouns and does not settle plurals.

Fourth, and most important for the debates ahead, it marks the subject. When a sentence has two nominatives joined by the verb to be, or by no verb at all, the endings cannot say which is the subject, because both have the same case. Greek writers usually solve this with the article: the noun that has it is the subject. In 1 John 4:8 ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν (ho theos agapē estin) has the article with God, so the clause says God is love, and it cannot be turned round into love is God. In John 1:1 καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος has the article with λόγος, so the Word is the subject and the clause says the Word was God, not God was the Word. Module 1 dealt with that verse and its debates. Here the point is simply mechanical, and it is the key to the anchor verse.

Apply it to John 4:24. πνεῦμα ὁ θεός (pneuma ho theos, God is spirit) is two nominatives with no verb. θεός has the article; πνεῦμα does not. So God is the subject and spirit is what is said about him, even though spirit comes first. Every translation agrees on that much. The disagreement is over what to make of the missing article on πνεῦμα, and that is the next question.

A Greek noun without the article is called anarthrous, from a word meaning without a joint, and a noun with the article is articular. The tempting rule is that an anarthrous noun is indefinite, so that it should take a in English. That rule is wrong often enough to be dangerous. An anarthrous noun can be indefinite, a spirit, one of a class. It can be definite, as in the beginning in John 1:1, or as many nouns are after prepositions and with proper names. Or it can be qualitative, describing the kind or nature of a thing rather than identifying it or counting it.

The qualitative use is the one that matters in John 4:24. In 1973 Philip B. Harner published a study in the Journal of Biblical Literature of anarthrous predicate nouns that stand before the verb, as πνεῦμα does here and θεὸς does in John 1:1. His argument was that such nouns are very often qualitative: they say what kind of thing the subject is. Read that way, πνεῦμα ὁ θεός says that God is spirit in his nature, not flesh, not bound to a mountain or a temple. That fits the conversation exactly. The woman has asked whether worship belongs on Gerizim or in Jerusalem, and Jesus answers that a time is coming when the Father will be worshipped neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem (4:21). The point is what God is, not how many spirits there are.

So why did the King James translators write 'God is a Spirit'? Not out of ignorance of Greek. English needs some decision about an article before a noun like spirit, and they made one that was defensible in their own idiom. To a modern ear, though, it sounds like one spirit among many, a member of a class, which is not what the clause is saying. Most modern versions, the BSB among them, therefore leave the a out. This is a good small example of a translation choice you can now weigh for yourself: same Greek, two honest renderings, and a reason one now reads more accurately than the other.

Two related rules belong to Module 1 and are only named here. E. C. Colwell observed in 1933 that a definite predicate noun standing before the verb usually lacks the article, which means the missing article does not by itself make such a noun indefinite. Harner's study came after Colwell's and pressed the qualitative sense. Both bear on John 1:1, and the lesson Reading Your First Verse has dealt with that verse and with the Jehovah's Witness rendering a god. What carries over to every verse is the method: when the article is missing, ask whether the noun is indefinite, definite or qualitative, and give your reason from the context, not from the absence alone.

The rest of John 4:24 has one more point worth noticing. ἐν πνεύματι καὶ ἀληθείᾳ (en pneumati kai alētheia, in spirit and truth) has one preposition governing two nouns, neither with the article. Many interpreters take the pair as one idea, worship that is both Spirit-given and true, rather than two separate requirements. Whether πνεύματι there means the human spirit or the Holy Spirit is argued, which is why the BSB prints a small s and some commentators would prefer a capital. The Greek manuscripts have no capital letters to settle it; that decision belongs to the translator and, once you know it is a decision, to you.

Granville Sharp (1735-1813) was an English campaigner against the slave trade who taught himself Greek and Hebrew, and in 1798 he published Remarks on the Uses of the Definitive Article in the Greek Text of the New Testament. His first rule, the one that bears his name, says in substance this. When two nouns in the same case are joined by καί, and they describe a person by office, dignity, relationship or character, and the article stands before the first noun but is not repeated before the second, then the second noun refers to the same person as the first.

Notice the conditions, because the debate turns on them. Daniel Wallace, whose doctoral work on the rule was later published as Granville Sharp's Canon and Its Kin (2009), argued that Sharp himself had limited the rule in ways his critics often ignored: both nouns must be personal, both must be singular, and neither may be a proper name. With those limits, Wallace argued, the rule holds without clear exception in the New Testament. Without them it fails at once: plural nouns, as in Ephesians 4:11, and proper names joined by and do not follow it, and were never meant to.

Test it on a case nobody disputes. 2 Peter 1:11 speaks of 'the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ'. The SBLGNT reads τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (tou kyriou hēmōn kai sōtēros Iēsou Christou): one article, Lord, and, Savior with no article. Nobody thinks the Lord and the Savior are two different people. The rule describes what every reader already hears.

Now the cases that matter. 2 Peter 1:1 has exactly the same shape with one word changed: τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, which the BSB renders 'our God and Savior Jesus Christ'. And Titus 2:13, the BSB's 'our great God and Savior Jesus Christ', reads τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ καὶ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (tou megalou theou kai sōtēros hēmōn Iēsou Christou). If Sharp's rule applies, both verses call Jesus Christ God. That is why Sharp wrote: his title page announced many new proofs of the divinity of Christ. And that is why the rule has been argued over ever since.

Notice also what the rule does not say. It does not say that a repeated article means two persons. Thomas's confession in John 20:28 is Ὁ κύριός μου καὶ ὁ θεός μου (Ho kyrios mou kai ho theos mou, my Lord and my God), with the article repeated, and it is plainly said to one person. So a repeated article does not prove two, and a single article proves one only when Sharp's conditions are met. Everything in Titus 2:13 depends on whether they are.

The case for one person, Jesus Christ called our great God and Savior, runs like this. First, the grammar: one article governs both nouns, both are singular and personal, and if θεός is treated as a common noun the verse meets Sharp's conditions exactly. Second, the parallel: 2 Peter 1:1 and 1:11 have the identical construction, and 1:11 is read by everyone as one person, so it is hard to see why 1:1 should not be. Third, the word appearing: ἐπιφάνεια (epiphaneia, appearing) is used in the Pastoral Letters of Christ's appearing, his first coming or his return (1 Timothy 6:14, 2 Timothy 1:10, 4:1 and 4:8), and nowhere of the Father, so the one whose appearing believers await in Titus 2:13 is most naturally Christ. Fourth, the next verse continues 'He gave Himself for us to redeem us', which describes Christ and reads smoothly if the whole title just given was his. Fifth, in the religious language of the day, god and saviour was a familiar double title for a single deity or a deified ruler, so a Greek reader would hear one figure. And sixth, the Greek-speaking fathers of the early church generally read it so, as Christopher Wordsworth argued in his Six Letters to Granville Sharp (1802). Murray J. Harris, in Jesus as God (1992), weighed the verse at length and concluded that it very probably calls Jesus God, and most modern translations, among them the BSB, NIV, NASB, CSB and NRSV, render it that way.

The case for two persons, God the Father and our Savior Jesus Christ, runs like this. First, usage: in Paul's letters θεός almost always means the Father, and in the Pastorals specifically God and Christ are regularly distinguished, as in Titus 1:4, 'Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior', and 1 Timothy 2:5, 'one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus'. Second, the rule's own limits: if θεός functions almost as a proper name, as it often does in the New Testament, the construction falls outside Sharp's conditions and the single article proves nothing. Third, the phrase σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, our Savior Jesus Christ, appears to work as a fixed title in this letter, as in 3:6, 'through Jesus Christ our Savior', and a fixed title behaves like a name. Fourth, Titus calls God the Father Savior too, at 1:3, 2:10 and 3:4, and 3:4 uses the verb appeared, from the same root as appearing, of 'the kindness of God our Savior', while 2:11 says 'the grace of God has appeared', so appearing language is not reserved to Christ in this very letter. Georg Benedikt Winer, whose grammar shaped New Testament study through the nineteenth century, granted that the grammar permitted one person but judged from Paul's other letters that the apostle would not call Christ the great God, and so read two, and the King James Version reads 'the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ', which most naturally suggests two.

A third reading tries to honour both sets of evidence. It takes our great God and Savior as one person, the Father, as Sharp's rule would suggest, and takes Jesus Christ as standing in apposition not to Savior but to the glory earlier in the verse: the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, that glory being Jesus Christ. On this reading Christ is the glory of God made visible, a thought with strong roots elsewhere in the New Testament, and the verse is still a high statement about him, though not the one Sharp found. F. J. A. Hort first proposed it, and Gordon Fee, who firmly affirms the deity of Christ, defended it in Pauline Christology (2007). Its critics, among them Robert Bowman in a 2008 reply to Fee, answer that the word order makes the appositional link to glory a long reach. Its defenders answer that the other two readings each have to explain away part of the evidence too.

Where does that leave a student? With three things that are settled and one that is not. Settled: the grammar of Titus 2:13 permits one person and, on Sharp's conditions, favours it, and most grammarians and translators now read it so. Settled: careful, orthodox scholars have read it otherwise for reasons drawn from the text, not from unbelief, and their arguments are real. Settled: the church's confession that Jesus is God does not hang on this verse. John 1:1, John 20:28 and Hebrews 1:8 stand whatever one decides here, and Romans 9:5, which has its own debate, is read by the BSB as 'Christ, who is God over all'. Not settled, among people who share that confession: whether Paul is saying it here.

So when you preach Titus 2:13, you may say what the BSB says, because it is a defensible rendering of the Greek, and you may say that most scholars read it as calling Jesus our great God and Savior. Do not say that 'the Greek proves' it, and do not tell a congregation that anyone who reads it differently is denying the faith. If someone in your church raises the question, show them the three verses side by side as you did in the inquiry, and let them see both how strong the case is and where its limits lie. That is what Sharp's rule, honestly used, can do for a pastor: not end an argument, but let a congregation watch one being weighed fairly.

Go back to the case map you began in the last lesson, on the passage you have chosen for your capstone study. Today you add one layer. Take a pen of a different colour, or use underlining if you have only one pen.

First, on your phone, go through the Greek of the same two verses on STEP Bible or Blue Letter Bible and underline every article in your notebook copy. Draw a short line from each article to the noun, adjective or participle it goes with. Check that they agree in case, number and gender; if they do not seem to, tap both words again and find out why.

Second, find every place where the article turns another word into a noun, as τοὺς προσκυνοῦντας does in John 4:24, and write the literal sense beside it, the ones who, the to-live, and then the natural English. Third, find every noun without the article and write I, D or Q beside it: indefinite, definite or qualitative. Give a one-line reason for each Q, from the context.

Finally, look for the pattern of section 4: article, noun, καί, noun, with no second article. If you find one, write out Sharp's four conditions underneath it and check each: personal, singular, not a proper name, same case. Then write one sentence on what you think the phrase means and one sentence on what the strongest other reading would be. You will need both sentences when you write up your passage at the end of the track.