The Words That Matter Most

Jesus says this on the Mount of Olives, in the long answer he gives his disciples in Matthew 24 and 25 about the destruction of the temple and the end of the age. It comes straight after a saying about this generation (24:34), whose reference Christians have long read in different ways; this lesson does not need that settled, and nothing here depends on it. The point of verse 35 is plain whichever way verse 34 is read. Jesus takes the two most permanent things anyone can see, the sky above and the ground below, and says they will go. Then he says his words will not.

In the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT), the free critical text this track uses, the verse is two clauses. The first is ὁ οὐρανὸς καὶ ἡ γῆ παρελεύσεται (ho ouranos kai hē gē pareleusetai, the heaven and the earth will pass away). The second is οἱ δὲ λόγοι μου οὐ μὴ παρέλθωσιν (hoi de logoi mou ou mē parelthōsin, but my words will never pass away). The word for words is λόγοι (logoi), the plural of λόγος (logos, word, saying, message), and here it means the things Jesus has said. A student who learns Greek vocabulary is learning the language in which those words were kept.

Now look at how ordinary the vocabulary is. Counting the SBLGNT, the article ὁ (ho, the), which appears here as ὁ, ἡ and οἱ, occurs 19,769 times in the New Testament. καί (kai, and) occurs 8,973 times; δέ (de, but, and) 2,766; ἐγώ (egō, I), of which μου (mou, my) is a form, 2,572; οὐ (ou, not) 1,605; μή (mē, not) 1,036; λόγος 330; οὐρανός (ouranos, heaven, sky) 273; and γῆ (gē, earth, land) 248. Only one word in the verse falls below fifty: παρέρχομαι (parerchomai, to pass by, pass away), with 29 occurrences, and that one is made of two pieces a beginner meets in the first weeks, παρά (para, beside, by), 193 times, and ἔρχομαι (erchomai, to come or go), 631 times.

So a student who knows the commonest few hundred words can read nearly all of this verse without help, and the one word he does not know is a compound of two words he does. That is not true of every verse; the next sections show where it fails. It is true of a great many, and it is the reason a small, well-chosen vocabulary is worth more to a busy pastor than a large, random one.

Two small points of grammar in the verse are worth having in your notebook. The first verb is singular, will pass away, although it has two subjects, heaven and earth. Greek often lets a verb agree with the nearer subject, or treats a pair as one idea, and some manuscripts have the plural instead; the SBLGNT marks the place with a small sign, and Module 8 teaches you to read such signs. The second point is the one the inquiry found: οὐ μή with an aorist subjunctive is emphatic denial. The BSB's never is not decoration added by the translators. It is in the Greek.

Numbers about New Testament vocabulary are repeated in sermons and classrooms without their source, and they do not all agree, so this lesson gives one set of figures and says exactly how they were made. They come from counting the SBLGNT, edited by Michael Holmes and published in 2010, as it is tagged by MorphGNT, a free project that marks every word of that text with its dictionary form and its grammar. A dictionary form, sometimes called a lemma, is the form you would look up: λέγω (legō, I say) rather than εἶπεν (eipen, he said). Proper names are counted as words.

On that count the New Testament has 137,554 words of running text, built from 5,461 different dictionary forms. Of those, 1,966 occur only once; a word found only once in a body of writing is called a hapax legomenon (hapax legomenon, said once), usually shortened to hapax. At the other end, 309 dictionary forms occur fifty times or more, and together they make up 79.8 percent of the running text. Widen the net to words occurring ten times or more and you have 1,125 dictionary forms covering 91.9 percent. The ten commonest words alone, almost all of them small words like the, and, he, you and in, make up 37.7 percent, and the article by itself is about one word in seven.

Other books give figures in the same neighbourhood but not identical: you will see totals of about five and a half thousand different words and about three hundred occurring fifty times or more. William Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek, one of the most widely used first-year grammars, builds its vocabulary lists on the words that occur fifty times or more, and many courses use the same line. The differences come from four places: which Greek text is counted, whether proper names are included, how a word with two spellings is handled, and whether a form such as a participle used as a noun is treated as a word of its own. None of those differences changes the picture.

The figures carry a lesson about honesty that runs through this whole track. If you quote a number in a sermon or a class, say where it came from, and do not round it into something more impressive than it is. A student who says that three hundred words make up about eighty percent of the New Testament, counted in the SBLGNT, has said something he can defend. A student who says that three hundred words are all you need to read the New Testament has said something false, and the next two sections explain why.

Eighty percent of the running words is not eighty percent of the meaning. The words at the top of the list are the joints and hinges of the language: the article, and, but, for, in, into, not, I, you, he, this, who, to be, to say. They tell you how a sentence is built. The words that tell you what the sentence is about, the nouns and verbs that carry its content, are spread much more thinly through the list, and the rarest of them are often where the weight falls. In a sentence of ten words where you know eight, the two you do not know may be the point of the sentence.

1 Corinthians 13:4, the anchor of the third lesson in this module, shows it. In the SBLGNT it opens Ἡ ἀγάπη μακροθυμεῖ, χρηστεύεται ἡ ἀγάπη (Hē agapē makrothymei, chrēsteuetai hē agapē, love is patient, love is kind). Every reader will know ἡ and will soon know ἀγάπη (agapē, love). But χρηστεύεται (chrēsteuetai, is kind) occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, and a few words later so does περπερεύεται (perpereuetai, boasts). Paul's description of love leans on words a reader with a three-hundred-word vocabulary will not have, and cannot guess.

Some rare words are rare in all of Greek, not only in the New Testament, and then even the experts are working from very little. The best-known case is in the Lord's Prayer. The word behind daily in Give us this day our daily bread (Matthew 6:11) is ἐπιούσιον (epiousion), from ἐπιούσιος (epiousios), which occurs in the New Testament only there and in the parallel at Luke 11:3. Origen, writing on prayer in the third century, said he could find it in no other Greek writer and thought the evangelists had formed it themselves. Suggested meanings include bread for today, bread for the coming day, the bread we need to live, and, in a reading as old as Origen himself, the bread that sustains our very being, which he took to be Christ, the bread of life. Jerome's Latin Vulgate rendered it one way in Matthew, supersubstantialem, and another in Luke, cotidianum, daily. When a reader with no Greek recites that petition, he is relying on a judgement that the best scholars still make with care.

So the honest summary is this. Knowing the commonest three hundred words will not let you read the New Testament without help. It will let you read it with help far faster and far more alertly than you can now. You will see where a sentence turns, you will recognise most of what the interlinear is telling you before you tap it, and you will notice when a translation has added or left out something, because you will know what the small words were.

Here are the twenty commonest dictionary forms in the SBLGNT with their counts, so that you can begin today. ὁ (ho, the) 19,769. καί (kai, and, also, even) 8,973. αὐτός (autos, he, she, it, self, same) 5,546. σύ (sy, you) 2,894, a count that includes its plural ὑμεῖς (hymeis, you all). δέ (de, but, and, now) 2,766. ἐν (en, in, among, by) 2,733. ἐγώ (egō, I) 2,572, including its plural ἡμεῖς (hēmeis, we). εἰμί (eimi, I am) 2,456. λέγω (legō, I say) 2,345. εἰς (eis, into, to, for) 1,754.

The next ten: οὐ (ou, not) 1,605. ὅς (hos, who, which) 1,408. οὗτος (houtos, this) 1,385. θεός (theos, God) 1,307. ὅτι (hoti, that, because) 1,294. πᾶς (pas, all, every) 1,244. γάρ (gar, for) 1,039. μή (mē, not) 1,036. ἐκ (ek, out of, from) 913. Ἰησοῦς (Iēsous, Jesus) 906. Other tools and grammars will give slightly different numbers, for the reasons in section 2, and the order of a few words near each other may change. The shape of the list will not.

Notice what kind of words these are. Apart from God and Jesus, they are almost all grammar: pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, the article and the verb to be. Learning them is learning how Greek sentences are put together, which is why the lessons on case, prepositions and connecting words in Modules 3 and 6 kept returning to them. Notice too that two different words for not stand in the top twenty. οὐ is used mainly with the indicative mood, the mood of statements, and μή mainly with the other moods; in Matthew 24:35 they stand together, in the emphatic denial Module 5 met in John 10:28. A list like this is not a pile of separate facts. Its words keep explaining one another.

One warning about the verbs in the list. The commonest verbs in any language tend to be the most irregular, and Greek is no exception. λέγω (legō, I say) is the dictionary form, but its aorist looks nothing like it: in Luke 1:42 Elizabeth cried out καὶ εἶπεν (kai eipen, and said), and the tool files εἶπεν under λέγω. ἔρχομαι (erchomai, I come) has the aorist ἦλθεν (ēlthen, he came), as in Matthew 11:19, The Son of Man came eating and drinking. And the verb behind see in John 3:3, ἰδεῖν (idein, to see), is filed under ὁράω (horaō, I see). A beginner who meets these forms and cannot find them in his memory has not failed. He has met the part of Greek that every learner has to memorise, a few common verbs whose forms come from different stems, and the parsing in the free tools will tell him the dictionary form until he knows it. Add these forms to the backs of the cards for their verbs.

Notice, finally, that the glosses are only hooks. δέ is listed as but, and, now, because it can be any of these, and sometimes the best English translation leaves it out altogether. λόγος is word, but it is also message, account, reason and matter, as any good lexicon entry will show you. Learn the gloss as a way to hold the word in memory, and let the uses you meet fill it in.

Learn the words in order of frequency, not in the order of the alphabet and not in the order you happen to meet them. The first fifty words give you more of the New Testament than the next five hundred. If you have a first-year grammar, use its lists, which are usually built this way. If you have none, use the twenty above, then add the words of your own passage that occur fifty times or more, then the next most frequent words your tools show you. You can build a good list for nothing.

Make cards from paper cut into small rectangles, or from the backs of old calendars or envelopes. On the front write the Greek word, and for a noun write the article with it, ὁ λόγος, ἡ γῆ, so that you learn its gender at the same time. On the back write the gloss and one short reference where the word occurs, preferably a verse you know. Say the word aloud every time you see it, with the pronunciation you learned in Module 1. A word you have heard yourself say is easier to remember than one you have only seen.

Then use boxes, or envelopes, or piles held with a rubber band. The method is usually credited to Sebastian Leitner, a writer on learning, whose book So lernt man lernen (How to learn to learn) appeared in 1972. All new cards start in box one. Each day go through box one; a card you know moves to box two, a card you miss stays where it is. Go through box two every few days and box three once a week, and any card you miss in a later box goes back to box one. The effect is that you spend your time on the words you do not yet know and only glance at the ones you do. The principle beneath it, that recall spread out over time is remembered far longer than recall crammed into one sitting, has been studied since Hermann Ebbinghaus published his experiments on memory in 1885.

Ten new words a day, five days a week, takes you through all 309 words that occur fifty times or more in about six weeks, with ten or fifteen minutes a day for review. Choose a fixed time and keep it, because a method you do every day beats a better method you do when you remember. There are free flashcard apps, and some are free on some phones and not on others; paper works on every phone because it does not need one. If you use an app, use one that spaces the reviews in the way just described.

Two habits make the cards stick. Learn words in families where you can, so that one card helps another; the next lesson shows how. And learn each word inside a phrase from scripture as well as on its own: ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ (ho logos tou theou, the word of God, Luke 8:11), λέγει αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰησοῦς (legei autō ho Iēsous, Jesus says to him, John 21:17). When you meet the word in your reading, you will meet it as an old friend in a familiar place.

Turn to the page after My passage and write at the top: Words in my passage. Open your passage in the interlinear on Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible. Write down every Greek word in order, with its dictionary form and gloss; a passage of eight verses may have well over a hundred words, so give this two sittings if you need to. Beside each dictionary form, write how many times it occurs in the New Testament, from the count your tool gives when you open the word. You only need to look each dictionary form up once.

Now mark the list. Circle every word that occurs fifty times or more. Draw a box round every word that occurs fewer than fifty times. Count the circles and the boxes and work out roughly what share of your passage the circled words make up. Compare it with the guess you wrote in the inquiry. Most students find that well over half their passage, and often about three quarters, is circled.

Then do three things. First, make cards for the twenty words in section 4 and for every circled word in your passage that is not among them, and put them all in box one. Begin your ten minutes tomorrow. Second, copy every boxed word onto a separate list headed Words to study. These are the words that probably carry your passage's content, and the third lesson of this module will ask you to do a full study of one of them. Third, look up one word's count in both tools and write down whether they agree. If they do not, write a sentence saying why they might differ. You have just learned to ask where a number came from, which is half of what this module is about.