Active, Middle and Passive

Every Greek verb that has person and number also has voice, and voice answers one question: how does the subject stand to the action? In the active voice the subject does it. In the passive voice the subject receives it, and someone else, named or unnamed, is the doer. English has those two, and you have used them all your life: the dog bit the man, the man was bitten. Greek has a third, the middle voice, which English does not have as a separate form, and that third voice is where most of the interest and most of the argument in this lesson lies.

The middle voice, in the description most grammars give, presents the subject as involved in the action in some way beyond simply doing it. Sometimes the subject acts on itself. Matthew 27:5 says that Judas went away and hanged himself, and the verb is ἀπήγξατο (apēnxato, he hanged himself), an aorist middle indicative with no separate word for himself; the middle carries it. Sometimes the subject acts for its own benefit or in its own interest. Sometimes the subject has something done to itself by arrangement, as when Ananias tells Paul in Acts 22:16, 'Get up, be baptized, and wash your sins away', and both verbs, βάπτισαι (baptisai, be baptized) and ἀπόλουσαι (apolousai, wash away), are aorist middle imperatives: Paul is to have himself baptized. And very often, as you will see, the middle has a sense that an English speaker can only render as an ordinary active verb.

Here is the fact about forms that you need before anything else, because every tool you use is wrestling with it. In the present, the imperfect, the perfect and the pluperfect, Greek uses one set of endings for both middle and passive. A form like κατεργάζεσθε (katergazesthe, you work out) could, by its ending alone, be middle or passive. Only in the aorist and the future does Greek keep a separate passive form, usually with the letters θη (thē) in it, as in παρακληθήσονται (paraklēthēsontai, they will be comforted) in Matthew 5:4. So whenever a tool labels a present or perfect form as middle or as passive, it is not reading the label off the ending. It is making a judgment about meaning, and a different tool, or a different grammarian, may judge differently.

You can watch this happen on your phone. Ephesians 5:21 begins with ὑποτασσόμενοι (hypotassomenoi, submitting), a present participle with the middle-passive ending. STEP codes it V-PPP-NPM, present passive participle, nominative plural masculine. Yet the BSB renders it 'Submit to one another', and other translations render it submitting yourselves, which is the sense grammarians usually call middle. The form is identical either way. The label in the tool is one scholar's decision, and the English in your Bible may reflect a different one. Neither is a mistake. Both are interpretations of an ambiguous form.

Now the anchor, in the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT), the free critical text this track quotes. Philippians 2:12 ends μετὰ φόβου καὶ τρόμου τὴν ἑαυτῶν σωτηρίαν κατεργάζεσθε (meta phobou kai tromou tēn heautōn sōtērian katergazesthe, with fear and trembling work out your own salvation). The verb is present, middle or passive in form, imperative, second person plural. Verse 13 continues θεὸς γάρ ἐστιν ὁ ἐνεργῶν ἐν ὑμῖν (theos gar estin ho energōn en hymin, for God is the one working in you), where ἐνεργῶν (energōn, working) is a present active participle, nominative singular masculine, and then καὶ τὸ θέλειν καὶ τὸ ἐνεργεῖν (kai to thelein kai to energein, both the willing and the working), two present active infinitives. One small thing to notice before moving on: the form κατεργάζεσθε is spelled exactly the same in the indicative, you are working out. What makes it a command is context, beginning with the word Ὥστε (hōste, therefore) at the head of the verse. English translations read it as a command, and rightly, but the reason is the paragraph and not the ending.

Open Philippians 2:12 in STEP and the code for κατεργάζεσθε is V-PNM-2P. The N in the voice slot means middle or passive deponent. The morphology STEP uses, which goes back to Maurice Robinson's coding of the Greek New Testament, has seven voice letters: A for active, M for middle, P for passive, E for middle or passive, D for middle deponent, O for passive deponent, and N for middle or passive deponent. Blue Letter Bible's parsing uses the same scheme, written out in words. To understand those last three letters you need to know that the word deponent is the subject of one of the liveliest arguments in Greek grammar of the last thirty years, and that good scholars stand on both sides of it.

The traditional view, which you will find in most grammars of the twentieth century and in Daniel Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (1996), runs like this. A large number of Greek verbs appear only, or almost only, in middle or passive forms, but are translated with an active meaning: ἔρχομαι, I come; πορεύομαι, I go; κατεργάζομαι, I work out or accomplish. The name deponent, from the Latin deponere, to lay aside, says that such verbs have, as it were, laid aside their active forms while keeping an active sense. Stated at its strongest, this view is a practical warning and a good one. The middle voice was weakening in the Koine period, and many writers were already using an active verb with a reflexive pronoun where an earlier writer would have used a middle. If a student is not told that a verb like ἔρχομαι is simply active in meaning, he will hunt for a hidden for himself or by himself in every middle form and preach a nuance that no Greek reader heard. Wallace's grammar is full of such warnings, and they are justified by what preachers have actually done. Defenders of the category add an argument from the forms themselves: ἔρχομαι has a middle present and future but an active aorist, ἦλθον (ēlthon, I came), with no change of sense at all, which suggests that in verbs like this the middle form had stopped carrying a meaning of its own.

The critical view has been building since the 1990s and is now very widely held among those who work on the Greek verb. The linguist Suzanne Kemmer, in The Middle Voice (1993), studied middle forms across many languages and found that the verbs which take middle forms cluster in recognisable groups: grooming and bodily care, changes of posture, motion, emotion, speech, thinking and perceiving, and receiving. Rutger Allan applied this to ancient Greek in The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek (2003). For New Testament students the case was argued by Neva Miller, in an essay printed with the Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament (2000), by Carl Conrad, in widely read essays on the Greek verb, and by Jonathan Pennington, in an article on deponency in Trinity Journal (2003). Constantine Campbell's Advances in the Study of Greek (2015) gives a fair summary. At its strongest the argument is this: ἔρχομαι and πορεύομαι are verbs of motion and κατεργάζομαι is a verb of effort and accomplishment, exactly the kinds of action in which the subject is most involved. These verbs did not lay anything aside; they are middle because their meaning is middle. The Latin category deponent was imported from Latin grammar into Greek, where it does not fit, and it trains students to stop listening to the voice just where it is saying something.

Notice that the two views differ less in what they tell you to do in a pulpit than the heat of the argument might suggest. Both agree that the meaning of κατεργάζεσθε in Philippians 2:12 is something the Philippians do, and that rendering it as passive would be wrong. Both agree that a preacher should not build a sermon on the bare fact that a verb is middle. The difference is in what the middle form is understood to be. On the traditional view it is a fossil, meaningful in origin but not in use, and the safest course is to translate the sense and move on. On the newer view it is a living part of the verb's meaning, usually impossible to render with a separate English word, but present in the kind of action the verb describes. A student does not need to settle the argument to use the tools well. He needs to know what N, D and O mean when the tool shows them, and that they are labels from one side of an argument, not observations.

One more comparison shows the labels at work. In Philippians 2:12 STEP labels κατεργάζεσθε with N, middle or passive deponent. In Matthew 28:19, the subject of lesson 3, it labels πορευθέντες (poreuthentes, having gone) as V-AOP-NPM, with O for passive deponent, because the form has the aorist passive θη but the meaning is plainly active: the disciples go, nobody sends them. The traditional view calls this a passive deponent. The newer view argues that in Koine the θη forms were themselves spreading into middle territory, so that the form is not really passive at all. You will meet both labels many times. When you do, write down the meaning the context requires, and note the label as what it is.

The danger with any grammatical category that English lacks is that a student, having learned it, starts finding it everywhere. Three passages show how to listen for the middle honestly: one where it is plain, one where it is contested, and one where a translation has had to choose.

Plain: Acts 22:16, already mentioned. Ananias says βάπτισαι καὶ ἀπόλουσαι τὰς ἁμαρτίας σου (baptisai kai apolousai tas hamartias sou, be baptized and wash away your sins). Nobody baptises himself, so the middle here means something like get yourself baptized, allow it to be done, and the second verb is also middle, wash away your sins. Grammarians call this a permissive or causative middle. It is worth noticing what the grammar does not settle. Christians who hold that baptism is a means by which God washes away sins and Christians who hold that it is the outward sign of a washing already done by faith both read this verse, and both read the middle the same way. The disagreement between them is about baptism, and the voice of the verb will not decide it.

Contested: James 4:2-3. James writes οὐκ ἔχετε διὰ τὸ μὴ αἰτεῖσθαι ὑμᾶς (ouk echete dia to mē aiteisthai hymas, you do not have because you do not ask), with the middle infinitive of αἰτέω (aiteō, I ask). The next verse opens with the active αἰτεῖτε (aiteite, you ask) and then returns to the middle, κακῶς αἰτεῖσθε (kakōs aiteisthe, you ask wrongly). The BSB reads, 'And when you do ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives', and the verse goes on to say why. Some interpreters have argued that the shift from middle to active and back is deliberate: the active is mere asking, the words without the heart, while the middle is asking as one personally involved, or asking for oneself, and James is saying that the first kind gets nothing. Others answer that the active and middle of this verb were used almost interchangeably by this period, that Mark 6:22-25 shows the alternation without any obvious change in sense, and that the contrast in James is carried by the word wrongly, not by the voice. Both readings are held by competent grammarians. If you preach this text, you may mention that some find a contrast in the voice, but you should not make it the hinge of the sermon, because it cannot bear that weight.

Chosen: 1 Corinthians 6:11. Paul writes ἀλλὰ ἀπελούσασθε, ἀλλὰ ἡγιάσθητε, ἀλλὰ ἐδικαιώθητε (alla apelousasthe, alla hēgiasthēte, alla edikaiōthēte). The second and third verbs are aorist passive indicatives, you were sanctified, you were justified. The first is an aorist middle, and by form it would mean you washed yourselves, or you had yourselves washed. The BSB, like most translations, gives all three in the passive: 'But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified'. That is a reasonable decision, since the three verbs stand in a row and the last two are passive, and the washing is plainly something God does. But it is a decision. A student with the Greek in front of him should be able to say that the first verb is middle, that it may echo the language of baptism as something a convert submits to, and that the translators chose to smooth it into the pattern of the other two.

The rule that comes out of these three is simple to state and hard to keep. When the middle form is the only form the verb has, as with κατεργάζομαι, translate the meaning and do not preach the voice. When a verb has both active and middle forms and the writer shifts between them, notice it, check whether other writers make the same shift without a difference, and treat any nuance you find as a suggestion rather than a discovery. When a translation has rendered a middle as passive or as plain active, ask why, and you will usually find a good reason, and occasionally a real choice.

A passive verb lets a speaker leave out the doer. Sometimes that is because the doer is unknown, sometimes because the doer does not matter, and sometimes because the doer is too obvious to need naming. Jewish writers of the period often spoke of God indirectly, by heaven, by the Name, or by leaving the subject unsaid. Gustaf Dalman drew attention to these habits of reverent speech in The Words of Jesus (German 1898, English 1902). Joachim Jeremias, in his New Testament Theology (1971), built on this and gave wide currency to a name for one form of it: the passivum divinum, the divine passive. He argued that around a hundred sayings of Jesus use a passive verb with God as the unexpressed agent, and that this was a characteristic feature of Jesus' own speech.

The examples are well known, and the case at its strongest is impressive. Matthew 5:4, 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted': παρακληθήσονται (paraklēthēsontai, they will be comforted) is a future passive indicative, third person plural, and the comforter is nowhere named. Matthew 7:7, 'Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you': δοθήσεται (dothēsetai, it will be given) and ἀνοιγήσεται (anoigēsetai, it will be opened) are future passives. Mark 2:5, 'Son, your sins are forgiven': ἀφίενταί σου αἱ ἁμαρτίαι (aphientai sou hai hamartiai, your sins are forgiven), present passive indicative. In each, the hearer is meant to supply God, and in Mark the scribes do exactly that, asking in 2:7, 'Who can forgive sins but God alone?' Defenders of the divine passive argue that the pattern is too frequent and too consistent in the sayings of Jesus to be an accident, and that it preserves something of the way Jesus actually spoke.

The case against the strong form of the idea is also serious, and you should hear it at full strength. First, the passive with an unexpressed agent is ordinary Greek. Writers with no reverential scruple use it all the time, so the form alone proves nothing about reverence. Second, Jesus in the Gospels names God constantly, as Father, and as God, in the very discourses where the passives appear: Matthew 7:11 names your Father in heaven four verses after the passives of 7:7. If the motive were avoidance of God's name, it was an inconsistent avoidance. Third, there are passives in the sayings of Jesus where the unexpressed agent is not obviously God, and calling every one a divine passive flattens them. Matthew 7:1 reads Μὴ κρίνετε, ἵνα μὴ κριθῆτε (mē krinete, hina mē krithēte, do not judge, so that you may not be judged), and the BSB gives 'Do not judge, or you will be judged.' Is the judge God, or the people whose measure you will receive back, as 7:2 might suggest, or both? Interpreters genuinely differ, and the label settles nothing.

What is settled is the narrower point, and it is the one to carry into the pulpit. A passive verb leaves the doer unsaid. Context, not grammar, tells you who the doer is. In many sayings of Jesus the context makes God the obvious doer, and you may say so with confidence, giving the verses that show it. What you should not say is that a passive verb proves divine action, or that Jesus used the passive in order to avoid saying God's name. The first claims more than the form can show; the second is a historical hypothesis, plausible to some and doubtful to others, that a preacher should present as such if he mentions it at all.

Now put the grammar back together. Verse 12 gives a command in the present tense to a plural subject: you, all of you, work out your salvation. The verb is middle or passive in form and active in meaning, and on the newer account of the middle the form fits a verb about effort that involves the doer deeply. The BSB's 'continue to work out' is the translators' way of bringing the present tense into English, and it is a fair one, because Paul has just said they have always obeyed. Verse 13 gives the reason, with γάρ (gar, for): God is the one at work in them, both in the willing and in the working. The participle ἐνεργῶν is active. The two infinitives are active. Paul could have written a passive, you are being worked on by God, and he did not. He puts two active subjects side by side, the Philippians working out and God working in, and he makes the second the ground of the first.

Notice also the reflexive pronoun ἑαυτῶν (heautōn, your own), which the KJV renders, 'work out your own salvation with fear and trembling' (KJV), and which the BSB folds into 'your salvation'. It is plural, because the subject is plural. Interpreters differ over what follows from that. Many read the verse as addressed to each believer, about the outworking of each person's salvation in obedience. Others, noticing that the whole paragraph from 2:1 is about the unity of a quarrelling church, read your own salvation as the health and wholeness of the congregation together, which they are to work at among themselves now that Paul is absent. Both readings have able defenders, both fit the grammar, and many readers hold that the corporate setting and the individual application belong together.

Here is the boundary a student of Greek must keep. The grammar of these two verses shows that both God and the Philippians are active subjects, that the human work is commanded and the divine work is given as its reason, and that Paul uses no passive to describe the believer. The grammar does not tell you how the two activities relate: whether God's work makes the human work certain, enables a human response that could be withheld, or cooperates with it in a single synergy. Those are the questions over which Reformed, Wesleyan, Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox Christians have disagreed for centuries, each with serious arguments, and the Systematic Theology track sets them out in its lesson on Sanctification, which uses this same passage as its anchor. Go there for the theology. Come here for what the verbs can and cannot carry.

If you preach this passage, then, you can say with full confidence that Paul commands real effort and grounds it in God's prior and present work. You can say that the two verbs are both active, and that Paul does not describe the Christian as a passive object. You can explain that the BSB's 'continue to' reflects the present tense. What you cannot say is that the middle voice proves the Philippians were working for their own benefit, or that the grammar settles the question between Calvin and Wesley. A congregation that hears you keep that boundary learns something about how to read, as well as what this text says.

Open your Greek notebook to the verb table you began in Module 4 for your capstone passage, with its columns for verse, Greek word, sound, dictionary form, parsing and English. If you have not yet chosen a passage, choose one now: five to twelve verses from a Gospel or a letter that you expect to preach or teach, and set up the table as Module 4 describes. This module adds a column to the table in every lesson, and by the end of it you will have the verb system of your passage on one page.

This week, add a column headed Voice and a narrow column headed Who acts. Open your passage in STEP Bible on your phone and tap each verb in turn. In the Voice column write the voice exactly as the tool gives it, in full words: active, middle, passive, middle or passive, middle deponent, passive deponent, or middle or passive deponent. Then open the same verse in Blue Letter Bible and check at least five of your rows. Where the two tools agree, tick the row. Where they differ, write both and a question mark.

In the Who acts column, for every active verb write the subject. For every passive verb write who does the action, if the passage tells you, followed by the verse that tells you; if the passage does not, write unnamed, and then a one-line guess with your reason. For every verb marked middle or deponent, look up its dictionary form in the Blue Letter Bible lexicon and see whether the New Testament ever uses it in the active. Write active forms exist or no active forms beside it.

Finally, write two sentences at the foot of the page, as you did in the inquiry. The first should be one thing about voice in your passage that you could say from a pulpit and defend from the Greek. The second should be one thing you might have said before this lesson that you now know the Greek will not carry. Keep both. The capstone will ask you for exactly this kind of honesty, and it is easier to build it a column at a time.