Present middle and passive indicative

Voice describes how the subject of a verb relates to the action. Every verb you have read so far has been active: the subject does the thing. This chapter introduces the other two.

The passive English has too — the subject receives the action. The middle it does not, and that is the difficulty. In the middle, the subject acts with reference to itself: on itself, for itself, or in its own interest.

This is not a corner of the language. Middle and passive indicatives are 3,799 of the New Testament's 15,589 — one in four.

One set of endings, two voices

The primary middle and passive endings are:

One set, and both voices use it. In the present, imperfect, perfect and pluperfect, a middle and a passive are spelled identically. The form cannot tell you which is meant. Only the verb and the sentence can.

Worth being honest about what follows from that. When this app's reader labels a form "middle" or "passive", that is an editorial judgement about the sentence, not something read off the letters — and you are entitled to disagree with it.

The paradigm, and the odd second singular

The connecting vowel ο/ε shows plainly in five of the six. The exception is the second singular, and it is worth a minute now because the same thing happens in each of the next three chapters.

λύῃ began as λύεσαι. The σ dropped out between two vowels, and the ε and α contracted, taking the ι underneath. Greek does this whenever an ending starting with σ meets a connecting vowel — so every second person singular in the middle looks irregular, and none of them is.

What the passive says

The subject receives the action, exactly as in English. What differs is that Greek does with one word what English needs two or three for: λύομαι is "I am being loosed".

Prefer that longer rendering while you are learning. "I am loosed" is closer to the Greek perfect passive, which is the next chapter, and blurring the two costs you the difference between them.

λεπροὶ καθαρίζονται καὶ κωφοὶ ἀκούουσιν, καὶ νεκροὶ ἐγείρονται καὶ πτωχοὶ εὐαγγελίζονται

"Lepers are being cleansed and deaf people hear, and dead people are being raised and poor people have good news preached to them." καθαρίζονται, ἐγείρονται and εὐαγγελίζονται are all present passives, and Jesus does not say by whom — a point we come back to.

What the middle says

There is no single English rendering, because the middle does not name how the subject is involved. It only says that it is. λύομαι as a middle could be "I am loosing myself", "I am loosing for myself", or "I myself am loosing", and the sentence decides.

The clearest evidence that it is doing real work is a verb that means two different things in the two voices. ἄρχω, active, means "I rule". ἄρχομαι, middle, means "I begin" — and 84 of that verb's 86 occurrences are middle.

Be careful not to overstate it. Where Greek wants a plain reflexive it usually says so with an active verb and a reflexive pronoun:

ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν ἐγὼ ἁγιάζω ἐμαυτόν

"For their sake I sanctify myself." Active verb, reflexive pronoun, nothing left to the middle at all.

Deponent verbs

A great many Greek verbs have middle or passive forms and no active ones. They are called deponent, from the Latin for "laid aside", on the theory that the active forms were dropped somewhere in the language's history. They are middle in form and active in meaning.

The name is disputed, and worth knowing as disputed. Robertson's grammar said in 1915 that it "should not be used at all", and that these verbs are defective rather than deponent — a verb that never had an active has laid nothing aside. The argument has run further that way since. Black uses the word and so does this course, because you will meet it everywhere; treat it as a name for the pattern rather than an explanation of it.

Here is the number that ought to change how you read the middle: 443 of the 683 present middle indicatives in the New Testament — two in three — belong to verbs that have no active form anywhere. The two commonest present middle indicatives in the book are ἔρχεται (89) and δύναται (71), and neither means anything reflexive. ἔρχομαι is the one to watch: it has no active present, so it is the standard example of a deponent — on the traditional label this chapter has just put a question mark over — but it has an active aorist in ἦλθον — which is why it is not among the 443.

So when you meet a middle, the first question is not "what is the middle voice doing here?" It is "does this verb have an active at all?" Usually it does not, and the ending is simply how the word is spelled.

One practical oddity: some verbs take an object in a case other than the accusative. ἀποκρίνομαι takes the dative, and ἄρχω, "rule", the genitive.

By whom, through whom, by what

A passive often names the agent, and Greek has three main ways of doing it — two of them from chapter 8. (There are rarer ones: ἀπό, ἐκ and παρά all mark an agent occasionally.)

Direct agent: ὑπό with the genitive.

ἐλέγχεται ὑπὸ πάντων, ἀνακρίνεται ὑπὸ πάντων

"He is convicted by all, he is called to account by all."

Intermediate agent: διά with the genitive — the one through whom the first agent acts.

Impersonal means: the bare dative, with or without ἐν.

τῇ γὰρ χάριτί ἐστε σεσῳσμένοι διὰ πίστεως

"For by grace you have been saved through faith." Both at once: grace in the dative as the means, faith with διά as what it comes through. (σεσῳσμένοι is a perfect passive — the next chapter.)

Very often no agent is named at all, and when the unnamed agent is plainly God the construction is called a divine passive. It is common in the sayings of Jesus.

μακάριοι οἱ πενθοῦντες, ὅτι αὐτοὶ παρακληθήσονται

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" — by God, and Matthew does not need to say so.

What to watch for

The form will not decide it for you. Middle and passive share endings in four tenses. Ask what the verb means before asking what the voice is doing.

Most middles are lexical. Two in three are deponent. Reach for "the middle voice is emphasising something" last, not first.

Translate the present passive as "is being —". It keeps the tense's aspect visible and it keeps the perfect free to mean what it means.

And λύῃ is second singular, not third, however much it looks like λύει with a subscript.