Personal pronouns

Pronouns stand in for nouns so that a sentence need not keep repeating them, and Greek uses them constantly. αὐτός alone occurs 5,546 times — four times more often than θεός, the commonest noun in the New Testament — and ἐγώ and σύ add 5,466 more between them. You will not read a paragraph without one.

One rule governs all of them, and it is worth having before the forms. A pronoun takes its gender and number from the word it stands for, and its case from its own job in its own clause. Those come from different places, and keeping them apart is most of the skill.

First and second person

The bracketed forms are the ordinary ones: no accent of their own, leaning on the word in front. The longer forms carry emphasis, and are the usual ones after a preposition — ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ, not ἀπό μου.

Now the pair that catches people for years. ἡμεῖς is "we"; ὑμεῖς is "you". One letter and one breathing apart, all the way down: ἡμῶν / ὑμῶν, ἡμῖν / ὑμῖν, ἡμᾶς / ὑμᾶς. The mnemonic worth having is that the last letter of the English word is the first letter of the Greek one: "we" ends in an e and ἡμεῖς begins with eta, while "you" ends in a u and ὑμεῖς begins with upsilon.

ὑμεῖς προσκυνεῖτε ὃ οὐκ οἴδατε, ἡμεῖς προσκυνοῦμεν ὃ οἴδαμεν

"You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know." Both in one line, and the whole point of the sentence is the contrast. Read them the wrong way round and you have reversed what Jesus said to the woman at the well.

αὐτός: the third person

There is almost nothing new here. It declines like ἀγαθός from chapter 6, with one exception you have met in the article: the neuter singular is αὐτό, with no final ν, exactly as the article's neuter is τό. That single letter is the difference between "it" and "him".

None of the personal pronouns has a vocative. You do not address a pronoun.

Where each part of a pronoun comes from

ὁ κόσμος δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ ὁ κόσμος αὐτὸν οὐκ ἔγνω

"The world came into being through him, and the world did not know him." Both pronouns stand for the Word, so both are masculine singular. But αὐτοῦ is genitive because διά meaning "through" takes the genitive, and αὐτόν is accusative because it is the object of ἔγνω.

That is the rule working: gender and number reach backwards to the noun, and case is decided by what the pronoun is doing where it stands. The relative pronoun behaves the same way, so it is worth settling now.

His, her, their

The commonest thing a Greek pronoun does is show possession, and it does it with a genitive placed after the noun. ὁ λόγος μου is literally "the word of me", which is to say "my word".

οἶδεν γὰρ ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν

"For your Father knows." Notice the order: the article stays with its noun and the possessing pronoun follows. English puts it first and drops the article, which is why a literal rendering sounds odd.

This is not a minor use. Of αὐτός's 5,546 occurrences, 2,140 are genitive — nearly two in five — and most are somebody's something.

When the pronoun is emphatic

A verb ending already names its subject, so a nominative pronoun is never required. Greek uses one when it wants weight there, and the numbers show how marked that choice is: only 272 of αὐτός's occurrences are nominative, fewer than one in twenty.

ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν

"But I say to you." The -ω of λέγω had already said "I". The ἐγώ is there because Jesus is setting himself against what was said to those of old.

ἐγὼ ἐβάπτισα ὑμᾶς ὕδατι, αὐτὸς δὲ βαπτίσει ὑμᾶς ἐν πνεύματι ἁγίῳ

"I baptised you with water, but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit." Two nominative pronouns, and the sentence turns on the distance between them.

Do not overclaim it, though. A pronoun the syntax needed is not emphatic simply by being there. Ask whether the sentence would have been complete without it.

αὐτός as "self" and as "same"

αὐτός has two further uses, and position decides between them — the same rule that governed adjectives in chapter 6.

Predicate position, with no article in front of it, means self.

αὐτὸς ὁ κύριος ἐν κελεύσματι

"The Lord himself, with a cry of command." And again:

αὐτὸς ὁ θεὸς μετ’ αὐτῶν ἔσται

"God himself will be with them" — where the αὐτῶν in the same line is the ordinary pronoun, "them". One word doing two jobs in the space of five.

Attributive position, with the article immediately in front, means same.

καὶ ὁ αὐτὸς κύριος

"And the same Lord." Move one article and "the Lord himself" becomes "the same Lord".

αὐτὸς γὰρ σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν

"For he himself will save his people from their sins." Three forms of one word in ten, doing three different jobs: an intensive nominative, then two genitives of possession.

What to watch for

ἡμεῖς and ὑμεῖς, and the whole column under them. This is the mistake that survives longest, because both readings usually make sense.

αὐτοῦ is "his", and "of it", and also just the genitive a preposition asked for. The gloss follows the job, not the form.

The neuter αὐτό has no ν; αὐτόν is masculine accusative.

And one pair to have in mind before chapter 11: αὐτή with a smooth breathing is "she", while αὕτη with a rough one is "this". Ten occurrences against seventy-two — so the odds favour the demonstrative, and odds are not reading.