Paradigm sheets

The article

Second declension nouns

First declension nouns

Stems in ε, ι, ρ keep α throughout; other α-stems shift to η in the genitive and dative singular.

Third declension nouns

Adjectives and position

Attributive (inside the article group): ὁ ἀγαθὸς λόγος / ὁ λόγος ὁ ἀγαθός — "the good word". Predicate (outside it): ἀγαθὸς ὁ λόγος — "the word is good".

πᾶς, πολύς, μέγας

πολύς and μέγας are regular second/first declension except in four slots each — masculine and neuter, nominative and accusative singular — giving three forms apiece: πολύς, πολύν, πολύ and μέγας, μέγαν, μέγα (neuter nominative and accusative are the same). Everything else: πολλοῦ, πολλῷ… μεγάλου, μεγάλῳ…

Personal pronouns

Demonstratives

Every ending here is αὐτός’s ending. What differs is where the accent sits: ἐκείνου keeps it on the stem, where αὐτοῦ throws it onto the ending.

Relative pronoun

Gender and number from the antecedent; case from its own clause. Always rough breathing + accent (ἥ vs the article ἡ; ἤ "or" has smooth breathing).

Interrogative, indefinite, reflexive

Reflexives (gen/dat/acc only): ἐμαυτοῦ myself · σεαυτοῦ yourself · ἑαυτοῦ himself/herself/itself · plural ἑαυτῶν for all persons. Reciprocal: ἀλλήλων — one another.

εἰμί — to be

Subjunctive: ὦ, ᾖς, ᾖ, ὦμεν, ἦτε, ὦσι(ν). Infinitive: εἶναι. Participle: ὤν, οὖσα, ὄν.

λύω — active indicative

Pluperfect: ἐλελύκειν, ἐλελύκεις, ἐλελύκει, ἐλελύκειμεν, ἐλελύκειτε, ἐλελύκεισαν.

λύω — middle and passive indicative

Subjunctive mood

No augment in the aorist subjunctive — aspect only, no past time.

Imperative mood

Prohibitions: μή + present imperative (general practice / stop) · μή + aorist subjunctive (don't do it at all).

The optative — wishes and prayers

The fourth mood, and by the first century a fading one. The New Testament has 68 optatives against 1,856 subjunctives — twenty-seven to one — and fifteen of the 68 are one phrase: μὴ γένοιτο, fourteen times in Paul and once in Luke. You will never have to build one. You only have to know one when you see it. The nine below are the kinds you will meet most often.

Three signs give it away: -οι- in the present and the second aorist, -αι- in the first aorist active, -θει- in the aorist passive. εἰμί is the exception: εἴη. Fifty-eight of the 68 are third person singular, so nearly every one you meet is may he or might it. Where ἄν stands beside it — ten times in all — the sense shifts to could rather than may, and nine of those ten are questions: what could this be?

Infinitives

εἰμί: εἶναι. Articular infinitive: the neuter article + infinitive (ἐν τῷ σπείρειν — "while sowing").

Participles — the key forms

Contract verbs — present

Before a tense sign the vowel usually lengthens instead (καλέω, keeping its ε, gives ἐκάλεσεν): ἀγαπήσω, ἠγάπησα · ποιήσω, ἐποίησα · πληρώσω, ἐπλήρωσα. Liquid stems (λ μ ν ρ) refuse σ: future μενῶ, ἀγγελῶ; aorist ἔμεινα, ἤγγειλα.

μι-verbs

Aorists: ἔδωκα (impv δός, δότε · ptc δούς) · ἔθηκα (ptc θείς) · ἔστησα trans. / ἔστην intrans. "stood" (ἀνέστη — he rose). ἀφίημι forgives: ἀφῆκεν, ἄφες, ἀφέωνται.

Principal parts — key irregular verbs

Six principal parts. Learn these and the rest of the verb follows. A dash means that part does not occur in the New Testament — checked against the text, not assumed.

All twenty are among the hundred commonest verbs in the New Testament. The perfect of μένω is a dash because the New Testament has none — though the stem surfaces once, in a pluperfect: μεμενήκεισαν, 1 John 2:19.

Prepositions and their cases

Look-alikes — one accent apart

Nothing separates these but an accent or a breathing, and nearly every pair is a live reading trap. Adjacent rows are the ones to keep apart.

The vocative — calling someone

For most nouns the vocative is simply the nominative. Every plural, every neuter, and the first-declension feminines. The second-declension masculine singular has an ending of its own, first-declension masculines take -α (ἐπιστάτα, ὑποκριτά), and a few third-declension nouns fall back to the bare stem. That is why it has no row in the paradigms: for most of the nouns in them it would repeat the line above.

660 vocatives in the New Testament across 121 words. Ὠ before one is optional and rarer than in classical Greek.

Numbers

Only the first four decline, and then the hundreds and thousands. Everything between πέντε and ἑκατόν has one form wherever it stands.

οὐδείς / μηδείς — no one — decline the same way. Ordinals: πρῶτος first · δεύτερος second · τρίτος third.

Genitive — what the “of” is doing

The genitive is the flexible case, and “of” is rarely the whole answer. These are the readings worth having in mind when a phrase carries weight.

The fork worth knowing. Subjective and objective look identical. ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ is either God’s love for us or ours for him, and only the argument around it decides. Say which you are taking, and why.

Genitive of time gives the period within which; the dative, the point when; the accusative, how long. Three cases, three questions — and, like most tidy rules, it leaks: an accusative can mark a point of time too (John 4:52).

Participles — what they are doing

A participle’s tense gives aspect, and time only relative to the main verb. An aorist participle usually happened first, a present one usually alongside — usually, and context outranks the rule.

Spotting a genitive absolute. A genitive participle with a genitive noun or pronoun beside it and no grammatical tie to the rest of the sentence. In Luke 13:17 the one speaking is αὐτοῦ; the ones put to shame are πάντες οἱ ἀντικείμενοι. Different subjects — and that difference is what absolute means.

The commonest error is reading an aorist participle as “after” where the writer meant it as one action with the main verb. Matthew 28:19 is the standing example: not “after you have gone”, but “go and”.

Conditional sentences

An if clause (protasis) and a then clause (apodosis). Which class it is comes from the particle and the mood, and it changes what the writer is claiming.

The first class does not mean “true”. It means the speaker is arguing from the condition, whether or not it holds. Satan’s εἰ υἱὸς εἶ τοῦ θεοῦ in Matthew 4:3 is first class and is plainly not a concession.

No complete fourth-class conditional survives in the New Testament: every instance is missing one half or mixes classes. Recognise it; do not expect to parse a whole one.

Discourse markers

These are the joints of an argument. They are small, they are usually dropped in translation, and they are how a paragraph is held together.

Why bother. A γάρ tells you the next sentence is support, not a new point — so it belongs under the previous heading rather than beside it. An οὖν says the argument has turned a corner. Tracking these is how you find a passage’s spine before deciding what to preach from it.

Do not lean on them too hard in narrative, where καί and δέ often carry no more than a full stop would.