How to Read John 1 in Greek: The First Five Verses

The opening of the Gospel of John is where a great many people read their first sentence of real Greek. It is a sensible choice whatever your reason for learning. The sentences are short, the vocabulary is small, and the same few words keep coming back. Verse 1 has seventeen words but only eight different headwords. This guide takes John 1:1–5 slowly, assuming little or no Greek. The text quoted throughout is the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT, edited by M. W. Holmes, 2010), which is freely available at sblgnt.com.

Why John 1 is a good first text

Three things make these verses kind to a beginner.

• Short clauses joined by "and". There are almost no subordinate clauses; the writer simply sets one statement beside the next with καί.
• Repetition. ἦν ("was") occurs six times in the first four verses, and λόγος three times in verse 1 alone.
• Core vocabulary. The article, the verb "to be", the commonest prepositions and a handful of everyday nouns, all of which recur on every page of Greek.

The alphabet and breathings in two minutes

You do not need the whole alphabet yet, only the letters that are not what they seem.

Three more signs matter.

Breathings. Every word that begins with a vowel carries a small hook over that vowel, or in front of it when the vowel is a capital, as in Ἐν. The rough breathing (as in ὁ) means "pronounce an h": ho. The smooth breathing (as in ἐν) means "no h": en. When a word begins with two vowels sounded together, the breathing sits on the second: αὐτοῦ, οὗτος.

Accents. The acute (ό), grave (ὸ) and circumflex (ῶ) all mark the syllable that carries the accent. For a first reading, simply stress that syllable. An acute on the last syllable is normally written as a grave when another word follows directly, which is why you see θεόν before the comma but θεὸς in the middle of a clause.

Iota subscript. The tiny stroke under a vowel in ἀρχῇ, αὐτῷ and σκοτίᾳ is a small iota. In these words it is the spelling signal of the dative singular, and it is worth noticing every time.

More than one pronunciation of ancient Greek is in use; any consistent scheme will do for now. In transliteration, verse 1 reads: En archē ēn ho logos, kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon, kai theos ēn ho logos.

John 1:1 word by word

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.
In beginning was the word, and the word was with the God, and God was the word.

The English line is a deliberately wooden crib that keeps the Greek word order, not a finished translation. Here is each form as printed in the verse, with the headword you would look up.

Notice how much the endings tell you. λόγος and θεός end in -ος, the nominative, the case of the subject. θεόν ends in -ον, the accusative, here because πρός, in this sense, takes it. The same method of reading the endings first works in any inflected language, and it is set out in detail in the guide to translating Latin step by step.

The grammar the verse teaches

The imperfect ἦν

ἦν is the third person singular imperfect of εἰμί, "I am". The imperfect is a past tense that presents a state or action as ongoing, without reference to its start or end. The verb εἰμί has no aorist, so ἦν is its ordinary past tense. It is worth setting it against ἐγένετο in verse 3, the aorist of γίνομαι, "come to be, happen". The passage moves between "was" and "came to be", a contrast that is easy to see in the Greek.

The article

Greek has a definite article (ὁ, ἡ, τό) but no indefinite article, so there is no word for "a". The article agrees with its noun in case, number and gender: ὁ λόγος, τὸν θεόν. Greek also uses and omits the article by its own rules, which do not match English. ἀρχῇ has none after ἐν, a common pattern in prepositional phrases, where English still says "in the beginning"; τὸν θεόν has one where English says simply "God".

πρός with the accusative

πρός with the accusative basically means "towards". With a verb of being, as here, it expresses presence with or relation to someone, and "with" is the usual English equivalent.

Word order and the predicate without the article

In the third clause, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, both nouns are nominative, because the verb "to be" links a subject to a predicate in the same case. Greek word order is flexible, so position does not tell you which is which. The article does: ὁ λόγος, with the article, is the subject; θεός, without it and placed before the verb, is the predicate. That is why English versions put "the word" first.

A predicate noun standing before the verb without the article is a regular feature of Greek syntax. What nuance the absence of the article carries in a given sentence is a question grammarians have discussed at length, and this article takes no position on it. For a learner the useful point is mechanical: find the article, and you have usually found the subject.

Verses 2–5 more quickly

οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν.
This one was in beginning with the God.

πάντα διʼ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων·
All things through him came to be, and apart from him came to be not even one thing. What has come to be in him was life, and the life was the light of human beings;

καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.
and the light in the darkness shines, and the darkness did not seize it.

Verse 2 is made entirely of words you already know, plus οὗτος. The new vocabulary of verses 2–5:

Four points are worth a second look.

1. A neuter plural subject usually takes a singular verb. πάντα is plural, ἐγένετο is singular. This is the regular pattern in Greek, though the New Testament also has neuter plurals with plural verbs.
2. Elision. διʼ is διά with its final vowel dropped before the vowel of αὐτοῦ.
3. Punctuation belongs to the editor. The SBLGNT prints a full stop after ἕν and takes ὃ γέγονεν, the last two words of verse 3, with verse 4, which is why the two verses are printed together above. Other editions and translations take those two words with the previous sentence. The raised dot (·) at the end of verse 4 is the Greek colon or semicolon.
4. Tenses. φαίνει is the only present tense in the passage, between the imperfects and the aorist κατέλαβεν. καταλαμβάνω ranges in meaning from physical seizing to mental grasping, and translators choose differently.

How to keep going

Read the five verses aloud daily until ἦν, καί and ὁ λόγος need no thought. Then go on to verses 6–18 with the same routine: cover the translation, name the form of each word, find the headword, and only then put the clause into English. Checking a version afterwards is useful; reading it first tends to do the work for you, for the reasons set out in why it pays to translate a passage yourself.

When a form defeats you, look it up rather than guessing. Lemma's reader includes the Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) and the Septuagint, and an Ancient Greek translator that explains every word will show the form, the headword, the meaning and a named source for each one. The licences of the texts are listed on the sources page.

If you would like to test this on a verse of your own choosing, try Lemma with four free questions: paste the passage, ask for an explanation rather than a translation, and work through it one word at a time.