One of my favorite verses from the New Testament is from the First Epistle of John, chapter 4, verse 8, ever famous for equating God with Love or Agape: Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (ESV) For many, including myself, this is the statement that is the core teaching of the Gospel. It encapsulates the most fundamental aspect of Christ’s teachings in a single, relatively simple statement, and the pungency of the final three words in both its brevity and weight has a profound effect. As an exercise to keep my ancient Greek reading comprehension sharp, I decided to take a look at the original Greek of the epistle and see if there was anything peculiar. The text is so beautiful in English, I was curious to see whether the Greek had anything to offer. Of course, it did. 1 John 4:8 in its original Greek is: ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν οὐκ ἔγνω τὸν θεόν, ὅτι ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν. This is a fairly straight forward sentence. "ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν" di...