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" directly translates as "one not loving." For the beginning Greek nuts out there, this is because ἀγαπῶν is a participle of ἀγαπάω, and as such is initially rendered as an English participle, "loving" which acts as an adjective in relation to "ὁ." This is often and rightly rendered as "Some/any/one/he who does not love," since in English "one not loving" might imply that there should be an object to "loving," but the meaning here is something more like, "Any person who does not love in general."
"οὐκ ἔγνω" simply means "not has known." Several translations however render "ἔγνω" in the present tense despite the fact that it is in the aorist tense. This would result in two different translations:
"One who does not love does not know God" (This is translating the aorist "ἔγνω" as present)
"One who does not love has not known God." (This is translating "ἔγνω" as it is in aorist tense)
Another rendering which is even more archaic is:
"He who loves not knew not God."
At which point, we might as well go the full way with the King James Version:
"He that loveth not knoweth not God."
The final part of the verse, "ὅτι ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν," easily translates as "because God love is," singularly in present tense. Despite the fact that this is often taken as the most poignant part of the verse, and by all means, it is for the sake of the personal edification of the believer who reads it, I cannot ignore the fact that the former part of the sentence is its primary one, while "God is love," is subordinated in the sentence by "ὅτι" which translates as "because." (There are translations which render this as "for" which in English is a coordinating conjunction, so the relationship between the two parts of the sentence are not accurately represented in terms of level of contextual importance, and for which Greek already has an explicit counterpart, "γάρ.") Furthermore, the more peculiar difficulties with the tense of the first portion lead to an important point in translation.
Granted, the difference between a sentence in both present and aorist (past) tense versus a sentence purely present tense appears to be a minimal one, fixated over by first year graduate students who need something to write about. However, the more subtle implications between the two, I would argue, are significant.
In the first case, there is a certain clarity in keeping the sentence in present tense. The parallelism between "does not love" and "does not know," along with the framing of the phrase, beginning and ending with the subject and object "Some/any/one/he" and "God," lends a distinct literary quality to the text in its symmetry, making it clearer and easier to read as a result, while a shift in tense might cause confusion, stylistically speaking.
However, the original Greek shifts tense between the participle "Loving" (ἀγαπῶν is a present active participle) and the main verb "knew" (ἔγνω is specifically third-person singular, aorist, active, and indicative). Furthermore, because participles take a distinctly different form than indicative verbs, the parallelism we see in the rendered English does not exist in the Greek. This is because of how translators often render Greek participles as relative clauses, the reasons for which I explained earlier; "One not loving," would make less immediate sense to modern English readers, whereas "One who does not love" is immediately clear, but if we are to be as accurate as possible to the Greek, another possible translation might be "A non-loving person knew not God," in all its awkwardness.
I will also note that while ἔγνω is most often translated as "knew," there are one or two instances when it is translated as "has not known." The usage of "has verbed" however is generally reserved for the perfect tense, not the aorist, but if we accept that, in this case, ἔγνω can be "has not known" instead of "knew," then the translation "A non-loving person has not known God," may be more palatable as well as more clear. Likewise it could be rendered as, "Any non-loving person has not known God."
Rendering aside, I've taken the time to consider ἔγνω because in the translation of its tense lies a subtle interpretive point in English if not both languages. In the purely present-tense sentence, we are presented with a static, almost logical proposition which could easily be reduced to "no love=doesn't know God." The proposition is present, and it being rooted in the present, it appears as a static and motionless idea. It's like a rule which can be readily and easily applied. However, if we reintroduce the past tense aorist meaning, suddenly there is a new implication to the entire statement. A non-loving person has not known God, but that person's ignorance is, in some way, rooted in the past, and by implication, there is an undetermined potential in the future of this person. A person who you see presently who does not love has yet to know God in their time on earth; as for their future, there is the possibility for them to come to know God, and to become a loving person. There is the possibility of repentance.
It would appear, if my analysis is even slightly correct, that the very notion of repentance is implicit in this statement if we consider how it may be said otherwise. I think that this is consistent with what we might presuppose of St. John's character, being an Apostle, being a leader in the early church, evangelizing the Gospel to non-believers. We might think that he kept the hope of repentance close to him, and that it would make sense for this to be reflected in his writings.
This, however, comes too close to the dreaded and ambiguous territory of authorial intent. My main purpose here is to simply illustrate that while many translations of the Bible render this verse in the present tense, it is indeed otherwise in the original Greek, and this difference can affect how we might understand the verse itself. If the past tense is retained, then the verse is transformed into a statement that affirms the possibility of transformation itself, from a non-believer to a believer, from being ignorant of God and his love, to coming into a relationship with God through his love. It becomes a statement of spiritual becoming, rather than a fixed state of ignorance and lovelessness.
Still, this entire exercise might seem frivolous. Logically, no matter how the verse is phrased, any person who has read the New Testament knows that a person has the opportunity to repent; one's understanding of that fact does not rest upon the exact rendering of this one line alone. Indeed, any person who knows the Gospel knows this logically. My concerns, however, are not with logic, but with rhetoric, poetics, and accuracy.
After all, my training is not in theology, classics, or translation, but in literature, rhetoric, and composition. As much as one might logically comprehend a text, it is just as important to understand the rhetoric and literary qualities of a text. Many hold that scripture is literature too, and that the literary qualities of a work, those aspects of art and style that go beyond merely formulating coherent utterances and into a realm of edification that unifies aesthetic with truth and expresses truth through beauty, are just as much a part of the experience of scripture as its literal meanings. There is no form without its art.
One of the marks of a really great work of literature that I’ve experienced is that the themes of a work are so intertwined with its written word that a close reading of almost any sentence on any page would reveal its most pertinent themes. Reading works like this can feel overwhelming, tiring, and ecstatic. The Bible has similar qualities that are more apparent in the original Greek, which English translations often faithfully attempt to represent, but doesn’t always have the means to do so. With all of the symmetry and parallelism that the ESV has to offer in this case (the ESV along with the NKJV are my translations of choice for the New Testament after all, and I love reading them), it does not represent the perhaps greater concern of tense, and how this tense plays a role in representing the larger themes of the New Testament, and indeed Christianity as a whole. What it makes up for in local eloquence, it can lack in representing the broader architecture of the scriptures.
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