Greek Tidbit: Granville Sharp

Well, Mike asked for a little sample of Greek weekly. I'm not good at doing things weekly, but I'll provide one for this week, at least! This is an interesting grammatical rule which came up when I was teaching the high school Sunday School class at my church last week. We were looking at Titus 2.13, “while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (NIV). Now, it seems natural enough that the author of the epistle is referring to Jesus as “our great God and Savior.” But, it could also be read, theoretically as “our great God” and also “our Savior Jesus Christ.” I noted in passing that there existed a grammatical rule in Greek that helps argue for the first reading.

Much to my surprise, I found out the class was really interested in hearing about this grammatical rule, so I told them it was called the Granville Sharp rule, and explained it something like the following. When there are two singular, non-proper nouns (e.g. God and savior) that have one article (“the”) in front of them, and those two words are joined with a conjunction (“and”), they both refer to the same thing. Granville Sharp, in formulating his rule, was a “little” more precise than that, but such is the gist.

In Greek, the text looks like this: “προσδεχόμενοι τὴν μακαρίαν ἐλπίδα καὶ ἐπιφάνειαν τῆς δόξης τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ καὶ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.” Notice the part in bold. The article is “τοῦ,” and the two titles applied to Jesus are “μεγάλου θεοῦ” (“great God”) and “σωτῆρος ἡμῶν” (“our savior”). The conjunction (“καὶ”) is right were you would expect it to be. So, as you can see, all the necessary components of Granville Sharp's rule are present. To answer one common question, yes, “God” is non-proper; we talk about gods or a god in English, and such usage would have been even more common in polytheistic Graeco-Roman culture.

So there you have it. Now, Titus 2.13 is not the most helpful verse in many discussions on the deity of Christ, even with Granville Sharp's rule, because of the question of the authorship of the Pastoral Epistles. That is, even if I affirm the Pauline authorship of them, many others do not, so even now that you are armed with this useful Greek tidbit, it will not necessarily be a convincing verse to many. Then again, even if it was without a doubt Pauline, it would remain unconvincing to many, so perhaps authorship really does not matter in this case.