There are no sentences in the Greek New Testament.

“But,” you may ask, “why is it when I look at a Greek New Testament I see periods and commas and all that? Doesn’t that prove you wrong?” A fair question.

Let me state my point with greater precision: there are no text sentences in the Greek New Testament. This is true for a very simple reason. Text sentences hadn’t been invented yet.

Knowing that Greek lacks text sentences entirely opens up a new frontier of reading the Greek New Testament. An approach that sits at the bottom of my Greek exegetical process: working with a text that has no punctuation.

Like this Greek New Testament without punctuation I’ve made here.

Let’s clear up a few points here:

  1. What is a text sentence?
  2. If Greek Doesn’t have these, what does it have?
  3. How should this affect reading the Greek NT?

Sentences and text sentences: what’s the difference?

Take a short minute to define the word “sentence.”

Depending on your past educational experience, your definition may very widely. Let’s start with a commonsense definition:

“that unit of written texts that is customarily presented as bracketed by a capital letter and a period.” Geoffrey Nunberg, The Linguistics of Punctuation, 22

A more theoretically robust definition from the SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms gives this: A sentence is a grammatical unit that is composed of one or more clauses.
A clause is a grammatical unit that: (1)includes, at minimum, a predicate and an explicit or implied subject and (2)expresses a proposition.

As a clever student of Greek, you doubtless notice the need to get rid of “capital letter” as the beginning point, since the usage of capitals in Greek New Testaments is sporadic and differs widely by editions. They are not reliable guides to the beginning of sentences. Otherwise, this commonsense definition is easy to take directly from English (or any other modern written language) to Greek.

A sentence is everything between two periods.

Here we need a point of order.

This definition works fine so long as we add an important caveat. This is not a definition of a sentence in its bare essence; this is a definition of a text sentence.

A Text Sentence

A text sentence is a beast that was conjured into existence around the time of the printing press.

Text sentences are so firmly entrenched in the way we think about the world that it is hard to envision what a sentence would be without periods. But this was not always the case. Indeed, the text sentence is rather a modern creature. It emerged slowly into the collective consciousness following the rise of the printing press. Even our Renaissance forefathers didn’t write in text sentences, because they still didn’t exist yet.

Here Geoffry Nunberg in his rather marvelous book about the linguistics of punctuation notes:

For this reason it is not possible to “modernize” the punctuation of these [Renaissance English] texts in a manner faithful to their original sense. . . . The practice of modernization in fact involves a mistaken assumption about modern punctuation: that punctuation marks informational units and relations in a neutral way, and hence should be applicable to any text that is coherently organized on independent grounds. It is this misconception that underlies the critics’ frustration with manuscript sources, the assumption being that the failure of such texts to yield up a structure that can be regimented according to modern text-categories must be an indication of a lack of clarity or organizational rigor in the original.” Geoffrey Nunberg, The Linguistics of Punctuation, 131

Hear that. The ordering principles of pre-text sentence texts don’t follow the logic of post-text sentence texts. Why is it so hard to drop punctuation in? Because the logic of punctuation as we use it did not exist.

Nunberg makes a point about the history of English that is worth generalizing: the Greek New Testament doesn’t have text sentences.

Greek New Testaments don’t have text sentences, even though they do

But of course, every Greek NT you read has text sentences. So, what gives?

It’s true that our printed Greek NTs have text sentences. Their origin is simple: they are editorial additions which aid modern readers. Having read text sentences our entire lives, we crave them. Desperately. A text without text sentences is baffling to our eyes and dispiriting to our spirits.

The solution: editors add the sentences we so desperately want to find.

These text sentences you read in the Greek NT are undoubtedly helpful and mostly harmless. BUT they stand in dubious relationship to anything in the history of composition. Punctuation of sorts certainly existed in the Koine period. Scholars were using it long before in their text-critical endeavors. In addition, the manuscript tradition of the NT evidence various punctuation and punctuation-like features.

But none of these correspond to the text sentence.

It didn’t exist yet.

Along with the simple fact of history, the text sentences we have between Greek NTs vary. The editors of different editions follow uneven criteria as to what constitutes a sentence. There is no self-evident definition of a text sentence, and different people will punctuate the same string of words differently (even when composed with text sentences in mind). And let’s not even throw in the complication that someone raised on academic German has a rather different idea of how much Greek can go between an initial letter and a period than someone more familiar with English. And vice versa.

How much more when the text was composed in a way of thinking that didn’t utilize text sentences?

Reading the Greek NT

A significant part of doing Greek exegesis of the Greek NT should be to work with a punctuation-less text.

Like this Greek New Testament without punctuation I’ve made here.

Here’s a few reasons:

  • it is a magnificent experience to work through a punctuation-less text. It forces and enables different ways of paying attention to how the text works.
  • since punctuation is just thoughtful editorial overlay, working without it forces one to wrestle with the real questions about what goes with what.
  • Greek writers didn’t think in terms of sentences, so leaving the tyranny of the sentence allows us to at least try to meet them on territory that was more familiar to them than to us.

They didn’t think in sentences? Then what were they writing.

Others have made the argument that Greek composition was done more at the level of the colon and period. These mysterious terms are maddeningly opaque, but the ancient evidence certainly supports the conclusion that Greek writers and orators did not think and work in terms of text sentences. Given the relative simplicity of much of the NT Greek writing, this is a difference without a distinction. But there are some interesting (and complicated) works in this area that I’ll note below.

A wrap up

The Greek NT doesn’t have text sentences.

That is just a reality of history.

If you are up for it, reading passages or books from the Greek NT without any punctuation is a rewarding experience. I’m currently studying Ephesians. It is maddeningly interesting the way that the book flows from idea to idea with hardly an obvious point of stopping. Remove the periods, and suddenly the book becomes more like an intertwined river. But it is easy in almost all cases to see which words should hang together in phrases and which phrases should hang together in clauses. If you can resist the idea that there needs to be a sentence next, it is intriguing to consider just how the various pieces hang together and develop one another.

Want to experience the Greek NT totally different?

Read without sentences.

Supporting Sources and Recommended Reading:

Baugh, S.M. “Hyperbaton and Greek Literary Style in Hebrews.” Novum Testamentum 59 (2017): 194–213.

Baugh, S.M. “Greek Periods in the Book of Hebrews.” Novum Testamentum 60 (2018): 24–44.

Hurtado, Larry W. The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006.

Montanari, Franco. “Correcting a Copy, Editing a Text. Alexandrian Ekdosis and Papyri.” In From Scholars to Scholia: Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship, edited by Franco Montanari and Lara Pagani, 1–16. Trends in Classics—Supplementary Volumes 9. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011.

Nunberg, Geoffrey. The Linguistics of Punctuation. Center for the Study of Language and Information Lecture Notes 18. Stanford: CSLI, 1990.

Scheppers, Frank. The Colon Hypothesis: Word Order, Discourse Segmentation and Discourse Coherence in Ancient Greek. Brussels: VUBPRESS, 2011.

Wackernagel, Jacob. “Über ein Gesetz der indogermanischen Wortstellung.” Indogermanische Forschungen 1, no. 1 (1892): 333–436.