Jesus's Interesting Style of Speaking: Word Order

The Greek language provided a very flexible platform for Jesus's creativity.

Jesus had a very interesting style of speaking. Certainly, humor is one central aspect of his teaching that is lost in translation, but several other aspects of how he uses words is also interesting and informative. It will take several different articles to discuss all these aspects. In this article, I am going to focus on the creative way he organized his sentences.

In my fictional work, I am trying to preserve, as much as possible, Jesus's original word order because it is so important in the way he makes his message interesting and his stories entertaining. There are so many interesting examples to the way he phrased things that I will never cover them all, so here I will focus on just the Lord’s Prayer for examples, describing why the original organization of subjects, verbs, and objects, lost in translation, worked so well in terms of entertaining a crowd.

Word Order in Different Languages

To explain why Jesus’s word order was so interesting, it is best to explain a little about the so-called “standard” orders in various languages, focusing specifically on the differences between Greek, the public tongue of Jesus, Aramaic, the language of Judean home life, and English, the language we speak.

Generally speaking, there are three common forms of word order among different languages. This is the order of formal written language, as we discussed in this article, spoken language is always different that written language. The most common, used by 46% of languages,  is subject-object-verb used in ancient Greek, Latin, and Hindi, obviously the fact this is used in Greek is important here. The next most common, nearly as popular, used in 42% of languages, is subject-verb-object, the order used in English, Chinese, and French. The least common word order, used by only nine percent of languages, is verb-subject-object used in Aramaic, the traditional language of Judean, Biblical Hebrew, the language of the historical Israelites, and, God bless them, the Irish.

Technically, a subject-object-verb language, Greek word order is more “free-form” than many languages, that is more flexible. There is another rule in Greek that often takes precedence over it, that is the rule that the most important words should come first in a sentence, with additional information following. The most important words can be the verb, the subject, or the object so any of them can come first.

Jesus’s  word order is even more "free form” than normal Greek. He doesn’t abide by any rules that I can see other than arranging the words to make them interesting and to create suspense. His favorite trick is to put the most important information last in a sentence. In English, we call this the punchline. All of this is, of course, lost in translation.

Putting the Verb First

The Lord’s Prayer starts with a series of sentences that begin with the verb. In each of these sentences, the subject is held back as a surprise. Those promoting the Aramaic Hypothesis (see this article) take this as evidence of Jesus's original words being Aramaic, but Aramaic doesn't put the subject last as Jesus does.  Actually, no language does that, except the language of humor.

The first three sentences of the Lord’s Prayer begin with a verb. In English, we put the verb first in commands as well, but we don’t have third-party commands. English commands all assume the subject “you.” I am not going to go into the nature of a third-party command except to describe it as something that must occur, usually translated—sloppily in my opinion—as “let” something occur, but better, though not perfectly, translated as “it must” occur. In this case, “It must be purified…!” (Matthew 6:9) “It must show up…!” “It must happen…!” (Matthew 6:10)

All three of these sentences create suspense on the part of the listener.   In each case, the listener must wait to learn what "it" is.  In each case, the Lord’s Prayer addresses that curiosity with the subject following the verb, "that name," "that realm," and "that desire." The "that" is actually the article "the," but the Greek article is closer to demonstrative pronoun ("this," "that") than the English article. Those articles highlight the word, but the listener must wait to learn which name, realm, and desire Jesus is talking about. That answer for all three sentences is the same, "of yours." 

This word order of the possessive/genitive descriptor following the noun preceded by an article is Jesus’s favorite, but only one of three forms he uses. In English, the possessive phrase "of yours" works fine after the noun, especially with a "this" or "that" before it. The English phrase works essentially like the Greek one does, creating more suspense. This structure of putting the possessive pronoun after the noun is the most common in Greek, but Jesus does not always use it. Sometimes he will put the possessive before the noun, with or without the article, depending on what he wants to emphasize.

Fast Changes

Notice his repetition of three sentences in the same form. Jesus does this consistently to create an expectation on the part of his audience. Once that expectation is formed, he can surprise them by changing it up. We see this in the Lord’s Prayer.

First, he changes to the unusual object first form with “this bread of ours.”(Matthew 6:11) Notice, he also changes the modifier as well, from “yours” to “ours,” but keeps if after the noun. Then comes the verb/subject, “give” in the form of a command, where the form indicates the subject is the second-person. The command verb form, the imperative, is used both for commands and requests. This makes the sentence form object-verb-subject, a word order is not used in any common language, occurring only in a couple of South American Caribbean languages spoken by a few hundred people and, of course, Klingon. This sentence too ends with “of ours.”

Then, the prayer then uses the verb-subject-object form with the addition of an indirect object ,"Forgive us our debts." The Greek in this clause alone following the common English translation in terms of order.

As the verse continues, it uses the same root verb and object in the next sentence, but it changes the word order to subject-verb-object form, putting the pronoun “we” before the verb (Matthew 6:12). This pronoun is only used to change the word order, emphasizing the subject, since this information appears in the verb ending. This makes his listeners wonder what “we” are promising in the prayer before finding out, “let go of those debtors of ours.” The forgiving of our debtors was the "punchline" at the end of the idea, paralleling the previous verse but reversing its idea.

The prayer ends by returning to the verb/subject-object form for the last two sentences (Matthew 6:13). This form was only used once before, in the “forgive us” line. Now it is repeated, but the final clauses do not end on an “of yours” of “of ours” phrase, instead ending on two preposition phrases, one beginning with Greet version of “into” and the following one beginning with the Greek version of “out of,” again, two opposite.

Conclusion

Jesus’s speaking style of shifting sentence word order was not an accident. It was used intentionally to grasp and hold an audience’s attention, to make them literally hang on every word, to create expectations only to dash them. It was the opposite of boring and very different than the styles of the writers of the Gospels and epistles of the New Testament, which were more orderly in a logical sense, but must less interesting.

Notice the subtle use of opposite ideas here. The “of yours” sentence end changing to “of ours.” The being forgiven our debts in return for forgiving our debtors. The avoiding being lead “into” something, instead seeking to get “out of” something else. This use of interesting opposites will the the topic of a future article.