Εύλογητός εί, κύριε ό τρέφων με έκ νεότητός μου,
ό διδούς τροφήν πάση σαρκί·
πλήρωσον χαράς καί εύφροσύνης τάς καρδίας ήμων,
ίνα πάντοτε πάσαν αυτάρκειαν έχοντες
περισσεύωμεν είς πάν έργον άγαθόν έν Χριστώ Ίησου τω κυρίω ήμων,
δι’ ού σοι δόξα, τιμή καί κράτος είς τούς αίώνας· άμήν.

A Prayer at Dinner (Apostolic Constitutions: Book VIII : LXIX)

ἀξιοῦμέν σε, δέσποτα, βοηθὸν γενέσθαι καὶ ἀντιλήπτορα ἡμῶν.
τοὺς ἐν θλίψει ἡμῶν σῶσον,
τοὺς ταπεινοὺς ἐλέησον,
τοὺς πεπτωκότας ἔγειρον,
τοῖς δεομένοις ἐπιφάνηθι,
τοὺς ἀσθενεῖς ἴασαι,
τοὺς πλανωμένους τοῦ λαοῦ σου ἐπίστρεψον·
χόρτασον τοὺς πεινῶντας,
λύτρωσαι τοὺς δεσμίους ἡμῶν,
ἐξανάστησον τοὺς ἀσθενοῦντας,
παρακάλεσον τοὺς ὀλιγοψυχοῦντας·
γνώτωσάν σε ἅπαντα τὰ ἔθνη,
ὅτι σὺ εἰ ὁ θεὸς μόνος
καὶ Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ὁ παῖς σου
καὶ ἡμεῖς λαός σου καὶ πρόβατα τῆς νομῆς σου.

—Clement of Alexandria (1 Clement 59:4)

Enjoy these beautiful photos from Unsplash combined with some pertinent Greek verses about giving thanks from the NT and the LXX.

These are all free to share and use as you see fit for the glory of God. Click on each picture to open it in full resolution.

The entire hymn is very long, this is just the first stanza. You can find the entire texts in Greek and English in the sources below, or you can listen to it sung on YouTube by the Greek Byzantine Choir MAKRIS.

The Greek text is licensed under CC BY SA 4.0, taken from https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/Λόγος_εις_τα_Θεοφάνεια

The English text is from https://earlychurchtexts.com/public/gregoryofnaz_oration_nativity_of_christ.htm

Featured image credit: Israhel van Meckenem (circa 1440–1503), licensed under CC0, via Wikimedia Commons, modified by Mr. Greek Geek.

Features

You don’t have to spend 100s of dollars on fancy Bible software and download gigabytes of data just to look up a Greek word any more. Just visit the online lexicon app and start typing the word. No Greek keyboard? No worries! You can type Latin letters and immediately see results that match what you’ve typed so far. What if you only know the Strong’s number and don’t know any Greek at all? Step right up, we’ve got you covered! Just type in the Strong’s number (no prefix needed) and you’ll be all set in less than a second.

Just looking for a quick gloss of the word? Look for the entries in bold. Or keep reading the whole entry to get a better sense for how the word is used in different contexts (highly recommended). Entries in a lighter grey type give additional information about the etymology of the word, or synonyms.

Want to see where that word is used in the New Testament? Just scroll down and click on the Strong’s number to be taken to a page where every verse is listed!

Coming soon: all the verse references in the lexicon will be hyperlinked so you can immediately see how the word is used in context in the Greek New Testament.

Credits

Most of the credit goes to the fine folks behind the translatable-exegetical-tools/Abbott-Smith project. They invested a LOT of time and effort into digitizing the printed copy of Abbott-Smith’s lexicon and marking it up in a way that’s easy for computers to parse. This little lexicon app would never have existed without their labors. Credit is also due to Jeffrey N. who took my feeble initial efforts in Javascript and improved them nearly beyond recognition!

Are you missing a feature? This project is freely licensed, so you can make a copy and add your own changes! Or you can report a bug or request a feature to be added. Details are on GitHub: https://github.com/mrgreekgeek/abbott-smith-greek-lexicon-online

These are all free to share; no attribution required. As far as I can recall, the photos are all from Pixabay (or a similar free image site), and the Greek text is from the Byzantine GNT, which is licensed as public domain. Enjoy!

(Click to open large/download)

Another “original Greek” artifact includes an interesting piece of pottery with the creed written on it (Accession number: 69.74.312, Israel Museum, Jerusalem). And then there’s P. Oxy. 1784, which may even be earlier than P6! Read all about it in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri Part XV by Grenfell and Hunt, page 17. You can check out an image of the papyrus P. Oxy. 1784 at the Atla Digital Library.

But I was unable to track down any complete copies of the Creed in ancient documents, so I decided I’d have to make my own!

First I had to locate a suitable blank piece of parchment, which I finally found at the British Library. Then I had to find a complementary font from my page of free Greek fonts. Next I took the digital text of the Nicene creed, removed all modern punctuation, spaces and diacritic markings, and arranged it on the parchment. I tried to match the line length and line spacing of the codex from the British Library as closely as possible to make it look realistic. Of course I needed to add some special effects to make the ink fade a little in places so it looked like it had been written several hundred years ago. Finally, I set it on a nice wooden table top!

It’s definitely not going to fool any paleographers, but I think it’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself!

Sources:

• Unicode text of the Nicene Creed – Σύμβολο της Πίστεως
• Blank parchment page – Royal MS 1 D VIII folio 1
• Free Greek uncial font – 0512 Dioskorides from KPS fonts
• Wooden texture – Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Since the resulting image was created with free resources, I am making it available for free as well. Feel free to use, share and copy it freely without any restrictions from me!

Byzantine Texts

• Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform, Public Domain. (PDF)
• Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform (Readers Edition), Public Domain.
• Family 35 (Pickering), CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (plain text).
• Solid Rock GNT, Public Domain.
• Text Critical GNT, Public Domain/CC BY 4.0. (PDF)
• Antoniades’ 1904 Patriarchal edition, Public Domain.

Textus Receptus

• KJV Textus Receptus (from CNTR), CC BY 4.0.
• Stephanus 1550, (from CNTR), CC BY 4.0. [removes movable nu]
• Stephanus 1550, (from Maurice Robinson), public domain.

Critical Texts

• Tischendorf, 8th Ed., Public Domain.
• Tregelles, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
• Statistical Restoration GNT, CC BY 4.0.
• SBL GNT, (from Logos) CC BY 4.0.
• Unfolding Word GNT, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Westcott & Hort, CC BY-SA.
• Nestle 1904, Public Domain. (See also)
• Berean Greek Bible, custom license.

More Free Resources

If you’d like to dig further, check out these lists of more free original language resources:

• Awesome Bible Data
• Biblical Humanities
• Greek Bibles at ebible.org

… so simple a task as translating a sentence from an ancient language into our own requires some sense of the social matrices of both the original utterance and ourselves. When we take up the dictionary and grammar to aid us, we err unless we understand that they only catalog the relics of language as a fluid, functioning social medium. If we translate without that awareness, we are only moving bones from one coffin to another.

—Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, Second Edition (Yale University Press, 2003), 5. (found here)

It  is difficult in following lines laid down by others not sometimes to diverge from them, and it is hard to preserve in a translation the charm of expressions which in another language are most felicitous. Each particular word conveys a meaning of its own, and possibly I have no equivalent by which to render it, and if I make a circuit to reach my goal, I have to go many miles to cover a short distance. To these difficulties must be added the windings of hyperbata, differences in the use of cases, divergencies of metaphor; and last of all the peculiar and if I may so call it, inbred character of the language. If I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth, and if compelled by necessity I alter anything in the order or wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function of a translator

—Jerome, “To Pammachius on the Best Method of Translating“.

The essential strangeness of the Gospel must never be forgotten. When it comes for the first time to a people, it opens up to them a whole new world, and introduces them to concepts which are wholly new and for which no suitable expressions exist in the language which they use. If we tailor our translations too smoothly to existing idiom, we may succeed in hiding what ought not to be hidden. I remember once exploding angrily in the Tamil Bible translation committee, when we had so smoothed out the complex passage Galatians 2: 1-10 as to conceal completely the tensions and confusions which underlie the apostle’s twisted grammar. This we had no right to do.

—Stephen Neill, “Translating the Word of God” p. 287, quoted in The Challenge of Bible Translation p. 102.

Dynamic equivalent proponents overwhelmingly assert that the difficulties posed by the original biblical text are either unique to modern readers or especially acute for them. Prefaces regularly use such formulas as “to modern readers” (NCV), “by the contemporary reader” (NLT), and “most readers today” (NJV). The effect is to isolate modern readers as a “special needs” group, and the whole dynamic equivalent enterprise can be viewed as an attempt to meet the special needs of impaired modern readers.

—Leland Ryken https://bible-researcher.blogspot.com/2011/09/leland-ryken-on-bible-readers.html

For language is a fluid thing. It does not remain fixed for a day. There is therefore constant need of retranslation and revision, lest the Word of God be left in archaic and outworn form.

—Herbert L. Willett, Our Bible: Its Origin, Character, and Value (Chicago: The Christian Century Press, 1917), p. 96.

For these reasons and others, with common charity to save all men in our realm, which God will have saved, a simple creature has translated the bible out of Latin into English. First, this simple creature had much labor, with diverse fellows and helpers, to gather many old bibles, and other doctors, and common glosses, and to make one Latin bible very true; and then to study it anew, the text with the gloss, and other doctors, as he might get, and especially Lyra on the old testament, that helped very much in this work; the third time to council with old grammarians, and old diviners, of hard words, and hard sentences, how they might best be understood and translated; the 4th time to translate as clearly as he could to the sentence, and to have many good and knowledgeable fellows at the correcting of the translation. First it is to know, that the best translating is out of Latin into English, to translate after the sentence, and not only after the words, so that the sentence is as open, or opener, in English as in Latin, and don’t go far from the letter; and if the letter may not be followed in the translating, let the sentence always be whole and open, for the words ought to serve to the intent and sentence, or else the words are superfluous or false.

—John Purvey (preface to the revised Wycliffe Bible)

Translation is the best of literary exercises, perhaps the only serious one. It is strictly impossible, and the scope for the apprentice’s ingenuity is therefore unlimited. At the same time the translator can have before him a competent model, not to copy but to study and to make something of his own out of.

—C. H. Sisson, On the Lookout (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), quoted in Cecil Hargreaves, A Translator’s Freedom: Modern English Bibles and their Language.

Featured image is from the beginning of Luke’s Gospel in Erasmus’s 1522 Greek/Latin edition of the New Testament.

Enter my good friend Jeffrey. I casually mentioned my dilemma to him, and pretty soon he whips out his phone and starts writing a Python script that would search the list of Greek headwords that I found in my research for my previous post! Within an hour or so, he had figured out the code to return the results I wanted, and had handed over to me a list of not just one word, but 28 Greek words that used every single vowel in them!

Now most of these will be obscure words that you’ve never heard of, but hopefully there will be a few that sound familiar! So without further ado…

• ἀναδημιουργέω
• ἀνευρησιλογήτως
• ἀντιδημιουργέω
• ἀντιρρητορεύω
• ἀνυποσημείωτος
• ἀρχαιομελῐσῑδωνοφρῡνῐχήρᾰτος
• αὐλωνοειδής
• Βρῡσωνοθρᾰσῠμᾰχεῐοληψικέρμᾰτος
• γυναικοπρεπώδης
• διαμνημονεύω
• δυωκαιεικοσίπηχυς
• εἰρηνοφυλακέω
• ἐλαιωνηφρουρέω
• ἐναποθησαυρίζω
• εὐδιαχώρητος
• εὐκοινωνησία
• ἡλιοκαυτέω
• ηὐτοματισμένως
• θηροζυγοκαμψιμέτωπος
• θησαυροποιέω
• κηλωνεύομαι
• μελῐσῐδωνοφρῡνῐχήρᾰτα μέλη
• ὀκτωκαιδεκᾰ́πηχυς
• πηδᾰλιουχέω
• σῑτοκᾰπηλεύω
• στωμῠλιοσυλλεκτάδης
• συνδιαμνημονεύω
• σωληνεύομαι

There are a few interesting ones here that should be easy enough to understand. Take διαμνημονεύω for instance. If you remember what μνημονεύω means, then you’re not too far off from knowing what διαμνημονεύω means! (See also συνδιαμνημονεύω).

There are some mouthfuls in there too! Some of those are so long they should be outlawed from all lexica past and present. You can look up any of these words at LSJ online.

But unfortunately, I don’t think any of those words show up in the Greek Bible. So I decided to just search the Greek LXX and NT to see if I could find any that might be a little more familiar to a Bible student who knows Greek. After some wrangling of Jeffrey’s code (and with some helpful advice from him), I managed to run the script on both the Greek New Testament and the LXX!

Words in the Greek New Testament that use every vowel

• εὐοδωθήσομαι
• εὐπροσωπῆσαι
• συγκοινωνήσαντές
• ἀπηλλοτριωμένους

Words in the Greek Old Testament (LXX) that use every vowel

• κατηργυρωμένοι
• εὐοδωθήσεται (9x!)
• ᾐχμαλωτευμένοι
• κατευοδωθήσεται
• ἐξουδενωθήσονται
• εὐοδωθήσονται
• αἰχμαλωτευομένη
• ἱεροσυλημάτων

I was surprised to see that there was actually a word (εὐοδωθήσεται) that occurred 9 times! The same word appears in the GNT in a different form too (εὐοδωθήσομαι).

According to the data here, it took the good Greeks at least 10 letters (ἡλιοκαυτέω) to create the shortest Greek word that contains all 7 vowels. Technically that ε doesn’t count though, because that’s just the lexical form; you would never actually see the word written in a sentence with the ε. So the real shortest word is actually 11 letters, and there are four three of them (not counting πηδᾰλιουχέω because it also has a ghost ε):

1. αὐλωνοειδής
2. κηλωνεύομαι
3. σωληνεύομαι

But… this is a very limited corpus! Only a list of headwords and the text of the Greek OT and NT were used to find these 39 unique words. There must be hundreds of thousands more words out there (in all the different cases and verb conjugations) that may possibly yield a shorter word yet. Hmm… maybe I need to search a bigger ancient Greek corpus.

Well anyway, there you have it. Next time you’re teaching the alphabet to your beginner Greek students you can impress them by showing them a word that has every single one of the Greek vowels in it!

Now to come up with some good uses for all this data…

Header image adapted from this image by Alex Barcley from Pixabay