Parsons Must Parse
σπούδασον σεαυτὸν δόκιμον παραστῆσαι τῷ Θεῷ, ἐργάτην ἀνεπαίσχυντον, ὀρθοτομοῦντα τὸν λόγον τῆς ἀληθείας.
—ΠΡΟΣ ΤΙΜΟΘΕΟΝ Β, 2:15[i]
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
—2 Timothy 2:15 [ii]
Rightly Dividing
In his second epistle to Timothy, the Apostle Paul instructs Timothy to rightly divide the Word of Truth. The phrase “rightly divide” is a translation of a single Greek word: ὀρθοτομέω, a compound of the adjectives ὀρθος, meaning “upright” or “straight”, and τομώτερος, meaning “cut sharper”. Of course Paul was speaking figuratively of interpreting the Word of Truth, but as English-speakers studying a translation of a Greek text, we students of the NT should take this instruction linguistically; and to “rightly divide” linguistically is called “parsing”.
Paul was advising Timothy in church matters. Timothy was a teacher and evangelist or, if you will, a person of the church. Dictionaries tell us that the word “parson” is from the Middle Latin word persona, which means "person". The history of the Ecclesiastical use of parson is obscure and may be an abbreviation of persona ecclesiae, meaning “person of the church”. So Timothy was a parson and Paul’s advice was to parse.
And by that definition, we are all parsons; we are all “persons of the church”. Therefore our fifth General Principle is Parsons Must Parse.
Parsing
Basically, parsing means “to partition” or “to put into parts”. In regards to a sentence, this means identifying the parts of speech, the grammatical elements, and the syntactic relationships of these elements within the sentence. When speaking of a single word, it means to describe the grammatical elements of that word; its part of speech, inflectional attributes, syntactic function, etc.
Technically speaking, parsing has to do with morphology and syntax, rather than semantics—semantics has to do with meaning; morphology is concerned with the shape or form of words; and syntax is concerned with the function of the word in the sentence.
However, that does not mean that morphology and syntax don’t affect the meaning of the words; they are, in fact, instrumental elements in linguistic communication. Take for example the following sentence found in the Chapter on English Grammar in J.W. Wenham’s The Elements of New Testament Greek:[iii]
He said that that “that” that that man used was incorrect.
In wrestling the sense out of this sentence, did you notice that knowing the meaning of the word “that” was of limited value to you? What you had to do in order to understand it was to subconsciously apply the rules of English syntax—rules that you processed subconsciously while growing up in an English-speaking environment. Without any conscious awareness of the grammatical nomenclature, you automatically determined which of four separate syntactical functions each of the “that’s” was fulfilling. “By ear”, you knew which one was a demonstrative pronoun (possibly 3rd); which one was a demonstrative adjective (2nd & 5th); a relative pronoun (4th) and a conjunction (1st). In other words, you instinctively parsed the sentence.
Now let’s take an example from the NT. Turn to Ephesians 5:25-27:
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.
Notice that the church is being called an “it”, yet we all know that the church is the Bride of Christ; shouldn’t “it” be a “she”? The Strong’s number of “it” is G846. If you looked up the listing for 846, you will see that the Greek word being translated is αὐτός, meaning “self”. If you substitute every “it” in those three verses above with the word “self”, you will produce a sentence that is difficult to understand.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for self; that he might sanctify and cleanse self with the washing of water by the word, that he might present self to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that self should be holy and without blemish.
However, if instead you parse αὐτός, you will see that each one in our verses is an appropriately declined form of αὐτή, the feminine version of αὐτός. You will see that each is a personal pronoun, singular and, again, feminine. The English singular, feminine personal pronoun is “she”. So, if you now substitute every “it” with the appropriately declined form of “she”, you finally get an answer to our gender question:[1]
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for her; that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that he might present her to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that she should be holy and without blemish.
So, from those examples, we can easily see that understanding written text involves much more than just understanding the dictionary meanings of the words, we must also have some knowledge of the grammar and rules of syntax of the text language. And to find out which grammar and syntax rules apply, we have to parse.
Parsing Guides
Parsing sentences begins with parsing words. This rule holds for Greek as well as English. Parsing Greek words is a fairly monumental task. Happily enough for us, the words in the GNT have been parsed for us already; there’s no need for us to have to memorise all the different inflections and parts of speech. All we need to do is consult what is called a “parsing guide” or an “analytical lexicon”.
A parsing guide (or analytical lexicon) of the NT will alphabetically list all the words in the GNT along with the myriad forms of all the declinable words. Beside each word form it will give all the parsing information. Here is a parsing guide entry for αὐτή:
αὐτή pers pron fem nom sing………………………. αὐτός
The abbreviations tell us the part of speech: personal pronoun; the gender: feminine; the case: nominative; and the number: singular.
At the far right, we see the “lexical form” of the word—this is the form that conventional lexicons will give (like Strong’s mentioned above). For nouns, pronouns and adjectives, the lexical form is always the masculine nominative singular form. For verbs it is always the 1st person singular present indicative active form. In the parsing guides, the primary definitions of the words are given with the lexical forms.
E-Parsing Guides
As wonderful a blessing as the parsing guide is, we Christians of today are doubly blessed, because we have electronic parsing guides! There are computer Bible Study programmes available—as software and online—which will parse the words of the GNT for us at the click of a mouse.
There are many of these programmes, but I’ll only mention two: the Blue Letter Bible is an online Bible Study tool found at www.blueletterbible.org; and e-Sword is a downloadable one found at www.e-sword.net.
CONCLUSION
The Apostle Paul instructed Timothy to rightly divide the Word of Truth. We, as students of the Bible and persons of the church, or “parsons”, know that, linguistically, rightly dividing means to parse. Therefore, we know that, to be obedient students, Parsons Must Parse.
[1] This mistranslation was one of those universally acknowledged KJV errors the RV was intended to correct. Most modern translations read “she” and “her”.
[i] All Greek citations from THE NEW TESTAMENT IN GREEK ACCORDING TO THE TEXT FOLLOWED IN THE AUTHORISED VERSION TOGETHER WITH THE VARIATIONS ADOPTED IN THE REVISED VERSION, edited by F.H.A. Scrivener; CAMBRIDGE: At the University Press 1949.
[ii] Whilst all English Bible verses are taken from the King James Version, modern punctuation and quotation markings will often be used where appropriate without reference (I.e. Capitalization after question marks; double inverted commas on opening quotes, then single inverted commas for internal quotations.).
[iii] THE ELEMENTS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK, J.W. Wenham, CAMBRIDGE, University Press, 1991
