Anyone Know Greek?

[LGMR]

As most of you know, the gospels each put a different amount of women who visit the tomb near the end of each gospel. (Mark says thee, Matthew says two, Luke says four+ and John says only Mary Magdalene.) Now, in John 20:2 Mary seems to refer to herself in the third person.

 

Joh 20:2 Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.

 

Now, because she said that, apologists have said that there were others with her, and so there's no contradiction. Every translation I checked says "we", but then when I looked up the verse in a concordance, the word "we" doesn't seem to be there. The word there is "eido" and it means "to see" or "to know". So my question is, in Greek, is there something added to the verb to show that it should be translated "we know" instead of just "know"?

[JadedAtheist]

The lemma (the word you'd look up in a dictionary) is oida , the exact word that appears there (at least in the NA27) is "oidamen" which is a first person plural. In Greek you will find not only the tense in a verb but voice, person, number, and mood. These exist in English as well obviously but unlike in English the Greek contains all this info in the verb.

 

EDIT: I found my TR (The Greek text the KJV is based on) and it has the same word, "oidamen".

[NoGods]

I always give them (christians) the 'we' thing and count it about as bad as was it dark or light. I always focus on the fact that in the synoptics, "The women" always see and interact with the angel(s) before they go running back to the disciples. In John's story, the angel interaction takes place after Peter and John leave the tomb. Also, what the angel says is very terse and different in John as compared to the synoptics.

[mwc]

As an example the same word (building on JadedAtheist above) is used in the same way earlier in G.John (3:2):

1 Now there was among the Pharisees a man named Nicodemus, who was one of the rulers of the Jews. 2 He came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, we are certain that you have come from God as a teacher, because no man would be able to do these signs which you do if God was not with him.

Who are the "we" the text is speaking about here?

 

It might be "the Pharisees." The "rulers." It could also be a collective "we" speaking about everyone since he did represent "the Jews" as well. Usually we confine him to the "Pharisees" or the "rulers" though. Some group that just knows the truth but won't really admit it. Again, two groups appear to actively oppose "jesus" but the third just won't acknowledge him openly even though they "know" he's the guy. All are possibilities and are mentioned in other places/literature. Even today this is the beliefs of believers. The Jews, as a group, knew the truth but denied it, and the rulers/Pharisees, actively worked to suppress/destroy him.

 

The "we" of G.John 20 is similar except there is less information to work with. If taken all alone then Mary shouldn't even know where the body is. Only the ones that buried the body should know this and, in this text, the part where the women also watched appears to be omitted. So who told her? Did they also tell Peter? As soon as Mary tells Peter the body is missing he (and the other guy) run straight to the tomb without any problems. Someone told them earlier, she told them right then, or it's just that easy to find since Peter takes off and gets there first...apparently his first visit. So the "we" could be any "we." It could be taken from the other gospels and be the other women. It could be the guy(s) that stuck the body in the hole. It could be some collective "we." It could be just about anything but since harmonization is important we'll read-in the other gospels and make it the other women even though it's not justified by the actual text of G.John (which more implies a "we" consisting of "followers of jesus" or possibly "disciples/apostles" to narrow it to a further "inner circle" type of situation since everyone who wasn't extremely loyal should have moved along).

 

mwc