Greek Breakdown & Meaning
[1:3] • [4–6] • [7–8] • [9–11] • [12–13]
Text and Translation
Greek Text
4. Ἐχάρην λίαν ὅτι εὕρηκα ἐκ τῶν τέκνων σου περιπατοῦντας ἐν ἀληθείᾳ, καθὼς ἐντολὴν ἐλάβομεν παρὰ τοῦ πατρός.
5. καὶ νῦν ἐρωτῶ σε, κυρία, οὐχ ὡς ἐντολὴν γράφων σοι καινήν, ἀλλὰ ἣν εἴχομεν ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ἵνα ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους.
6. καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἀγάπη, ἵνα περιπατῶμεν κατὰ τὰς ἐντολὰς αὐτοῦ. αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἐντολή, καθὼς ἠκούσατε ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ἵνα ἐν αὐτῇ περιπατῆτε.
English Translation
4. I exceedingly rejoiced that I found some of your children walking in truth just as we received a commandment from the Father.
5. And now I ask you, lady, not as though I were writing a new commandment to you, but one we have had from the beginning, that we may love one another.
6. and this is love, that we may walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, just as you heard from the beginning, that you may walk in it.
Graphical Grammar1
Weighty Words
- περιπατοῦντας – pres act ptc masc pl acc ▶ περιπατέω. The word means to “walk,” but also, like English, can be metaphoric for conducting one’s life. The present participle is an adjective describing what the children are doing. In this case, walking is a metaphor. The children are living or conducting their lives in truth.
- ἀγαπῶμεν – 1st pl pres act subj ▶ ἀγαπάω. See below for discussion.
- περιπατῶμεν – 1st pl pres act subj ▶ περιπατέω. Same lemma here as above.
Syntax Sense
Why is ἐκ in verse 4 partitive?
You may feel it instinctively, but you want to know how to spot it from the context rather than from a rulebook. First, let’s be clear about what a partitive is. A partitive points to a portion of something, a part of a whole. In English, we frequently find partitives with uncountable nouns to make them measurable (e.g., “a slice of bread,” “a cup of tea,” “a bunch of cilantro”). It’s a word, phrase, or even a grammatical case that expresses partialness; it distinguishes a subset from the entire amount.
Now, on to our question. Here’s what the semantic situation tells us.
- The verb εὕρηκα (“I have found”) is perfect tense → a completed discovery the Elder made on a recent visit or via a report. If every single one of the Elect Lady’s children had been walking in the truth, he would have said something like “I rejoiced that your children are walking…” or “I found all your children walking…”. The fact that he uses a perfect “I have found” + a partitive construction signals “I checked, and here’s what I discovered about a portion of them.”
- The immediate context of the Johannine epistles is schism (1 John 2:19; 4:1–6; 2 John 7–9). Churches are splitting. Some “children” stayed loyal, some have gone out into the deception. The partitive ἐκ quietly prepares the reader for the warnings that start in v. 7.
- Later in the letter he will command the “lady” not to receive certain people into the house (v. 10). That command only makes sense if some of her “children” might be tempted to do exactly that — i.e., not all of them are solidly faithful.
- Parallel usage elsewhere in Johannine literature. John 16:17 εἶπαν οὖν ἐκ τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ πρός ἀλλήλους… (“some of his disciples said to one another….”) Exactly the same construction: not “the disciples” but “some out of the disciples,” because only a portion were confused.
Bottom line: the schism context + the verb εὕρηκα + the fact that the letter is about to warn against false teachers all tells us that “some, but not necessarily all” is the only reading that fits. The Greek doesn’t need an explicit “some”; ἐκ does the job all by itself.
In verse 5, what’s going on with the οὐχ ὡς clause?
The οὐχ ὡς clause is notoriously slippery. One might be tempted to translate (as I was!) “not as a new commandment in writing to you.” This is grammatically possible, but it slightly misplaces the emphasis. The Greek is: οὐχ ὡς ἐντολὴν καινὴν γράφων σοι = “not as though I were writing you a new commandment” (the participle is the key).
Why is γράφων rendered past tense even though it’s present participle? Welcome to the Epistolary Present!
Short answer: English idiom forces it. In both Greek and English, when we use ὡς / “as” + participle in a negative comparison that denies the manner of the main verb, the participle is very often understood from the perspective of the finished letter. The letter is being written now, but the moment the recipient reads it, the writing is already complete.
Greek routinely uses the present participle for this “epistolary” situation (the author steps into the shoes of the reader). English, however, has no epistolary present; we automatically shift to the past or to a past-continuous construction.
Examples of the same phenomenon all over the NT epistles:
- Philemon 19: ἵνα μὴ λέγω σοι … → “I say not unto thee” (KJV) – present λέγω, rendered past.
- Romans 15:15: τολμηρότερον δέ τι γράφων ὑμῖν → “as putting you in mind” or “I have written to you” – present γράφων, rendered past.
- 1 Cor 9:15: οὐκ ἔγραψα δὲ ταῦτα ἵ ἵνα οὕτως γένηται → “But I have not used…” – aorist ἔγραψα for something he is in the act of writing.
So the Elder’s present γράφων is an “epistolary present.” English has no direct equivalent, so responsible translations therefore use either:
- past tense: “as though I wrote”
- past continuous: “as though I were writing”
Both are accepted conventions. If you want to stay hyper-literal you could say: “…not as though writing to you a new commandment….” But that sounds stilted to native ears.
But γράφων is not 1st person. Where is that coming from?
The participle γράφων (“writing”) is not grammatically first-person in Greek. True. It is nominative masculine singular, which simply agrees with the subject of the main verb ἐρωτῶ — i.e., the Elder himself. So in Greek it is already, unambiguously, “I writing.” Greek does not need an explicit ἐγώ here because a participle in agreement with the subject of the sentence automatically carries the person of that subject. This happens constantly. See, e.g.:
- Φησιν λέγων = “he says, saying” = “saying, he says”
- Ἐγὼ βαπτίζων ἐν ὕδατι = “I baptizing in water” = “I who baptize in water” (Mark 1:8)
- Σὺ εἶπας εἰπών = “you said, saying” = “you yourself said”
So γράφων σοι is already first-person in Greek: “(I) writing to you”.
English, however, cannot do that. We don’t write things like “And now I ask you, not as a new commandment writing to you…” That’s ungrammatical in English. We have to supply an explicit subject for the participle or turn it into a finite clause. The only natural options are:
- Turn it into a finite verb with “I” → “not as though I were writing / I wrote…”
- Use a concessive/conditional clause → “although I am writing…”
- Keep a participle but add the pronoun → “not as I writing to you a new commandment…” (still bad English)
Because of that restriction, English translations are forced to insert the pronoun “I” that Greek didn’t need to write. The “I” is not coming from some mysterious “epistolary rule that changes third-person to first-person.” It’s simply the English language requiring an overt subject where Greek can leave it implicit.
But ἀγαπῶμεν looks like a passive indicative. What gives?
Well, the forms themselves are identical.
- 1st pl pres act subj = ἀγαπῶμεν (as described above)
- 1st pl pres pass ind = ἀγαπῶμεν
In later Koine, the contraction of -άομεν and -ώομεν both end up as -ῶμεν, so the middle/passive and active subjunctive look exactly alike in this person/number. Thus, morphology alone cannot decide between these two renderings:
- active subjunctive: “that we may love one another”
- passive indicative: “that we are (being) loved (by one another / by God)”
Welcome to real-world Greek. So how do we know it’s active subjunctive? Only context and Johannine usage — and the context is overwhelming:
- The entire Johannine corpus uses the verb ἀγαπάω / ἀγαπᾶν ἀλλήλους dozens of times as the active commandment given by Jesus:
- John 13:34–35 (×3)
- John 15:12, 17
- 1 John 3:11, 23; 4:7, 11, 12
- 2 John 5 (here)
Every single one is active voice: “you (plural) love one another.”
- Immediately after this verse (v. 6), the Elder defines what “walking according to his commandments” means: ἵνα περιπατῶμεν κατὰ τὰς ἐντολὰς αὐτοῦ … ἵνα ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους
There he switches to the explicit 2nd-person plural active subjunctive/imperative ἀγαπᾶτε — same verb, same construction, unmistakably active. - A passive reading (“that we may be loved”) would make nonsense of the purpose clause. The Elder is not saying “I’m reminding you of the old commandment in order that we may be loved.” He’s saying “in order that we may keep on loving one another.” Love in Johannine theology is always something the community actively does, never a passive state.
- Every Greek NT manuscript reads the same spelling, and every father, version, and commentator from the 2nd century onward has taken it as active subjunctive. There is no textual or interpretive tradition for the passive indicative reading.
This is one of those little Koine landmines that trips up even advanced students when they’re translating in a vacuum. Translators must be sensitive to the grammatical options available to them, but then must use the surrounding logic, discourse, and other aspects of context to fix the meaning.
Verse 6
There is nothing too tricky here, But what is the reason αὐτῇ is translated “it” and not “her/she”? The immediate antecedent of the feminine dative pronoun αὐτῇ is ἡ ἐντολή (the commandment) that appears in the same sentence just four words earlier.
- ἡ ἀγάπη → feminine
- ἡ ἐντολή → feminine
- αὕτη → feminine (twice)
- αὐτῇ → feminine dative
Greek loves to use a pronoun with the article (αὕτη ἡ ἐντολή … αὐτῇ) when it wants to emphasize or pick out one specific item from a class. Here the Elder is doing exactly that:
- “And this is love: that we walk according to His commandments (plural).”
- “This is the commandment (singular — the one that really matters) — just as you heard from the beginning — that you walk in it (ἐν αὐτῇ).”
So αὐτῇ is not personified here; it is simply the normal way Greek refers back to a feminine noun that is not a person. When the antecedent is an abstract or inanimate feminine noun (ἐντολή, ἀγάπη, ἀλήθεια, etc.), English almost always switches to “it” even though Greek keeps the feminine pronoun. We do the same thing in English with ships or cars (“she”) only when we deliberately personify them; otherwise we say “it.”
The only place you ever see “her” is when someone mistakenly thinking αὐτῇ refers back to the “elect lady” of v. 1 — which is impossible because (a) she is too far away as an antecedent, and (b) the Elder has just introduced a new subject (ἡ ἐντολή) with αὕτη.
Demystifying the Discourse
One thing that these three verses highlight that becomes much more visible when you see these verses diagrammed together is that Greek often advances thought by chaining restatements rather than nesting subordinates. This seems especially so in Johannine literature.
Here is the conceptual flow of this passage. We received a commandment from the Father (the normative anchor) → That commandment defines what “walking in truth” means (v.4) → Now (καὶ νῦν) John turns from report to exhortation {Love is not new — it is the same commandment “from the beginning”} (v.5) → And this is what love is (v.6a) → Namely: walking according to his commandments (v.6b)
What do you notice? v.5 does not depend on v.4 grammatically; v.6a does not depend on v.5 grammatically; v.6b does not grammatically subordinate to v.6a. Rather, each clause (i) re-describes the same moral reality (i) from a slightly different angle (iii) with increasing explicitness. We do not have a tree. We have a chain.
Subordination implies hierarchy, containment, one idea living inside another: A because B because C because D. That is not what John is doing. What he has given us is reiteration, clarification, and tightening. Each restatement with added precision and depth. Each link depends on the previous meaning, not the previous syntax.
We have three things operating on different levels and in different orders of importance: grammar; logic; theology. Grammatically, v.5–6 are largely coordinate, not subordinate. Rhetorically, they form a conceptual chain anchored in the received commandment. Theologically, John is collapsing “commandment,” “truth,” “love,” and “obedience” into a single moral reality. Keeping these three levels in your mind will help you avoid over-hierarchizing texts that are actually chained, spiraled, or iterative in logic.
Another thing worth observing is the three parallel ἵνα + subjunctive clauses in verses 5 and 6. They really stand out when you look at the verses in the diagram.
One last little thing to note from verse 5. John uses ἐρωτῶ (ask, request, entreat) instead of the much more common παρακαλῶ or even a direct imperative. This choice softens the tone without weakening the appeal, reinforcing the Elder’s posture as a fellow participant in the commandment rather than a superior issuing orders.
Your turn!
Here are some things to consider. Try one or more to see where you come out.
- How would you diagram this verse?
- Is καὶ νῦν a discourse marker or is it doing substantive work?
- Can you find another place in John’s writing that uses chained restatements? How about by another author?
- What features in the writing draw out the chaining? Is it the ἵνα + subjunctive clauses? Something else?
- Do the chained statements come across as clearly in the English as they do in the Greek? Could you–without being interpretive–translate the chained statements more forcefully?
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See complete translation of II John here.