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Conjunction · Grammar concept
Conjunction: ὅτι ‘because, that’
ὅτι ‘because, that’ is a conjunction topic in Koine (biblical) Greek. This page gathers its forms, paradigms, and function, drawn from the lessons of Reading Greek Deeply.
SyntaxConjunction – ὅτι
The conjunction ὅτι introduces a subordinate clause. This is a clause that is dependent upon the independent clause in some way. In other words, it cannot stand alone as the only clause in a sentence. For example, if I said something like because she was hungry, you would probably ask what did she do or something to that effect. You know the reason something happened, but you don’t know what she did because she was hungry. Both a clause that begins with because in English and one that begins with ὅτι in Greek are subordinate – they can’t stand on their own.
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SemanticsConjunction – ὅτι
There are two main functions of ὅτι. The first is to introduce clauses that are selected by a certain kind of verb. In other words, some verbs can take an entire clause as an argument (this is called a complement clause), and some of these verbs require ὅτι to introduce the clause. This is most closely approximated by that in English. For example, a verb like εἶπεν ‘said’ in Matt 27:43 can have a full clause after it that specifies what was said:
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New Testament text shown on hover: Greek from the SBLGNT, © 2010 Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, CC BY 4.0; English from the Berean Standard Bible (public domain).