QUESTION
Hi Dennis, I’m curious as to why John includes the ὁ in πᾶς ὁ in 1 John 3:6?
1 John 3:6
πᾶς ὁ ἐν αὐτῷ μένων οὐχ ἁμαρτάνει· πᾶς ὁ ἁμαρτάνων οὐχ ἑώρακεν αὐτὸν οὐδὲ ἔγνωκεν αὐτόν.
RESPONSE
Πᾶς is a predicate position adjective in these two articular phrases.
Πᾶς is the most frequent adjective in the Greek New Testament (GNT). It is one of the 10 predicate position attributives (as opposed to all the other attributive position adjectives), which means that if the head is articular, it is almost always in the first or second attributive position.
With nouns, the head may be articular or anarthrous (more often). However, with prepositional heads of πᾶς, as here, the preposition is never anarthrous. With participles, the ratio is 63 to 1 in favor of articular (the one exception is Second Thessalonians 2:4). The reason for the article on the preposition is that the article is necessary to supply the case, which is proto-function (every grammatical relation that takes a declensional has a particular case or case rule). The reason for the articular preference for the participle (over the noun) is that anarthrous participles are generally adverbial while articular participles are generally substantival or attributive. The noun can never be attributive so it needs no article to signal this distinction.
These familiar patterns are habits of speech that facilitate communication through multiple redundant reinforcing signals between the speaker and hearer. They distinguish the idiomatic native speaker from the novice and are learned unconsciously by children at the receptive period.