A Review of the Translation of Πιστεύω(pisteuō)’s Middle and Passive Voice Usages: With Reference to Recent Discussions on Voice in Ancient Greek and the Accusativus Retentus Construction

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Korean translations of the middle- and passive-voice occurrences of Πιστεύω in the New Testament and to propose alternative renderings. Although Πιστεύω is used more than 240 times in the New Testament alone—making it an extremely high-frequency verb—its middle and passive forms, regardless of tense, appear in only a handful of verses across the Old and New Testaments (Gen 42:20 [LXX]; 1Sa 3:21; 27:12 [LXX]; Est 8:12 [LXX]; Rom 3:2; 10:10; 1Co 9:17; Gal 2:7; 1Th 2:4; 2Th 1:10; 1Ti 1:11; 3:16; Tit 1:3, among others). Even when the scope is broadened to include literature directly or indirectly related to the New Testament, middle- and passive-voice instances remain vanishingly rare. This paper regards this striking phenomenon as the result of each author’s deliberate ‘choice’ of voice in these particular instances, and asks the question, “Why did the authors ‘choose’ the middle or passive voice rather than the active in these select instances?”—then seeks an answer capable of explaining that choice. To this end, the paper draws in turn on recent discussions of voice in ancient Greek centered on the concept of ‘deponency’, and on the characteristics of the accusativus retentus (retained accusative) construction. Recent discussions of ancient Greek voice centered on deponency encourage the adoption of a “presumption of the middle voice” in cases—such as the present and perfect systems—where the middle and passive forms are morphologically identical. The retained accusative construction, meanwhile, tolerates the somewhat awkward syntactic feature of a passive verb co-occurring with an accusative in order to emphasize the ‘subject’ of the passive. Building on these two lines of discussion, this paper then examines the middle- and passive-voice occurrences of πιστεύω found in the New Testament and proposes alternative translations.