What is the word "one" trying to convey here?
I would like to offer an answer to just this part of the OP's question, since there is an idiom here that underpins everything else.
I always aim for a firm distinction between (as here) reading, which some people call "studying words" - and translating - which is a higher function. Ideally we want separation of functions and this is about passing a reading up to inform the translators.
It's very possible there are simple errors in this answer, but if the many stages are set out, and the reading is also a writing, then it's hopefully convenient for corrections to be drawn, and of wider benefit to mine and others' understanding.
For this answer I assume Galatians is from a trilingual Paul of Tarsus. I'm not at all a historian and due to his famous description of himself in Philippians 3:5, as a "Hebrew of Hebrews", I'm prone to imagining him as having Aramaic and Hebrew above Greek.
TL;DR - see Meyer's commentary
For ye all are one, ye form a single moral person; so that now those distinctions of individuals outside of Christianity appear as non-existent, completely merged in that higher unity to which ye are all raised in virtue of your fellowship of life with Christ. This is the εἷς καινὸς ἄνθρωπος
https://biblehub.com/commentaries/galatians/3-28.htm
Meyer is an authority on Greek grammar and idiom in the NT, and expresses it with crystal clarity. His commentary often works through very fine distinctions at the level of which way round words are. So he will have been through the topic that follows, it's just that we can't see how from just 1 sentence. And the OP may need to see how.
There are some textual variants, which I'll mention only briefly in case the OP needs to follow these up with a critical apparatus. They would affect the important bit of the verse, but they don't come from the MSS the translators give weight to.
From Nestle-Aland, 1981:-
- πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ (Berean Greek New Testament 2016, used throughout in this answer)
- πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς ἕν ἐστε ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ
- πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε ἐν Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
- πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
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πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ (Galatians 3:28)
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TRANSLATING NUMBER
The grammar difficulty is in how the two (potentially three) languages handle the plurality of the objects of plural verbs.
E.g. from Aristotle's De Partibus Animalium (670a.25~)
All animals have two spleens - - echei panta ta enaima duo ta splanchna tauta mona
English and Greek do the same thing with the verb's object - we take it from context that it isn't all the animals with two spleens to go round between them. You can probably see where this is going.
Slightly more than English, I'll submit Greek has a tendency to mentally separate plural verbs into a bundle of separate singular ones.
We ask a hundred people to take off their hats, but in Greek it can be their hat.
I couldn't find this topic (let alone the precise rules) in Jay (1958) for NT Greek. Moule (1982) doesn't have a section on verbs' number, but it might be in there somewhere under another heading.
I think I have it in North & Hillard's Greek Prose Composition for Schools (1954) which is pitched at 11-year-olds and somehow they've slipped this little gem into the third lesson and expected everyone to still remember it when they get to Paul of Tarsus.
"(b) with regard to Number-the Predicate may be plural or may be singular in agreement with the nearest subject." (predicate="object" in a subject/object distinction)
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As I've already intimated, I implicitly trust Meyer but it's about working through carefully so that the OP can follow what the word "one" conveys.
The idiom of most of our translations lends itself to "being one" with one on the predicate side of the verb. But in Greek the numeral is an adjective agreeing with the subject.
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ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε - - you are all one in Christ Jesus
double check: humeis=we is (nominative plural) ; heis=1 nominative adjective so agrees with humeis ; este is plural agreeing with humeis
Was this natural idiom in NT Greek? To have the singular numeral adjective in agreement with the plural personal pronoun.
It's like saying "one cats sit on the mat"
I suppose we might feel the number of heis when in Greek it isn't a grammatical property of the numeral. Their numerals don't possess number... and it isn't necessarily because they are the number. How do they say "tens and twenties"?
Cambridge Greek Grammar has this (archive.org often needs an account to borrow but it's free):-
https://archive.org/details/greekgrammar0000smyt/page/108/mode/2up
(In Attic Greek, they say kata deka kata eikosi.)
Point e here is interesting. Abstract and collective numbers are feminine.
Three ways forward occur:-
- Check if NT Greek is the same or this Grammar covers it
- Look for usages of heis and a plural verb
(- Check if this was a difference from Ancient Hebrew or Aramaic)
The last one is a last resort that is too often used as a first resort, perhaps because it's easy with a Strongs Concordance and appears 'deep'. If Paul is translating an idea, a translator's product is only in the new language.
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For NT Greek, Blass and Funk
https://archive.org/details/greekgrammarofne0000blas/page/34/mode/2up
(the reason I leave NT Grammar to this stage is that Paul is such a big proportion of the surviving corpus, so saying "this is fine in NT Greek" to some extent reduces to saying "Paul got away with this")
This grammar doesn't shed light on the topic, but the way it covers the topic in terms of difference from the earlier language means it's probably safe enough to move on.
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εἷς - - "The Meaning of One... The Meaning of Two... The Meaning of Many..."
Liddell & Scott (1882) isn't clear enough for this word for this purpose, and I can't manage to get Perseus Project to return it at all, but Strongs is online and has about 100 occurrences
https://biblehub.com/greek/eis_1520.htm
To me these ones seem like the closest:-
Matthew 26:21 Adj-NMS - - GRK: ὑμῖν ὅτι εἷς ἐξ ὑμῶν
Matthew 27:38 Adj-NMS - - GRK: δύο λῃσταί εἷς ἐκ δεξιῶν
John 8:9 Adj-NMS - - GRK: ἀκούσαντες ἐξήρχοντο εἷς καθ' εἷς
1 Corinthians 8:6 Adj-NMS - - GRK: ἀλλ' ἡμῖν εἷς θεὸς ὁ
I'll submit none of those ones match, and it's not there.
The feminine μία and neuter ἓν do have closer matches to Galatians 3:28 though so I will try to work through these. μία has 35, ἓν has 67.
I propose to skip the other cases.
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Matthew 19:5-6
[...]καὶ ἔσονται οἱ δύο εἰς σάρκα μίαν;’ - - and they will be the two into one flesh
ὥστε οὐκέτι εἰσὶν δύο ἀλλὰ σὰρξ μία [...] - - So they are no longer two but one flesh
In this last part the verb is still in agreement with the man and woman. This is also a difficult idiom: I read it that ἀλλὰ contrasts "they are two" with "one flesh [is]". I don't think it's a clear parallel to Paul's construction.
Mark has the same words but in one verse. (Mark 10:8)
καὶ ἔσονται οἱ δύο εἰς σάρκα μίαν·’ ὥστε οὐκέτι εἰσὶν δύο ἀλλὰ μία σάρξ.
I submit that the second part is marked idiom and needs the first part to be understood. Our division into verses might not have served Matthew's version well for modern readers.
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John 10:16
καὶ γενήσονται* μία ποίμνη, εἷς ποιμήν - - they will become one flock, one shepherd
So the same construction as Paul. Like Mark this also derives some clarity from what precedes it. And having γίνομαι signifies the change of condition.
I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.
This looks like three familiar idioms followed by a marked one. And all expressed as pairs which is neat.
We can now do a productive comparison to Paul:-
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
I submit that here the preceding three pair-ideas contrast with the concluding idea rather than clarifying it. On the basis the last one is combined but the preceding are not ; and the preceding are negatives.
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Acts 19:34
φωνὴ ἐγένετο μία ἐκ πάντων - - one voice became from many
This is a simpler idiom from Paul. But it refers to one voiced idea emerging from a cacophony, not the union of the crowd's voices into, like, one actual voice. So it's not helpful to Galatians and may be another example of how translation loses the details of thought.
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For ἕν,
John 17:22-3
Κἀγὼ τὴν δόξαν ἣν δέδωκάς μοι δέδωκα αὐτοῖς, ἵνα ὦσιν ἓν καθὼς ἡμεῖς ἕν·
ἐγὼ ἐν αὐτοῖς καὶ σὺ ἐν ἐμοί, ἵνα ὦσιν τετελειωμένοι εἰς ἕν, ἵνα γινώσκῃ ὁ κόσμος ὅτι σύ με ἀπέστειλας καὶ ἠγάπησας αὐτοὺς καθὼς ἐμὲ ἠγάπησας.
“I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one. I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.
Here ...ὦσιν ... ἡμεῖς ἕν corresponds with ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε but I submit there are three differences.
The whole point of ἡμεῖς=we, is that it combines a plural into a singular.
There is more clarifying context.
re. εἰς ἕν this is the same idiom as Plato uses in Republic Book IX 588d for his representation of the soul as a man, a lion, and a monster carved into one image. If this was still strongly felt in John's time it might qualify καθὼς such that the union of the Son with the Father is of the familiar metaphysical type Plato described. Which then has Father+Son extended to Son+Christian implying a Father+Son+Christian unity, from which the Christian-Christian unity might derive.
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Conclusion
There is a subtle range in the idioms NT Greek uses to express metaphysical combination. Notwithstanding some minor differences, Galatians 3:28 has at least two close parallels in John 10:16 and John 17:22-3, and a similar construction in a shared phrase of Matthew 19:5-6 and Mark 10:8.
In all four of these parallels can be found close-in devices that served to clarify the idiom, and the absence of this in Paul might be hypothesized to be due to increasing familiarity amongst Christians with the metaphysical concepts of the earlier authors. That is a tenuous link but it might be a productive one for further study.
Another point of interest is that the four places where these idioms appear all communicate a similar idea. It isn't that we find εἷς with a plural subject in contexts of baking a cake, or constituting a federal government from notionally independent states.
Which offers some prospect of εἷς conveying something special to Christians. The number's meaning beginning to change, through acquaintance with a concept of the one-who-is.
