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Greek Roots · letter 12 of 24

Mu

Water — and the letter of “mystery” and “only begotten.”

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician mem — a zigzag: water.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

The water still ripples — five strokes, the last leg trailing.

The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters

Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one — no lower case, and no spaces between the words.

The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter — at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.

Sounds like

M, as in English.

Written m in scholarly books.

Its number

40

it is letter 12 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

water (from mem)

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician mem

Well established

Mystērion in ordinary Greek belonged to the mystery religions: a secret shown only to initiates. Paul takes the word and turns it inside out. In his letters a mystery is something that was hidden and has now been announced — not a secret kept, but a secret told.

That is a deliberate reversal, and it is worth catching, because the English word “mystery” has drifted back toward the pagan sense. When Paul says “mystery,” he is usually about to explain it.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

A mystery is a secret that has been told

Paul's mysteries are Gentiles brought into the same body; Christ in you; the resurrection of the living. Each time he names a mystery he immediately declares it. The word marks something that could not have been worked out and had to be revealed.

“Only begotten” — and a real manuscript question

Monogenēs means “one of a kind,” the only one of its sort. John 3:16 has it, and so does John 1:18 — where the manuscripts genuinely differ. The oldest copies we have read monogenēs theos, “the only begotten God”; a large body of later ones read monogenēs huios, “the only begotten Son.”

This is not a scandal and it is not hidden. It is an ordinary textual decision, and every modern Bible's footnotes will tell you which way its translators went.

Witness became martyr

Martys is a courtroom word: someone who testifies to what they saw. Because so many who testified were killed for it, the word slid, in Christian usage, into “martyr.” You can watch it happening in Revelation, where Antipas is called “my faithful witness, who was slain.”

Words that begin here

μυστήριον

mystērion — mystery

A secret now disclosed — the opposite of how English uses the word.

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μονογενής

monogenēs — only, unique

“One of a kind” rather than “biologically begotten” — nine occurrences.

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μάρτυς

martys — witness

A legal word that the cost of testifying turned into “martyr.”

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μετάνοια

metanoia — repentance

A changed mind that changes direction — not a mood, and not merely regret.

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