Go and Make

The bloke across from me had a tattoo that caught my eye—it was ancient Greek: ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ.

And suddenly, the meaning of a famous saying of Jesus became clear.

You’ve probably seen ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ before on a bumper sticker. Probably on a truck featuring gun racks, if I may be permitted one stereotype. It’s a gun style rallying cry!  The phrase comes from the words the Spartan king Leonidas used to respond to the invading Persian king Xerxes in 480 B.C. Xerxes demanded that Leonidas surrender his weapons, and Leonidas replied, “Come and take them.”

LET'S DO SOME GREEK!

The first word is a participle, so literally what Leonidas said was, “Coming . . . ,” or “Having come, take.”

That is all true. You’re right.

• The first word, μολών molōn (“having come”) is the aorist active participle (masculine, nominative, singular) of the Greek verb βλώσκω blōskō “to come.” 
• The aorist stem is μολ- (the present stem in βλώ- being a regular contraction of μλώ-, from a verbal root, reconstructed as melə-, mlō- “to appear”). 
• The aorist participle is used in cases where an action has been completed, also called the perfective aspect. This is a nuance indicating that the first action (the coming) must precede the second (the taking).

Go and make
This is where the saying of Jesus comes in. You see, when Jesus says, “Go . . . and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19), he uses a similar construction: aorist participle + imperative finite verb (πορευθέντες οὖν μαθητεύσατε).

Some people want to say, “Jesus uses a Greek participle here which, literally, means ‘Having gone.’

• This means he assumes his hearers are going out to spread the gospel! It’s like the going is assumed, and once you’ve gone, then you need to make disciples.”
• But that’s where ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ helps us. Because it’s not Bible, we’re less inclined to read extra meaning into it, meaning that goes underneath and beyond the English translation in our hands. 
• ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ means—it has to mean, given the context—only one thing: “COME AND TAKE THEM.” There’s just no way that Leonidas, in that moment when he is called upon to be the macho trash talker insolently defying the massive opposing army, said something as frilly and hair-splitting as, “Dear Xerxes, once you have come, take.” 

• ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ provides some evidence that participle + imperative was just the ancient Greek way of saying stuff. Good idiomatic Greek that sounds like the Greek of native speakers often went participle + imperative in situations in which good idiomatic English that sounds like the English of native speakers would never, ever do this. 
• “Having come, take” - belongs buried deep in the niceties of a grammar book that no self-respecting Spartan warrior would ever touch (because he uses it in Λογος, of course).
• Jesus, then, did not say, “Having gone, make disciples.” He said, “Go and make disciples.”