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 verb...