Greek Roots · letter 15 of 24

Omicron

The eye, emptied into a circle, and the letter of “the Way.”

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician ʿayin: an eye.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

The pupil dropped out and left the eye's outline: a plain circle.

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

A short o, as in “pot.” The long one belongs to omega.

Written o in scholarly books.

Its number

it is letter 15, the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

“little o”: a later Greek label

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician ʿayin

Well established

Before anyone was called a Christian, the movement had a different name. In Acts it is simply hē hodos, the Way. Luke uses it half a dozen times, in Paul's mouth and his enemies', as the ordinary term for the thing.

It is a road word. Hodos means a road, a journey, the route you take. The name says that following Jesus is a direction of travel before it is anything else.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

They called it “the Way”

Saul goes to Damascus hunting people “of the Way.” The riot at Ephesus is about “the Way.” Paul, on trial, says plainly: after the Way which they call a sect, so worship I the God of my fathers. And John's Gospel has Jesus say the same word of himself, I am the way.

The name above every name

Onoma, “name,” carries more weight in Scripture than it does in English. To act in someone's name is to act with their authority; to believe on the name is to trust the person. Philippians pushes it as far as it goes.

Words that begin here

ὁδός

hodos — road, way

The church's first name for itself, and Jesus' name for himself.

Open the word→

ὄνομα

onoma — name

A name in Scripture carries authority and character, not just identification.

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οἶκος

oikos — house, household

The building and the family in it, which is why whole households are baptised.

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ὀφθαλμός

ophthalmos — eye

Fittingly, the letter that used to be an eye opens the word for one.

Open the word→