Granville Sharp's rule

Granville Sharp’s rule is a rule of New Testament Greek grammar: when a single definite article joins two singular, personal, common nouns with “and” (Greek kai), both nouns describe one and the same person rather than two different people. Applied to Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1, the rule identifies Jesus Christ as “God and Savior” in one phrase, rather than reading the verse as naming God the Father and Jesus Christ separately, a reading cited in support of the deity of Christ.

Biblical Basis

Titus 2:13 speaks of waiting for “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.” Read under Sharp’s rule, “God” and “Savior” are both descriptions of one person, Jesus Christ, rather than two people (“God” the Father and “our Savior Jesus Christ”).¹ 2 Peter 1:1 follows the same grammatical pattern: “the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.” Older English translations that render the Greek more loosely (“God, and our Saviour Jesus Christ”) obscure this, while translations that follow the Greek construction more closely (“our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus”) preserve it.

Grammar aside, Reformed exegesis has long read Titus 2:13 as calling Christ God outright. John Gill listed “the Great God” (Titus 2:13) among the biblical epithets applied to Christ, alongside “Immanuel” (Matt. 1:22), “God manifest in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16), “the mighty God” (Isa. 9:6), “over all, God blessed for ever” (Rom. 9:5), and “the true God” (1 John 5:20), concluding that “since then Christ is so frequently called God, with these additional epithets, which are peculiar to the one only God, it follows, that he must be truly and properly God.”²

Historical Development

The rule takes its name from Granville Sharp (1735-1813), a British abolitionist and amateur grammarian who set it out in a study of the Greek article.¹ Ancient Greek writers commonly joined two or more nouns of the same case and number under one article and “and”; Sharp observed that when the joined nouns were singular and described a person, they tended to refer to a single individual rather than two, and that Titus 2:13 was a clear New Testament instance of the pattern.¹

Sharp’s own statement covered only this specific case: singular, personal, common nouns (not proper names like “Paul,” and not ordinals). In the twentieth century, Daniel Wallace revisited the rule and argued that, within those limits, the New Testament has no clear exceptions.³ His work responded to a common error: the rule gets misapplied by stretching it to plural nouns, which Sharp never claimed to cover. Ephesians 4:11’s “pastors and teachers” is a modern case in point. Some arguments that Paul means a single “pastor-teacher” office appeal to Sharp’s rule, but “pastors” and “teachers” are plural, so Sharp’s first rule does not even apply to that verse.⁴

Objections and Responses

The traditional “God, and our Saviour” reading treats Titus 2:13 as naming two persons, not one. That reading is grammatically possible in looser constructions, but Titus 2:13 has the specific pattern Sharp identified as naming one person: a single article governing two singular common nouns joined by “and.”¹

Detractors have pointed to New Testament examples where the construction does not seem to name a single referent. Reexamination of these counterexamples has found that they fall outside the rule’s actual scope, most often because the nouns involved are plural or include a proper name, not because the rule fails within the limits Sharp himself stated.³

Related Doctrines

References

Jonathan D. Worthington, “The Pastors and Teachers in Ephesians 4:11,” Themelios 50, no. 3 (2025): 497. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
John Gill, The Doctrine of the Trinity, 109-12, quoted in Jonathan Elliot Swan, “‘Nothing Else Than Generation’: John Gill’s Doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship,” in “’The Fountain of Life’: John Gill’s Doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), 108. ↩
Worthington, 497n13, citing Daniel B. Wallace, “The Semantic Range of the Article-Noun-Kai-Noun Plural Construction in the New Testament,” Grace Theological Journal 4, no. 1 (1983): 59-84; Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 270-90; and Granville Sharp’s Canon and Its Kin: Semantics and Significance (New York: Lang, 2009). ↩ ↩²
Worthington, 497-98. ↩