The Emphatic Hypernegation That Was(n’t): Revisiting οὐ μὴ and New Testament Translation in Light of Research and Contemporary Linguistics

Abstract

The pleonastic hypernegation οὐ μὴ is widely recognized as conveying an emphatic “no.” However, all major English translations fail to render it consistently with such emphasis. This article explores the nature of this disparity by locating οὐ μὴ linguistically, semantically, and lexically within New Testament literature and contemporary research. It concludes that, despite theoretical exceptions and the erroneous trend of translations, οὐ μὴ should, in the New Testament, always be rendered with some explicit emphasis.