First John 3:17 read: ὃς δ᾽ ἂν ἔχῃ τὸν βίον τοῦ κόσμου καὶ θεωρῇ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ χρείαν ἔχοντα… “Whoever has the life of the world and sees his brother having need…” Τὸν ἀδελφόν is the accusative direct object of θεωρῇ, but how should we label the function of the participle ἔχοντα? A survey of commentaries and grammars finds a wide variety of explanations of this rather common grammatical construction. Some scholars label ἔχοντα as the complement in an object-complement construction (Culy). Others call this the “predicative” use of the participle (Goodell). Although many Classical Greek grammars and older Koine Greek grammars discuss this usage under the category of the supplementary participle (Smyth, CGCL, BDF, Hewett) most recent Greek grammars have no mention of this category (KMP, Wallace, Matthewson and Emig). This neglect is unfortunate, as many examples of the supplementary participle are found in the Greek New Testament, and the traditional label is still the best. The purpose of this paper is to categorize grammarians’ diverse labels of this common use of the participle and to appeal for adopting the category of “supplementary participle” as the best name for this debated construction.