cwconrad wrote:Two disturbing trends in the latter are (1) the abandonment of any expectation that seminary students should gain any real competence in Biblical Greek, and (2) the emerging consensus that Biblical software -- and in particular parsing guides and interlinear displays -- are sufficient stand-ins for that real competence in Biblical Greek.
Unfortunately, many seminaries see #2 as the salvation of #1! "Greek" in too many places has become "Logos 101"--and often with the encouragement of Logos. Some seminaries, mine included, have resisted this trend.
The one positive trend has been the emergence of real endeavors such as those spearheaded by Randall Buth and Daniel Sreett to teach the ancient languages as living languages in which students can and should think and communicate with each other; the big question is whether that has any real chance of catching on and spreading in the schools that matter. It may already be too late for that.
I've tried not to get entangled in debates on this here since the majority opinion seems to pretty "fixed." I think it likely too idealistic to have a chance of making any significant impact on seminary training. For a "Greek major" perhaps--but seminaries are intended primarily for ministerial training, so there simply aren't enough hours. A pastoral training major must include not only Greek, but also Hebrew and Bible and theology and church history and ethics and apologetics and homiletics and practical theology. And that's all I'll say about that.
I was partly amused and partly saddened to learn that Rod Decker's discovery of Smyth's grammar was practically an accident, although I think that he would have discovered Smyth sooner or later somehow.
That says most about my earliest training I suppose. To the credit of my doctoral program, my Doctorvater, also the head of the NT dept., was very familiar with Smyth--and corrected my pronunciation of it the first time I mentioned it. (I was calling it "Smith.")
In addition, I think that what's been said about BDF and the fact that (a) it isn't really up to date, and (b) it isn't really a full-scale Hellenistic Greek grammar, are related to another significant fact: for several decades now the authoritative academic voices in NT Greek have been insisting that the approach to Biblical Greek pedagogy and scholarship should be strictly synchronic. And the seminaries have accepted that and have ceased to insist that incoming students have an undergraduate grounding in Classical Greek.
I'm not so sure that's the fault of a synchronic emphasis. The classical pre-reqs had been gone long before synchronic became a buzz word. And in defense of synchronic, I'd point out that such an emphasis is almost always used (if used correctly) in terms of lexical semantics, not morphology and syntax. There, I think, I'd be willing to defend synchronic *priority*--but certainly not synchronic exclusivity.
One consequence of all this is that, even if the funding were available now to underwrite the project of compiling a true Hellenistic Greek grammar, we might very well be hard put to assemble a body of competent teacher-scholars who could put together a Hellenistic Greek grammar even on the scope of Smyth. What I mean by that is a grammar that expounds Koine Greek morphology and syntax with a perspective on both earlier and later Greek morphology and usage, as Smyth expounds Classical Greek grammar with a look backward toward Homeric Greek and forward toward Hellenistic Greek.
That is undoubtedly true.
Rodney J. Decker
Prof/NT
Baptist Bible Seminary
Clarks Summit, PA
(See profile for my NTResources blog address.)