How To Use New Testament Greek Study Aids - Walter Jerry Clark - Loizeaux Bros. (1984)
Eric S. Weiss
eweiss at gte.net
Wed Jul 24 11:46:21 EDT 2002
This book, too, is out of print. I found a few clearance copies via the
Internet at a Bible bookstore in West Virginia, and bought their remaining
stock.
It's not a bad book. The fact that both this and Goodrick's book (see my
original post) are out of print means that there is NO book out there (in
English) specifically geared to helping non-Greek students learn to use
beginning and advanced Greek study tools. (Hint: Anyone want to write and
publish such a book? I think there would be a market for it!)
He starts with showing how to use Strong's and Young's concordances and
leads the reader all the way through understanding how to use real Greek
resources and lexicons, etc., even showing them how to use books like THE
EXPOSITOR'S GREEK TESTAMENT. He quotes from Dana and Mantey frequently,
and gives a brief overview/explanation/description of nouns, verbs,
prepositions and other parts of speech. He has a nice Appendix A where he
outlines how to teach what amounts to a word-study/translation course on 2
John.
The book does give a thorough explanation of various Greek tools, it has a
nice set of charts in Appendix B that could be adapted for handouts if one
were to teach such a class (for one, I would put the words in Greek
characters, not just transliterations), and in Appendix C he describes and
rates/ranks (i.e., 1 - for English-only student, 2 - for those with some
familiarity with Greek, 3 - for Greek readers and students) a multitude of
tools, grammars, aids, etc., all the way from the simplest to BAGD, BDF,
etc. It was published in 1983, and he mentions how a new edition of BAGD
had just come out, so that gives you an idea of what he had available.
The book seems (based on things I've read on this forum) to give more
credit than should be given to Trench's Synonyms, Wuest's Word Studies and
Expanded Translation, and Vincent's Word Studies. In other words, students
may not realize the exegetical fallacies that I understand are sometimes
exhibited by these works.
As I said, it's out of print, but would be useful for someone to try to
find in their seminary library if they are intending to teach such a
course -- e.g., a church course for people who want to learn how to do
Greek word studies, etc., but are not willing to commit to a 1st-year
Greek class.
William Mounce via Zondervan will be coming out with GREEK FOR THE REST OF
US in February/March 2003, sort of a companion volume to his reverse
English-Greek Interlinear (and announced in that book to be forthcoming in
2001 -- obviously it was delayed nearly 2 years). I understand that it
will cover similar territory, i.e., helping non-Greek students do word
studies and other advanced research in Greek. Mounce's reverse interlinear
is different in that the Greek text has been rearranged to correspond with
the (NIV) English text. The obvious problem with this (to me) is that
emphasis based on word order will be lost to the student. The reverse
interlinear will allow the English student great ease in looking up Greek
words, and the words are ALL parsed/grammatically-tagged in the
Interlinear and have a Goodrick-Kohlenberger number for each word. This
enables the student to easily use two other resources in the Zondervan
series -- the Greek-English Concordance, and Verbrugge's new 1-volume
condensation/rewrite/expansion of Colin Brown's NIDNTT. Mounce thoroughly
explains in the Appendix why the structure/layout of the interlinear was
chosen and the issues related to it, as well as various translation
issues.
This is not an announcement or promotion for Mounce's book, just letting
everyone know what I know about published resources related to helping
non-Greek students begin their foray into the Greek text.
CARIS
> Any comments re: this book? Would it be useful for a class I will soon be
> teaching at church to non-Greek students (who might potentially become
> Greek students) on "How to use Greek tools if you don't know Greek"? The
> only book I knew of that dealt with this kind of thing was Goodrick's
> out-of-print DO IT YOURSELF HEBREW AND GREEK. Is this book by Clark still
> useful/relevant -- or is it out of date and/or not helpful re: what he
> says/writes? It's $9.99, I believe, so it wouldn't be too bad if I told
> the class members to each get a copy for the class (starting
> mid-September). But I don't want them spending money on non-useful
> material. Thanks for any comments.
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