[B-Greek] Suggested Greek reading beyond the NT
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Oct 22 08:05:26 EDT 2003
At 4:55 PM -0600 10/21/03, Garret wrote:
>On 10/21/03 4:06 PM, "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> wrote:
>
>> I personally think that the synchronic focus of NT Greek studies tends to
>> blind teachers and students of NT Greek to the fact that the language of
>> the NT is in flux, that constructions such as the participial indirect
>> discourse with a verb of perception once standard in classical Koine are
>> considerably rarer in NT Koine but still used by those writers especially
>> (e.g. Luke, Paul) who probably had grammatical and literary instruction in
>> a school. First-year Koine grammars teach the constructions that are more
>> common and tend to ignore or give short shrift to those less common. It
>> wouldn't hurt at all for students of NT Koine to read considerably more
>> Greek outside of the Biblical corpus and outside of the NT era.
>
>
>I hope I am not being rude coming into this discussion at this point, but I
>think that this is a very good point.
>
>If you don't mind me asking Carl, what would be in your opinion good reading
>of this time period.
>
>Homer, Eusebius or archives of documents found at Qumran?
The Qumran documents are not Greek. Homer is always worth reading, but if
one has been reading only NT Koine, the transition to Homeric morphology
and vocabulary can be deterring (I managed it, but with great difficulty,
fifty years ago when I moved from a Freshman Greek class that read Mark's
gospel to a Sophomore class reading the Iliad). Eusebius would probably be
a pretty good choice as being not too difficult and written in a good
literary Greek. There used to be available at a site in Brazil a neat text
of a short novel by Pseudo-Lucian called LOUKIOS H ONOS, but it's no longer
there. On the other hand, Lucian himself, a Syrian Greek writing good Attic
probably within the NT era is relatively easy reading and fun to read; I
note that a Greek text of his "True History" (gk. ALHQH DIHGHMATA) is
accessible on-line at
http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/graeca/Chronologia/S_post02/Lukianos/luk_ver0.html
Another on-line resource of classical Greek texts at easy and intermediate
levels is at Cornell:
http://www.cornellcollege.edu/classical_studies/reviewgreek/index.shtml
This includes:
Easy readings: Fable and Myth (Apollodorus--late Hellenistic)
Intermediate readings: Athenian Life; Plato's Dialogues; Democracy
A serious student of Greek would do well to read, sooner or later, some
Plato. While it's not really easy, one really OUGHT to read at some point
in one's life Plato's Apology of Socrates; one can read it at the Perseus
web-site in a downloaded Greek font and even avail oneself of instant
parsing there.
I prepared a page a few years ago (while I was still actively teaching) for
students who had finished first-year Greek with me and needed to keep their
skills alive over the summer. It's not really up-to-date, but there are
some more suggestions there and even a listing of some annotated texts one
could use; the page is entitled, "Reading to Extend and Keep Alive Greek
Skills," and is accessible at:
http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/moregrk.html
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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