[B-Greek] Criteria for evaluating NT Greek Intro Grammars

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Feb 19 13:34:08 EST 2004


At 9:39 AM -0800 2/19/04, waldo slusher wrote:
>Carl wrote...
>
>> I applaud this very sensible suggestion for a more
>> objective basis for
>> choosing a textbook for Beginning Greek. I ought
>> perhaps to make clear that
>> in my 40 years of active teaching of Greek I mostly
>> taught Classical Attic,
>> very rarely BEGINNING NTGreek--at Washington
>> University we insisted that
>> those wanting to read Biblical Greek should first
>> take a year of Classical
>> Attic,
>
>This comment caught my attention. Do you really think
>"a year" of Attic is sufficient? I've taken almost a
>year of Attic and feel very inadequate in my grasp of
>even the basics of Attic. (Although, as Mitch just
>pointed out, I've not taken Attic with a
>teacher....rather, I'm learning it on my own.)

Well, I hope your textbook work is accompanied by plenty of reading of
Attic Greek texts (simple ones, that is). Do you mean you've been at it for
a year or that you're nearly finished with a first-year textbook? If you're
asking the question seriously, perhaps we should take it off-list.

But the question is a fair enough one. I do NOT think that one year of
Classical Attic is enough to enable one to read any Classical Attic text,
but some textbooks will take you a lot farther than others: two of the very
best that, if worked through conscientiously, should enable one to move on
with some confidence to more difficult Greek prose and poetry are: the JACT
course, _Reading Greek_ and Hansen & Quinn, _Greek: An Intensive Course_.
This latter is the textbook used in the summer
8-week/6-hours-a-day/5-days-a-week course taught at UCal-Berkeley and at
CUNY. These textbooks are more difficult to use for self-study, although
there is now available _An Independent Study Guide to Reading Greek_. I
would think that most Greek literature would be accessible to someone who
successfully completes either of these textbooks.  I still maintain a page
on my web-site that I originally put together for my students to follow up
in the summer after completing _Reading Greek_; it's entitled "Reading to
Extend and Keep Alive Greek Skills":

	http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/moregrk.html

>And if I may follow up with another question; what
>benefit accrues if I take 2 years of Attic as far as
>my understanding of the GNT?

Here are a few thoughts:

(a) you'll be better able to read Luke and Hebrews and perhaps 1 Peter than
you would from just studying a primer of NT Greek: that is, you'd develop a
sense of what LITERARY Greek is and of a number of constructions that
aren't really taught normally in a NT Greek primer but that still survive
in NT writers who are deliberately writing in a more "educated" style;

(b) you'll be able to do some serious reading in Church Fathers of the
second and later centuries--Clement, Eusebius, Origen, etc. or even Philo
of Alexandria: the Patristic writers mostly write in a revived Attic rather
than in the looser Koine of the GNT;

(c) akin to (a): you'll acquire some sense of the diachronic aspects of the
Greek language as used in the NT era; there's a tendency among NT teachers
to want students to ignore those matters--and of course, it's important to
realize that PONHROS doesn't mean quite the same thing in the GNT as it
means in Aristophanes--but I earnestly believe and have said here
repeatedly that I think it is important for a serious student of the Greek
NT to understand and appreciate that the Greek of this era is a language in
flux employing quite a few alternative modes of expressing comparable
notions, some of those modes being older, some newer, and some only hinted
at in NT usage (e.g. hINA clauses that are substantival as much as any
other noun clauses, alpha conjugation of second-aorist verb stems).

(d) Not all would agree with this, but I personally think that some
familiarity with earlier Greek literature enhances one's understanding of
the NT Greek text; that might be harder to prove, but I think it's
something one experiences as one reads more and more of classical Attic
texts while continuing to focus chiefly on the Greek NT.
-- 

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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