[B-Greek] Blass-Debrunner-Funk

Stephen Baldwin stbaldwi at hotmail.com
Tue Aug 16 22:18:12 EDT 2005


...Well Ms. Kline, thank you for your slightly discouraging remarks.
We all have to start somewhere, and a classical emphasis is [regrettably] 
not exactly a priority in public education.
Nevertheless, I would like to press a little further into the benefits of 
knowing Attic greek as a backdrop to studying the New Testament. 
Linguistically, the benefits are obvious -- grammar etc.
Since [to the best of my knowledge] very few of the NT writers (and their 
readers/hearers) had a classical education either, and the literary 
abilities of the different NT writers varies so much, I'm wondering whether 
there is much additional benefit? Given the time lapse, the geographical and 
cultural differences, and the great stylistic differences between Attic and 
Koine, for the purposes of understanding the message of the New Testament, 
is it possible to overstate the benefits of knowing Attic?

One is sometimes left wondering whether the average first-century Judaean 
christian would have a ghost of a chance of understanding the NT writings...

Hoping to learn...

Stephen Baldwin
stbaldwi at hotmail.com



>From: Elizabeth Kline <kline-dekooning at earthlink.net>
>To: B-Greek B-Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
>Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Blass-Debrunner-Funk
>Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 12:56:22 -0700
>
>
>On Aug 16, 2005, at 12:47 PM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
> > But i fear that BDF is
> > not going to be of such great value to students of NT Greek who have
> > no foundation in the earlier Classical Attic Greek;
> >
>
>Students of NT Greek who have no foundation in the earlier Greek
>should go get some. Not much hope of understanding the language if
>you read Koine all the time.
>
>
>Elizabeth Kline
>
>
>
>
>---
>B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
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