[B-Greek] Blass-Debrunner-Funk
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at ioa.com
Wed Aug 17 07:41:46 EDT 2005
On Aug 16, 2005, at 10:18 PM, Stephen Baldwin wrote:
> 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...
Let's just talk about an average first-century speaker of Greek,
whether Greek is a first or second language. For one thing it should
be understood that he/she would have HEARD the GNT texts as read
aloud (that's what ANAGINWSKW, "read" means) rather than have read
them silently to him/herseslf. This literature, like all literature,
was read aloud to an audience. I think that the comprehension level
of the "average first-century Greek speaker" would have been
commensurate with most NT Biblical texts and would have found
difficult the same passages that modern readers find difficult when
reading the New Testament in a "good idiomatic" translation; that is
to say, parts of the Pauline letters and the letter to the Hebrew
would very likely have been difficult for many listeners, while the
gospels would have been readily understandable. But I indicated a
"good idiomatic translation" -- an "average speaker of English today"
would and DOES have some difficulty in understanding the Elizabethan
or Jacobean English of the KJV (which many a church-goer in the
mountain area where I live -- including my 9-year old grand-nephews)
are told is the only permissible version).
Now, of what value for the student of the GNT is learning Classical
Greek. I'll trot out once again a response to that question that I
first wrote out a decade ago (Thu, 28 Sep 1995 21:21:01 -0500) when
the question was raised by Eric Weiss:
Q: “How crucial is knowing these earlier forms of Greek to
understanding the Greek New Testament?”
Crucial is a loaded word. Can you understand the Greek NT without
knowing any earlier Greek? Certainly, and I'll venture to say that
there are many participants in this list who have never studied
earlier Greek. The real question is: how much better would you
understand the Greek NT if you DID know earlier Greek? and then: how
much earlier Greek would you have to study for it to make a real
difference in how well you understand the Greek NT. I don't know if
this could be measured in quantitative terms, but maybe that's why
I'm very definitely a philologist and very definitely NOT a linguist.
I love words and their histories and nuances--their distinctive
personalities, and the distinctive ways in which the different
crafters of Greek literature have stamped them with unforgettable
overtones by means of the metaphors they've used them in and the
contorted syntactic structures they've wrenched them into. So mine is
a philologist's answer rather than a linguist's: the more of the
Greek language and the ways in which it has been used between the era
of Homer and today you come to know, the better you'll understand the
Greek NT. Again the quantitative question is unavoidable: what's the
critical mass? One year, two years, more? To which I can only answer
that one year of earlier Greek is better than none, two are better
than one, and so on. Of course this is true not only of the Greek
language; the more you know about antiquity the more you'll
understand about the Greek NT. Is it obvious that I'm a philosophical
Platonist?
Q: “What have those of us who have only taken NT Greek missed by not
taking these earlier forms of Greek?”
Chiefly the best years of the Greek language's life. That is an
exaggeration and a grossly unfair statement--but I have never ceased
to admire a gutsy colleague's course description for his class on
'Mycenean Society': "The student will come away from this class with
a taste of what it was like to live in the last great age of Western
Civilization." Let's say, then, SOME of the best years of the Greek
language's life. And it's not just a matter of a richer and more
flexible instrument of expression--something that you could learn (as
I don't really think was intended to be an adequate answer to the
question raised) by having a copy of H. Weir Smyth's _Greek Grammar_.
Rather it's a matter of coming to appreciate how the language has
been wielded by Homer and Aeschylus and Pindar and Sophocles and
Herodotus and Thucydides and Plato and Demosthenes and Theocritus and
others.
If you want this put in a more practical formulation, then I think
you should be aware that if you want to read patristic Greek of the
second and third centuries, you will be reading works that are
consciously and deliberately written in the idiom of classical Attic
Greek, even if with a somewhat different vocabulary. And if you want
to have a sense of how the style of Luke is different from (and,
strictly in terms of stylistic excellence) far superior to that of
Mark, you're going to need to have a standard against which to
measure good style. Where do you go for that? Well, it wouldn't hurt
to read some Philo, who is roughly contemporary with the earlier NT
documents, but I guarantee that Philo will be very difficult if the
only Greek you've had previously is the Koine of Paul and John and
the Synoptic gospels. That means that you probably ought to have read
some Plato--at least the Apology and one or more of the longer
dialogues.
Q: “Should we somewhere down the road take a course in these other
forms of Greek even though our main interest is in reading and
understanding the New Testament, not Homer, et al?”
Yes! Yes! And Yes indeed! Read some Homer (I'm doing it now with a
third-year class of eight, more than half of whom are students at
Concordia Seminary here, and pretty good ones--of course, the
classical curriculum is one of the best things going for Missouri
Synod Lutheran colleges); probe the archaeology of the Greek language
with old genitives in -OIO, -AO, and -EW, old infinitives in -EMEN, -
EMENAI, duals in -W and -OIN and -TON, -THN, -SQON, -SQHN, short-
vowel aorist subjunctives functioning as futures, etc., etc. Along
the way you might just discover that Homer (whoever he may have been
or how many generations of minstrels he may represent) is by no means
so primitive in his view of the human condition as you might have
supposed. Read some Herodotus and you'll find that it won't take very
long to master his Ionic dialect (that it's akin to Koine in some
ways, even), and moreover that he's fun to read--you'll go on reading
him because you can't stop.
Q: “Are there good grammar books on Classical/Attic Greek that would
be easy for someone with 1-2 years of NT Greek to pick up and read
that would fill in the gaps we supposedly missed by not learning
these forms of Greek? “
Other teachers of classical Attic might not agree with me, but I
honestly believe that a person with one or two years of Koine will be
able to move along readily through either of two courses that are
constructed similarly: the Cambridge (also called JACT, "Joint
Association of Classical Teachers"--a British institution) Greek
Course in two volumes entitled _Reading Greek_ and another course
that's pitched at a somewhat lower student level (I think) but still
quite good, the Oxford Greek Course, entitled _Athenaze_ ("To
Athens"). The thesis on which these texts is based is that continuous
discourse -- paragraphs of continued narrative in which constructions
recur again and again and cumulatively build up until one is reading
almost unaltered original Attic texts. If you're willing to read lots
of Xenophon's Anabasis, as late Victorian students both British and
American were doing about the same time they were excelling in Bulwer-
Lytton's Boy Scouts, Crosby and Sheaffer can still be found in second-
hand stores and may even still be in print--but I and most readers
nowadays don't find the Anabasis the most exciting subject matter one
could cut one's Greek teeth on. A still simpler work is that of
Melluish and Kinchin-Smith in the [British University?] "Teach
Yourself" series, _Teach Yourself Ancient Greek_ (but be careful,
there's also a _Teach Yourself Greek_ which deals with Modern Greek--
still, eventually you'll want that too!). And there are other good
books too. These are just a few that seem to me worth mentioning.
Q: “What "gaps" do we have (i.e., what areas of understanding are we
ignorant of) because all we have learned is NT Greek?”
When Moses asked how he could be sure that the mission on which he
was being sent was really a divine mandate, he was told that, after
he had led the children of Israel out of Egypt and crossed the Red
Sea, he would worship YHWH "at this mountain." That is, he wouldn't
know for sure until he had completed the task with which he had been
entrusted. However irrelevant that may seem, I think there's a
meaningful analogy in the answer to your question: you won't know
what you're ignorant of until after you've learned it. I can mention
a few things, but they are only illustrations:(1) how did the
optative function before it became Paul's way of saying (MH GENOITO),
"Hell, No!"? (2) why are there so many pesky types of hINA-
subjunctive clauses, and how are they genetically related to each
other? (3) why are second-aorists sometimes conjugated with O/E-
endings and sometimes with A-endings? (4) why can't articular
infinitives fall into neat, easily-comprehensible categories? (5) why
can't I read the Letter to the Hebrews even though I know Machen
backwards and forwards? (6) how is it that Paul can interpret the
sentence, hO DE DIKAIOS EK PISTEWS ZHSETAI to mean something that
could only legitimately mean what he wants it to mean if it were
written, hO DE EK PISTEWS DIKAIOS ZHSETAI? i.e. why doesn't the Greek
of OT quotations and much of NT narrative follow the rules of Greek
syntax that you have learned?
But the best thing of all: you'll start reading classical Greek with
an ulterior motive of understanding the Greek NT -- that's the only
thing you really want to understand, after all -- and you'll end up
being hooked on a literature and a culture that can stand up all by
itself and sing its bewitching siren song to you. Be careful! In the
course of some thirty + years of teaching Concordia Seminary students
who just wanted to continue with classical Greek while taking their
B.D., I've seen a few get so hooked on it that they've not pursued a
ministerial career after all. One of those was the late John Hollar
of Fortress Press, who did a Ph.D. dissertation with me; another who
got a Ph.D. in Greek at Washington U. not long before I got there is
Edgar Krentz, who can speak for himself to this list. I can say all
this because I myself was an undergraduate at Tulane once with every
intention of going into the ministry, but before I got that far I was
hooked on Classical Greek.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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