[B-Greek] Iterative, Customary, Gnomic, Conative, etc.

Steve Westfall steve.westfall at comcast.net
Fri Apr 6 00:37:23 EDT 2007


I apologize for the delay in posting this response.  I'm a bit behind in
reading B-Greek.

I'm curious about the implications of some statements in Randall Buth's
posting on 29 March 2007 (excerpted below).

I think it's fair to say that in the entire history of the interpretation of
the New Testament, apart from Greece itself and the Greek-speaking part of
the Mediterranean world of antiquity, only a minuscule percentage of
commentators, biblical scholars, theologians, philologists, lexicographers,
etc. (not to mention pastors who have studied Greek) have had the ability to
carry on conversations in Koine Greek at normal conversational speeds.  

If it's true that one can't even "start to trust the person's exegesis"
until that person has reached that type of fluency with the spoken language,
does this mean that almost the entire body of exegetical reflection on the
New Testament generated by this part of the Christian church and/or the
scholarly community is without value to the person who wants to understand
the Greek New Testament?

Thank you.

Steve Westfall

-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of
randallbuth at gmail.com
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 2:51 PM
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [B-Greek] Iterative, Customary, Gnomic, Conative, etc.

. . . An internalization of a language means being able to hold a
"sumposion" in the language, being able to discuss >>topics and to
understand the language automatically enough to be able follow a
conversation or speech in the language. And that is part of the basic skill
set that you want exegetes to have. . .

. . . only when one has the basic skills to follow it on the surface at
normal speeds would you start to trust the person's exegesis and basic
language skills. . .
 
Randall Buth





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