[B-Greek] Bible Study, Greek or otherwise.
Jerry McDonald
jerry at bellecoc.com
Fri Aug 10 12:45:42 EDT 2007
Message: 2
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 14:31:01 +0000
From: jmlineb at comcast.net (John M. Linebarger)
Subject: [B-Greek] NT Greek Paedogogy redux
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
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I'm following the discussion of NT Greek paedogogy with great interest
but with an increasing sense of frustration. In a theoretical sense I
can understand that learning Attic Greek provides a good foundation for
reading the simpler Koine Greek of the New Testament. I can also
understand the approach that inhales large amounts of text at one sitting,
and attempts to induce meaning from context instead of looking up
everything in a dictionary. After all, that's how many of us learned to
read our first language.
But surely this can be done within the New Testament itself to some
degree, without having to take a 1-2 year detour to learn Attic Greek?
Many of us barely have the time to maintain our Koine Greek, much less
the much richer and more difficult world of Attic Greek. And speaking
from experience, it is hard enough to convince a church Sunday School
class to devote at least an hour a day to learning Koine Greek; if I were
to suggest learning Attic Greek first, I'd have nobody left in my
class. They (and me too) want to get into the New Testament as quickly as
possible, and desire to devote their energies to the study of God's
word.
So within the corpus of the New Testament itself, how would you sculpt
a paedogogy that achieves the goals of Greek fluency? Focus one's
study efforts on Luke-Acts and Hebrews and one's devotional efforts on the
Johannine corpus and Revelation, with the middle area being the
epistles of Paul? Inhale large chunks of the other Synoptic gospels (Mark and
Matthew) on a daily basis to develop and maintain reading proficiency?
You see where I'm going with this -- how does one achieve (or approach)
proficiency within the confines of the NT corpus itself? Any thoughts
from the group?
Thanks! Enjoy!
John M. Linebarger
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Jerry McDonald
John, I realize that Koine Greek is difficult, and I haven't even tried Attic yet. However, I tell my son (who is in school to learn to preach) that Bible study isn't easy. I have been studying Greek for 27 years in school and in my own personal study. I have been preaching for 27 years and I have found that, many times, you cannot just get into the text. Some times you have to make preparation for it. One of the main reasons I think people leave Christianity and embrace atheism is because the Bible requires hard study in order to "rightly divide the word of truth" (2 Tim. 2:15). Just a thought you might want to consider and tell your students.
Respectfully,
Jerry McDonald
jerry at challenge2.org
http://www.challenge2.org
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