[B-Greek] NT Greek Paedogogy redux
George F Somsel
gfsomsel at yahoo.com
Fri Aug 10 12:56:19 EDT 2007
You really can't approach Greek with a desire to gain proficiency and limit yourself solely to the NT corpus.
At the very least, I would say that it would be necessary to include the Apostolic Fathers and probably the LXX as well. The NT corpus is simply too limited to gain much proficiency. I'm almost tempted to say that if you do that you might want to save the effort and confine yourself to a good translation. You should probably deal with some other secular writers who write in koine as well. You may learn how you choose to deal with various passages if you deal only with the NT, but you may not know why certain passages are the way they are. Once you get beyond these you will begin to run into an Atticising tendency so you will need to learn classical Greek if you wish to read them with any proficiency.
george
gfsomsel
Therefore, O faithful Christian, search for truth, hear truth,
learn truth, love truth, speak the truth, hold the truth,
defend the truth till death.
- Jan Hus
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----- Original Message ----
From: John M. Linebarger <jmlineb at comcast.net>
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2007 9:31:01 AM
Subject: [B-Greek] NT Greek Paedogogy redux
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
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