[B-Greek] Difficulty of reading passages

Elliot Poe Elliot.Poe at gmail.com
Sat Jun 30 21:04:25 EDT 2007


Hello, Jeffrey.

You ask a good question. Others will probably express their points of 
view. If you have access to Daniel Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the 
Basics, he presents a chart on page 30 that might be helpful to you. I 
myself prefer to start with the more difficult texts (like Hebrews and 
Luke-Acts) because they give me a feel for Greek that is more literary. 
Revelation, John, and the Johannine epistles are among the easiest (and 
sometimes most offensive) Greek.

I'm reminded of Plato's Cratylus, where Socrates (in his usual fashion) 
makes the argument that words do not obtain their meanings arbitrarily, 
but rather they obtain their meanings for logical reasons. Socrates 
gives several logical etymologies that are absurd, which basically shows 
his argument is specious. I know that we can sometimes "absorb" grammar, 
but vocabulary seems to me to be quite different. While some Greek 
vocabulary can be surmised from its constituent parts, many words must 
simply be learned. Learning vocabulary takes intentional effort, I 
think, and I prefer not to delay the learning of that vocabulary lest I 
know the grammar of the language fairly well but cannot understand its 
words.

Best of luck to you! I'd love to hear others' opinions.

Yours,
Elliot Poe

Jeffrey T. Requadt wrote:

>I know that a frequent topic of discussion on this list is how best to learn
>Koine Greek. I find myself generally agreeing that the more exposure one has
>to a language (especially using it), the more natural it will become. Thus,
>I would really like to start reading more of it without worrying too much
>about getting everything right, or for the purpose of exegesis, etc., but
>rather just to read it over and over and over and thus to become very
>familiar with it (not unlike the point of the C.S. Lewis passage referred to
>earlier on the list). So I was wondering if those of you out there more
>familiar with the level of sophistication/difficulty of the New Testament
>(and other easily-obtainable texts) could recommend a starting point for
>reading just for the fun of it. I've tried reading James, and can make a
>little headway because I already know it in English, but there is too much
>vocabulary that I'm not familiar with. I've read through 3 John before; that
>seems to be a fairly simple passage as the NT goes. I've heard that 1 John
>is easy to read without too much trouble. My purpose again is to read lots
>of text without trying to figure everything out. I remember learning to read
>French by *actually reading French books* without trying to figure out every
>single word and how it fit into the grammatical or syntactical structure of
>the sentence, or doing discourse analysis, or literary analysis. In other
>words, the purpose was to understand French by reading and speaking French.
>In the same way, when I taught piano, I didn't just teach about how the
>piano works, or the difference between whole steps and half steps, or how
>the diatonic scale works (although you need to know these things at some
>point to truly understand how to play the piano well). I focused more on
>actually playing the piano. I really think that's how our brains learn most
>things. We connect the theory to our own experience. I want to be able to
>read the N.T. (and other early Christian literature) for understanding
>without resorting to lexica all the time, and I don't care so much about
>writing a technical commentary. I want to be able to connect the linguistic
>theories to my own experience so that I can not only understand the "how" of
>the Greek but also the Greek itself. So again, my question is, what texts
>would be good to start out with, and where would I go from there? If anyone
>has a "graded" list of difficulty, that would be helpful too. 
>
> 
>
>Jeffrey T. Requadt
>
>Teacher
>
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