[B-Greek] Eric Sowell on reading unfamiliar Greek

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 20 14:13:07 EDT 2008


This kind of reminds me of what Machen says
  in his preface:"...the student's memory of the
  English Bible is not an unmixed evil.."  It's funny,
  I always thought that memory of the Bible, in
  any language, was not "evil" at all.
   
  There is a flip side to this drachma. My experience has been that
  while reading some unfamilar Greek is helpful, to master New Testament
  Greek, nothing comes close to being as helpful as re-reading the  
  Greek New Testament.  In the past, I have spent a fair amount of time
  reading non-biblical stuff.  Not long ago, I read all of Hermes, which, while
  pretty easy Greek, took a long time because it is so long.  In retrospect,
   I think the weeks I spent reading that would have been better spent re-reading
   the Greek NT, even though by now I am pretty familar with it.  EVERYTIME I 
  reread a NT book, I KNOW my NT Greek has become MUCH better;   I mean
  you have thousands of NT vocab words to learn, many of which have 
  many meanings.  You are going to have to remember that PROSFERW 
  in the passive with the dative means in Hebrews 12:7 (and only in Hebrews
  12:7 in the NT!)  not "I am brought forward," but "I deal with."  Now,
  evidently, Thucydides uses this verb this way, so you have two choices.  You 
  can read the Harvard Greek reading list (all of Homer, of Sophocles, all of Plato, 
  all the papyri, ect.) and hope that from this you remember that PROSFERW
  in the passive with the dative can mean "I deal with," or YOU CAN JUST
REREAD HEBREWS 12 until you master this.  You have all these elipses
  in 2 Corinthians.  The Greek does not make sense until you figure out that
  something is missing and what it is.  (For example 2 Cor. 8:23, "If [there
  is a question] about Titus...")  So, again, how do you get to the point that
  that when you read this, it does not trip you up?  By reading so much unfamilar
  Greek that elipses no longer bother you? OR BY REREADING 2 CORINTHIANS
  20 TIMES, and by also LOOKING AT ALL THE TRANSLATIONS until you get it.
  Radical familarity with the Greek text, and, yes also the English translations, is
  the GOAL, not a hindrance.  Every second spent reading unfamilar Greek or
  listening or speaking Greek (which also takes a long time; I can silently read and 
  understand a chapter much faster than I can read Greek out loud, not to mention
  trying to formulate sentences in Koine) is a second taken away from re-reading the 
  Greek NT.
   
  I occurs to me that the approaches of Conrad and Buth (whose postings on this
  list I ALWAYS appreciate) are in different ways about learning NT Greek in a not
  very efficient BREATH, whereas I recommend that one go into the DEPTH of the 
  Greek NT.  I think Rabbinical students get pretty familar with the Torah after reading
  it hundreds. maybe thousands of times, but I don't think that they would know it better
  if they stopped reading the Torah and started reading "unfamilar Hebrew."
   
  Again, I think reading unfamilar Greek and engaging the language through the lips and ears has some value, but just not much.  I am at the point where I still read a little LXX
  from time to time, but spend almost all my time re-reading the Greek NT and I think
  that is the best way to do it.  (And of course I won't break the b-Greek protocol by 
  pointing out that for some us reading the Greek NT is like reading the Torah in that
  reading unfamilar Greek cannot compare to it as a religious experience, but I will say, 
  leaving aside, doctrinal convictions, as a purely intellectual conclusion, I believe that
  the Greek NT for whatever reason is largely a sui generis thing and the best help
  in understanding it is to read more of it, and read it more deeply.) 
   
  Mark Lightman 
   
   
  "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> wrote:
  Eric Sowell's blog has a new item about the pitfalls of reading NT 
Greek texts when one is already familiar with English translations. 
He's preaching my own "ad nauseam" pedagogical gospel:

http://www.archaicchristianity.com/Blog/Archives/2008/4/12/OnLearningNewTestamentGreekAndEnglishTextFamiliarity.aspx
= http://tinyurl.com/5b6fn4

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Ret)

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