[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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