[B-Greek] Fwd: "Why do we make pastors translate?"

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Dec 12 12:12:15 EST 2009


I really think this was intended for the whole list; my apologies to Aaron Marshall if that is not the case. CWC

Begin forwarded message:
> From: Aaron Marshall <greekmeister1 at hotmail.com>
> Date: December 12, 2009 12:06:30 PM EST
> To: cwconrad2 at mac.com
> Subject: RE: [B-Greek] "Why do we make pastors translate?"
> 
> > (1) If "the gold standard for seminary Greek is being able to parse," then is there really any value in a pastor-to-be's learning Greek in a seminary at all?
>  
> No.  Although that was not really the "gold standard" at the seminary I attended.  I only took one year of grad school but I had several grad level Greek courses because that was my undergrad minor.  My first year we had to parse the ENTIRE book of 1 John.  How do you parse a conjunction??????  By my 4th semester we were already starting to get away from the "parse" mentality of Greek. By 3rd and 4th years we were delving into how to transfer our theoretical Greek knowledge into practical use in Bible teaching.  If a seminary only requires a few years of Greek then there is no point at all of learning it.  By the time you get to the 4th year you're just starting to be able to rapid read with proficiency, which is where I think you really start to "get" Greek.  Ultimately, though, a seminary cannot produce a Greek scholar any more than it can produce a real "pastor". If a Bible teacher or pastor intends on using his/her Greek training in ministry then they had better use that training as a good boost up to the next level, which is many years of self-study.  I think this is where a lot of people miss the boat on grad-level education.  The intention of seminary or post-grad training is not to teach the students everything they need to know; rather, it is to teach them how to teach themselves (or should be).  Hence, the ultimate degree (Ph.D.) is largely self-education guided by a mentor and a committee.  Any self-respecting seminary should make it clear to its students that after they finish their Greek requirements at that school, they still have a very minimal knowledge of the language and that to use it responsibly in their ministry (which will help them immensely, I think), they will have to take it to the next level on their own.  So in response to Dr. Conrad's question of what should a Greek student expect to get out of his/her Greek education I would say this:  A crash-course in the basics of Greek, an introduction to the tools (i.e. books, software, internet resources) that can help them take their Greek to a responsible level, and most importantly a clear understanding that when they graduate they will not be competent Greek scholars and until they are they should probably not say all that much about it from the podium. :)
>  
> Aaron Marshall
> > Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:00:20 -0500
> > From: cwconrad2 at mac.com
> > To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> > Subject: [B-Greek] "Why do we make pastors translate?"
> > 
> > That's the question Rich Rhodes asks in a blog entry in the Better Bibles Blog this morning:
> > 
> > http://betterbibles.com/2009/12/12/why-do-we-make-pastors-translate/
> > 
> > The point he intends to make (I think) is that pastors ought not to have to do exegesis which the translator ought to have done for him or her; the pastor ought not to have to consult multiple translations of a Biblical text in the effort to understand what the original text "really means." 
> > 
> > " ... the kind of translations that are out there hang pastors like Paul out to dry. They often know that there’s a problem, but they do they don’t have the tools to deal with it. That’s why they consult different translations, believing that somehow the “real” meaning will emerge as some kind of compromise among them."
> > 
> > But here's the comment that grabbed me:
> > 
> > "Sure pastors go to seminary and learn some Greek, but most walk away from seminary barely beyond being able to recognize enough inflected forms of words to be able to find them in dictionaries. (But they all seem to remember what their Greek professor said about the translation of aorists.) Furthermore, the gold standard for seminary Greek is being able to parse. The seminarian who can tell you that πληρωθῇ is an aorist passive subjunctive in the 3 sg. gets an A. But nobody gets points for observing that its use in Matt 1:22 is metaphorical in Greek but has to be translated literally as ‘was fulfilled’ in English, which is actually much more important in the larger scheme of things."
> > 
> > To my mind this raises two questions:
> > (1) If "the gold standard for seminary Greek is being able to parse," then is there really any value in a pastor-to-be's learning Greek in a seminary at all?
> > (2) Can any (publishable) "translation" adequately convey the fruits of a full-scale exegesis of any complex Biblical Greek passage?
> > 
> > I should add that I do not consider B-Greek an appropriate forum to discuss the second question, but it involves, it seems to me, the question that Eddie Mishoe raises again and again in this forum, although not, perhaps, in quite this formulation: "Is the pastor always at the mercy(???) of "scholarly" interpreters of the Biblical Greek text in her/his effort to understand what the Greek text is saying?"
> > 
> > In the last analysis, it seems to me, the question is really: What SHOULD a pastor-to-be expect to get out of instruction in Biblical Greek? What constitutes "minimal" competence in Biblical Greek? And finally, I guess, I should note that I am horrified by the thought of definining a "least common denominator" of competence in Biblical Greek.
> > 
> > Carl W. Conrad
> > ---
> > B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
> > B-Greek mailing list
> > B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek





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