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

Jeffrey T. Requadt jeffreyrequadt_list at hotmail.com
Sat Dec 12 12:38:16 EST 2009


To piggy back off of Carl's 1st question below, " 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?" I would completely agree. What's the point of training people to do that? They already have overloaded schedules and are worn out from the assignments and, I would assume, their MA thesis or project. Are they training to be the shepherds and leaders of a flock, or to do something else? Will this kind of "proficiency" help them in this regard? If so, no one has convinced me yet, and I've been part of a ministry family since I was born--in which my own father helped me learn Greek when I was 14, but only to parse! The goal was to use parsing to produce some kind of literal translation. I will say that doing this for a whole chapter (3 John, the epistle) did force me to think about what the original would have meant to the original audience. But--surprise!--my translation brought me no closer to that than if I had studied an English version in-depth. If we really want these pastors-to-be to be able to rightly divide the word of truth, shouldn’t they be learning to think in Greek, to think like a first-century Jewish or Greek person? Shouldn't they be spending a lot more time learning to read 1st century texts, lots of them? Shouldn't they be learning about different kinds of literature? Shouldn't they be learning everything they possibly could about the first century world? If they were to do that, they would probably have to learn Greek! Maybe also Latin and Hebrew. But not in order to parse everything. To understand and to think.
Jeff 

-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Carl W. Conrad
Sent: Saturday, December 12, 2009 3:00 AM
To: B-Greek
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
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