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

John Wilking jcwilking at yahoo.com
Sat Dec 19 14:21:12 EST 2009



--- On Sun, 12/13/09, Carl W. Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> wrote:

From: Carl W. Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] "Why do we make pastors translate?"
To: wmhboyd at aol.com
Cc: B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Sunday, December 13, 2009, 5:20 AM



 
On Saturday, December 12, 2009, at 06:18PM, <wmhboyd at aol.com> wrote:
>
>Perhaps a "Gold Standard" for pastors should be to know enough Greek to protect themselves from professors.
>
> : )
>
>William (The Barbarian) Boyd
>Greensboro, NC

There's a great deal to be said for this warning, and I shall be the first to say or second it. Having sat through and even
taken minutes for University Faculty meetings, I would be the last to defend any proposition that any special wisdom
belongs to academic "scholars."

What disturbs me most about the "least-common-denominator" standard of competence in Greek for those whose
vocation is interpretation of the Biblical text for others is that these pastors and laymen are at the mercy of all those
who claim to know "better" -- those who write commentaries, those who offer their opinions freely on lists like B-Greek.
The "gold standard" for competence in Greek ought, I think, to be ability and confidence to make up one's own mind
about issues of interpretation.


JW  I don't understand the value of making up one's own mind, at least as a gold standard,  


 That won't yield uniformity of opinion, and it may just as well bring judgments that others
will deem highly questionable, but I do think that readers of the Greek text need to be able to resolve the issues to 
their own satisfaction and be able to use some discrimination in dealing with diversity of alternative views about texts
under consideration.


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