[B-Greek] The Elephant on the List

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 18 06:50:30 EST 2010


There is an elephant on the B-Greek List that no one wants to
talk about.  Jeffrey Requadt first raised the specter of the
elephant back in November when he asked:
 
<what is the value of learning Greek…for the different
purposes of studying and preaching?>
 
And then Andrew Suttles got a little closer to the
elephant when he wrote:
 <Greek…in the pulpit usually serves one of two purposes: 1) To create a perception of authority on behalf of the speaker2) To make a text say other than it says>
 
I want to come out and identify the elephant.  Learning Greek will
not help you to understand any better the underlying meaning of the
New Testament.  That’s an extreme statement.  I don’t exactly mean
it.  I’m overstating the case to make a point.  Bill Mounce (p. 4.) says:
“The only people I have heard say that Greek is not important are 
those who do not themselves know Greek.”  True.  But what if they
have a point?  You know the old joke:  “The woman I love does not even
know that I exist.  And I’m beginning to think she has a point.”  I am
trying very hard in this post not to sound negative or critical.  In general,
I hate critics.  But I’m beginning to think that the critics of learning
Greek have a point. I’m beginning to see this elephant.
 
People who know Greek like to quote the Italians:  "Traduttore, traditore”
To translate is to betray."  This is always true.
Except when it is not.  It's true for Homer but not for 
the Greek NT.  It's funny, almost as much artistic talent has
gone into translating Homer as has gone into the Greek NT.
Yet all the translations of Homer are unreadable because they
fail to get at his art.  They get at his meaning just fine.  There is no
INFORMATION in the Greek of Homer that three or four translations,
compared side by side, do not get at.  But there is value in learning
Homeric Greek because he is the greatest artist in human history.
 
But this is not an issue in the Greek NT.  A few times
Paul turns a nice Greek phrase, but the Greek of the New Testament
is not great literature.  It does not aspire to be.  It holds its treasure in 
27 clay jars.  The Gospel of John, for example, contains absolutely no
art.  It makes no attempt to use the beauty of the Greek
 language for any literary effect.  It's all about conveying
INFORMATION and it does this in a straight-forward, wonderfully
simple way.  The fact is, it is very easy to translate the Greek
New Testament into an English text which conveys 99% of the meaning
of the Greek NT.  This is why it has been done so many times so well.  I've said
this before on list; again I say to you:  The English Translations,
taken as a whole, are always MORE clear than the Greek; they
always convey MORE information about the underlying Greek text
than the Greek text itself does.  To translate, in this case, (maybe only 
in this case?) is not to betray at all but is to rescue, to rescue from the 
maddening ambiguity of the Greek. Jeff Requadt did not win a B-Greek Year 
End Award because most of his best stuff was said off-list.
Yet he had the best post last year with his bit about Greek Urban Legends.
The biggest Urban legend of all is when the preacher gets up and says:
“All the translations get this wrong.  What the Greek really says is…”
The truth is exactly opposite; all the translations get it right.
 What the Greek really
says is always impossible to determine or agree upon.
 And the Versions get at the matter with better art.
 The dirty little secret of Seminary Greek is that
not only the KJV, but even something
 like the NIV or the Message is a far greater
piece of literature than anything in the Greek NT. The elephant 
on the list is this:  Because the English translations are more 
clear than the Greek, and because the English translations
are better literature than the 
the Greek, there really is no reason to learn New Testament Greek.
 (unless you are yourself a translator.)
 
Let me tell you about this elephant.  I’ve read every post ever made
on B-Greek.  I’ve learned tons of stuff about the Greek language and I have
loved every minute of it.  But I don’t think that I have ever learned anything about
the fundamental meaning underlying the Greek NT that I did not already know
about in the English.  This sounds extreme. I don’t mean to be negative
or critical. God is love, and I hate critics.  But go back and read some posts.
With most of our discussions, it’s pretty clear BASICALLY what the text means.
We usually bring in the Greek to try to get at marginal meaning, to pin down
EXACTLY what the Greek says. We are never able to do this. And when it is
unclear what the text really means, is it ever the Greek that decides for each of
us what the text says? Can it?  Should it?  Does it?  I’ve come to believe that any
meaningful discussion about the NT should
be phrased in terms of the English, or the French, or the Dutch, or the Modern
Greek.  When we try to discuss what Paul means in 2 Cor 3:15 by bringing the Ancient
Greek into it, all we do is open up a bottomless pit of grammatical and linguistic
gobbledegook.  And I say “gobbledegook” with all due respect.  Instead of coming out and
saying: “The Holy Spirit and years of living with other Christians has taught me that what
Paul really means here is this…”  we use terms like quasi partitive genitive and
semantically fronted topicality. We quote Smyth, and we
 never agree on anything.  We’ve learned
much about the Greek but nothing about the text the Greek is supposed to help us
understand. The elephant on the list is that the better a Christian knows Greek, the less use, he,
as a Christian, has for it.  The elephant on the list is that if a scholar really wants to help me
better understand the New Testament, let her stick to the English.
 
Does this mean that what we do on B-Greek is a waste of time?  No, I never said anything like
that.  Did anyone hear me say anything like that?  And besides, you say “waste of time” like it
was a bad thing. For me, Greek has always been more fun than useful.
 Life is always more about the journey than the destination, more about 
the process than the goal.  I never really learn anything about the Bible on B-Greek,
 but, for some odd reason that I cannot really explain, I’d rather learn about nothing
here than about something anywhere else.  There it is. 
 
“I really like thee, Dr. Fell.  
The reason why I cannot tell.”
 
The reason why I like B-Greek I can tell.  Carl Conrad recently asked what B-Greek 
is about.  I suggested it was about nothing.  Not quite true.
Do you remember the last line in that
Charlton Heston movie about cannibalism?  
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sp-VFBbjpE
 
“It’s people! Soylent Green is people!”
 
 B-Greek is about neither the Bible nor Greek.  It is about people.
 Fantastic people who give you, not
information about the Gospel, but give you, with every post,
a bit of themselves  Their glorious,
flawed, created-in-His-image selves. 
 
Again, I’ve tried very hard in this post not to sound negative
or critical.  I hate critics. I think the reason no one talks about
the elephant is that to do so somehow violates the rule of love.
 
So, I suggest that we go back to ignoring the elephant and
 trying to figure out what kind of genitive that is.
Remember, “denial” is a POTAMOS in Egypt.

Mark L
Φωσφορος

FWSFOROS MARKOS


      


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