[B-Greek] William Harper Rainey's Textbook

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Jan 31 16:59:49 EST 2011


On Jan 31, 2011, at 4:03 PM, Robert Stump wrote:

> Mark-
> 
> I did a little searching around after what you wrote about Machen's
> work, and then after getting a little background on the man himself.
> It took a bit of searching but I found a website with a PDF scan of
> the original 1923 edition:
> 
> (http://www.churchlivinglord.com/Machen_NTGreek.html)
> 
> Is it safe to assume that I'm not missing out on much from the newer editions?

There are different opinions about Machen's textbook. I taught from it once
and rued doing so on grounds of inadequate grammatical explanation and 
Greek to English and English to Greek sentences clearly more represeentative
of English idiom than of any ancient Greek.  My impression is that the later
revisions were considerable improvements over earlier editions; but there
are far, far better primers than Machen, several of which have been mentioned
in earlier replies to your question. If it's primarily Biblical Greek that you
want to learn, you ought to make some use of the long-out-of-print work
that was scanned and reformulated by B-Greekers, Robert Funk's 
_Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek_. It is accessible
at: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/project/funk-grammar/pre-alpha/
If I were still teaching and teaching a course in Biblical Greek, this is
what I would use.

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






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