[B-Greek] In Defense of Machen, sort of (was William Harper Rainey's Textbook)

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 31 21:18:10 EST 2011


Mark wrote:

< Is it safe to assume that I'm not missing out on much from the newer 
editions?>

Hi, Mark

The revision of Machen isn't really that different from the original.  

Carl wrote

<...but there are far, far better primers than Machen...>

I agree with you, Carl. But more to the point, MARK agrees with you.  He already 
said he is using a text other than Machen, namely Rainey.  He already said that 
he prefers an inductive approach, and that he does not like reading made up, 
boring sentences.  But what happened was, Barry made the very sensible point 
that one might want to supplement an inductive primer with a deductive one, and 
Mark was convinced and asked for recommendations.  I don't know of any NT Greek 
text that is deductive in the way Machen is.  Do you?  You are certainly correct 
that Machen's sentences don't look like real Greek, but that's because his 
approach is to introduce a few words and grammatical principles at a time and 
have the student use them over and over again before going on.   I would not 
want anyone to use only Machen to learn Greek, but I think his approach is 
useful as part of a total learning package.  As you point on, several people on 
this list have found going through his English to Greek exercises a very 
effective way to master the forms.  Funk is great for more detailed grammatical 
verbiage, but Machen makes the express point that he is trying to avoid this 
very thing. 





 Mark L



FWSFOROS MARKOS




________________________________
From: Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
To: Robert Stump <robertstump at gmail.com>
Cc: B-Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Mon, January 31, 2011 2:59:49 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] William Harper Rainey's Textbook


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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