[B-Greek] Intermediate to Advanced Greek
Ken Penner
kpenner at stfx.ca
Tue May 18 14:56:03 EDT 2010
My "Advanced Greek Readings" course didn't use any grammars either. I remember reading Hebrews, Ignatius, additions to Esther, 2 Maccabees, Josephus, and Artapanus (from Eusebius). I found Mounce's Morphology of Biblical Greek most helpful.
In terms of secondary literature for "Advanced" Greek, I'm not sure what to say if you're going to exclude classical Greek. For my degree in Biblical Languages (Greek Focus), I had to read Porter, MacKay, Fanning, and Robertson on verbal aspect. But that's specialized. If I was teaching an advanced NT Greek course in which we had to work through a textbook, I'd consider using Steve Runge's work on Greek discourse.
I think Greek composition would qualify as "advanced". The closest I came to this was translating the book of Ruth from Hebrew to Greek, comparing my results with the LXX. Classical Greek programs used to have more of this.
I personally think Robertson was ahead of his time, but really, if one wants to be an advanced student of NT Greek, one needs some familiarity with classical Greek. That may include BDF, and certainly includes Smyth.
Ken M. Penner, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Religious Studies
St. Francis Xavier University, Canada
kpenner at stfx.ca
On 2010-05-18, at 3:25 PM, Kenneth Litwak wrote:
> I took three years of NT Greek in college. The first year was built on working through Machen, the second on translating 1 John, James, and parts of 1 Corinthians and Acts, while also reading assigned portions of Dana and Mante, and the third year was all about reading Hebrews, with no actual grammar reading, except on our own, and I consulted tings like BDF more than once, though I often felt at a loss, because BDF assumes that one is an expert in classical Greek. Since then I've read parts of Wallace's GGBB, and as needed checked BDF and Robertson for various things, but it is not clear to me from all of this, what is "intermediate" and what is "advanced" topic-wise. I've read Porter's book on Idioms of NT Greek. I've also read extensively in the LXX and some classical Greek (specifically Hellenistic historiographers), but any grammar study was on my own in an ad hoc way. Is that advanced? If one doesn't know classical Greek, what represents an
> advanced grammar that a NT Greek student ought to consult? My impression is that such an item does not exist that has been published since Robertson's grammar and it's my impression that Robertson's major fault is that it is not recent (I have not seen a litany of areas he got wrong based on more recent knowledge). So, what qualifies as intermediate and what qualifies as advanced Greek? What grammar/other books would one use to teach/study NT Greek at the advanced level? Thanks.
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> Ken
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