[B-Greek] Intermediate to Advanced Greek

Kenneth Litwak javajedi2 at yahoo.com
Tue May 18 16:16:13 EDT 2010


Ken,

  I'm not trying to "exclude" classical Greek.  Rather, I'm thinking in terms of people like me who have had NT Greek study but have not taken any courses in classical Greek.  So if you'd recommend reading through Smyth (which I've only consulted a bit) for advanced study, that's fine.

Ken

--- On Tue, 5/18/10, Ken Penner <kpenner at stfx.ca> wrote:

> From: Ken Penner <kpenner at stfx.ca>
> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Intermediate to Advanced Greek
> To: "Kenneth Litwak" <javajedi2 at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Date: Tuesday, May 18, 2010, 11:56 AM
> 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.
> > 
> > Ken  
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > ---
> > B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
> > B-Greek mailing list
> > B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
> 
> 


      



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