[B-Greek] other relevant languages besides Greek?

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sat Mar 19 19:48:17 EDT 2011


Hi, Ted,

<Which ancient languages are relevant to the study of the original New Testament 
and the 1st & 2nd century church?>

None, in my humble opinion.  Not even Attic or Homeric Greek.  Koine is a sui 
generis thing, best understood on its own terms.  Appeal to other languages, 
even to Aramaic or Hebrew, only confuse the issue and gives people an even 
greater opportunity to read their own views into the text.  (Not that we don't 
do this anyway, but why make it worse?)

Of course, there are a million reasons to learn Hebrew or Homer.  I study both.  
But they have nothing to do with learning Koine or anything about the Early 
Church. 


If you want to learn one other ancient language just for the heck of it, I would 
chose PIE.  You can even learn to speak it here:

http://dnghu.org/


Mark L
Φωσφορος


FWSFOROS MARKOS




________________________________
From: Ted & Robin Shoemaker <shoes6 at juno.com>
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Sat, March 19, 2011 4:47:49 PM
Subject: [B-Greek] other relevant languages besides Greek?

Greetings,

Please forgive me if this question is off-topic.  

Which ancient languages are relevant to the study of the original New Testament 
and the 1st & 2nd century church?

So far, my list of candidates is:
Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Bohairic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Sahidic.

I can see this question being judged as on-topic or off-topic. 
If this question is considered off-topic, please respond off-list.  
But if it's on-topic and on-list, it could be an interesting conversation.

Thank you!

Ted Shoemaker

Success is easy only if you're a weeds farmer.


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