Velma called me this morning to let me know that Carl Conrad died yesterday (February 20, 2025). He was 90 years old. They had been married 65 years. During Hurricane Helena, Carl wound up in the hospital, then in nursing homes, and the last year has been a hard one as his health declined. Yesterday, he was unable to get up, and then he died.
Carl was an amazing teacher who really encouraged people to learn or go deeper with Greek, and he put endless time into this forum for many years. As his eyesight faded, it became harder for him to use the Internet, and he could no longer post on B-Greek.
At Carl's request, there will be no memorial service. I told Velma I would start a thread on B-Greek for people to post their tributes and memories of Carl Conrad. Please post them in this thread, which I will share with her and their family. When an obituary becomes public, I will also share that here.
Tributes to Carl Conrad
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Tributes to Carl Conrad
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Re: Tributes to Carl Conrad
That's very sad news, Jonathan. Thank you for letting us know.
I first engaged with you, Carl, and many others through this forum about 30 years ago now. Carl was always very generous with his knowledge and also in his interactions overall with our Greek enthusiast community. I can't think of anyone who would not have a kind word of thanks for him. Please pass along my condolences to Velma and thanks for all Carl did for this community.
Paul O'Rear
SIL Global
I first engaged with you, Carl, and many others through this forum about 30 years ago now. Carl was always very generous with his knowledge and also in his interactions overall with our Greek enthusiast community. I can't think of anyone who would not have a kind word of thanks for him. Please pass along my condolences to Velma and thanks for all Carl did for this community.
Paul O'Rear
SIL Global
Paul O'Rear
Re: Tributes to Carl Conrad
Carl Conrad was a wonderful person. I call him Carl because he insisted on it. It exemplified his humble spirit. He valued people and evaluated ideas, in that order. He loved Velma and spoke highly of her always.
I posted regularly on the forum 15 or so years ago, and Carl would patiently answer any Greek questions that I, or anyone else, had. That is how our paths first crossed. Over time, we began to correspond regularly through email about pretty much everything: food, sports, politics, religion, aging, family, life. Nothing seemed to be off-limits, and nothing caused us to become angry or even frustrated with each other as far as I am aware. I learned so much from him, and I’m sure many of you know exactly what I mean. Carl was my friend, and I feel blessed to have known him.
I posted regularly on the forum 15 or so years ago, and Carl would patiently answer any Greek questions that I, or anyone else, had. That is how our paths first crossed. Over time, we began to correspond regularly through email about pretty much everything: food, sports, politics, religion, aging, family, life. Nothing seemed to be off-limits, and nothing caused us to become angry or even frustrated with each other as far as I am aware. I learned so much from him, and I’m sure many of you know exactly what I mean. Carl was my friend, and I feel blessed to have known him.
Ἀσπάζομαι μὲν καὶ φιλῶ, πείσομαι δὲ μᾶλλον τῷ θεῷ ἢ ὑμῖν.-Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους 29δ
Re: Tributes to Carl Conrad
Thank you, Jonathan, for passing along this news. Carl was a mighty man of old of the B-Greek mailing list, back when it was strictly a mailing list, and we all learned much from him — many of us about Greek, but all of us about how to conduct ourselves with grace and patience in a mixed group of international scholars, intermediate and beginning students, autodidact experts, axe-grinding non-experts, and wayfaring strangers.
I will remember him particularly in conjunction with his advocacy of positions on verbal aspect, deponency, the aorist passive, and linguistics in general at a time when these were not common currency in the biblical marketplace of ideas. He was kind and helpful to me as I was growing up into a Greek teacher, and I know that Jonathan and some of our old-school participants will miss him — have missed his participation — and will long give thanks for his contributions. Vale, Carole Conrade!
I will remember him particularly in conjunction with his advocacy of positions on verbal aspect, deponency, the aorist passive, and linguistics in general at a time when these were not common currency in the biblical marketplace of ideas. He was kind and helpful to me as I was growing up into a Greek teacher, and I know that Jonathan and some of our old-school participants will miss him — have missed his participation — and will long give thanks for his contributions. Vale, Carole Conrade!
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Re: Tributes to Carl Conrad
I haven't posted much on B-Greek for many years, but hearing of Carl's death and the tribute discussion here prompts me to come back and express my appreciation for Carl's service to the Greek-student community over many years. The unflagging persistence with which he responded to nearly every imaginable question on B-Greek is a tribute to his dedication as a teacher. Those who did not know the forum during its heydey probably can't imagine the workload that his fully engaged participation entailed. And if you knew Carl, you know that his replies were not terse: he regularly expanded the discussion into realms that the questioner had not even been aware of but that were important for adequate perspective to understand the fullest possible answer that Carl wanted to provide. The hours required for such thoughtful interaction with such a large number of discussions must have mounted well beyond 10,000--likely double that--over the years. All free of charge, as a public service, out of his love for the language and its students.
While I did not get to know him personally as well as some others here, I did have a fair amount of offline contact with him over the years, including the privilege of spending the better part of a day together back in the mid '90s. Carl handled everything with grace and cheerfulness. Not only the most annoying of the B-Greekers (myself undoubtedly being somewhere on that end of the spectrum), but the challenges of his own aging and decline. I talked with him by phone at least twice after his and Velma's ordeal with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene (which hit their area near Burnsville, NC very hard but largely spared their own property--Velma's family homestead, where she was born). His son had told me something of his sufferings, and I expected him to sound frail and worn. But both times, his very "Hello, Randy!" was so cheerful and energetic that I'd have been delighted to call him just to hear that greeting! He seemed a bit slower, but his Greek knowledgede seemed well intact, and we had good conversations, both on personal topics and on academic questions I wanted to consult him on.
I was thankful to hear that his passing was apparently fairly easy for him. After he had so patiently eased so many past whatever Greek questions they were wrestling with over his lifetime (and undoubtedly doing the same in many other areas of life), it would have seemed incongruous for him to have faced a final ordeal of such trauma that nobody would be able to ease him through. So I praise the Lord for this final earthly mercy.
Carl was truly one-of-a-kind in the combination of gifts, attainments, and generous disposition that he displayed. So he will never be fully replaced, and he will be deeply missed. And not by only a few!
Randy Leedy
www.NTGreekGuy.com
While I did not get to know him personally as well as some others here, I did have a fair amount of offline contact with him over the years, including the privilege of spending the better part of a day together back in the mid '90s. Carl handled everything with grace and cheerfulness. Not only the most annoying of the B-Greekers (myself undoubtedly being somewhere on that end of the spectrum), but the challenges of his own aging and decline. I talked with him by phone at least twice after his and Velma's ordeal with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene (which hit their area near Burnsville, NC very hard but largely spared their own property--Velma's family homestead, where she was born). His son had told me something of his sufferings, and I expected him to sound frail and worn. But both times, his very "Hello, Randy!" was so cheerful and energetic that I'd have been delighted to call him just to hear that greeting! He seemed a bit slower, but his Greek knowledgede seemed well intact, and we had good conversations, both on personal topics and on academic questions I wanted to consult him on.
I was thankful to hear that his passing was apparently fairly easy for him. After he had so patiently eased so many past whatever Greek questions they were wrestling with over his lifetime (and undoubtedly doing the same in many other areas of life), it would have seemed incongruous for him to have faced a final ordeal of such trauma that nobody would be able to ease him through. So I praise the Lord for this final earthly mercy.
Carl was truly one-of-a-kind in the combination of gifts, attainments, and generous disposition that he displayed. So he will never be fully replaced, and he will be deeply missed. And not by only a few!
Randy Leedy
www.NTGreekGuy.com
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Re: Tributes to Carl Conrad
I always found Carl to be a very knowledgeable and caring teacher. We didn't correspond a lot, but when Con Campbell's book on aspect first came out, Carl mentioned that he was writing a review. I offered to host it on my blog. He accepted the offer (https://anebooks.blogspot.com/2008/11/r ... erbal.html) and it become one of my most popular posts that year.
I've missed his contributions the last few years. He has been missed. May he rest in peace and rise in glory!
I've missed his contributions the last few years. He has been missed. May he rest in peace and rise in glory!
Proofreading and copyediting of ancient Near Eastern and biblical studies monographs
Re: Tributes to Carl Conrad
I first crossed paths with Carl on B-Greek in 2006 shortly after beginning work at Logos. I had never come across the depth of hard-won knowledge he possessed so practically applied to a text. It was both scary and gratifying to see him comment on my blog as I tested out explanations I hoped to write up in a monograph. Carl's comments there and on the list made it apparent that he was reluctant to accept the claims made in the name of linguistics unless it helped him better understand the grammar and patterns he had internalized from a lifetime of wide reading in the Greek corpus. If a new theory offered a more complicated, jargon-filled rehashing of what he felt was straightforward grammar, he let you know it. His insights regularly filled in gaps, highlighted broader patterns, or shattered ill-formed ideas (including mine), always in the name of deepening our understanding of and appreciation for ancient Greek.
I came to rely on his instincts as an early sanity check or corrective for the discourse features I sought to describe. He was one of the loudest voices in my head when I wrote. What would Carl think of this description? Would he think it was more gobbledegook? Was the jargon necessary or a barrier? Was it just making the simple complex? Were the descriptions too influenced by the limited corpus of the NT or would they apply more broadly?
Based on these interactions, in late 2008, I got up the nerve to ask him to comment on an early draft of my discourse grammar. He agreed. I sent him the text and waited with a mixture of dread and impatience, not unlike awaiting exam results from a curmudgeonly professor. Several weeks later, I received a 20-page Word doc. Single-spaced with only 1/2" margins.
Some of it was musings:
His persistence, curiosity, attention to detail, patience, respect for those with whom he disagreed, incredible memory, and an insatiable thirst to learn indelibly shaped my understanding of what it means to be a scholar. He is already deeply missed.
I came to rely on his instincts as an early sanity check or corrective for the discourse features I sought to describe. He was one of the loudest voices in my head when I wrote. What would Carl think of this description? Would he think it was more gobbledegook? Was the jargon necessary or a barrier? Was it just making the simple complex? Were the descriptions too influenced by the limited corpus of the NT or would they apply more broadly?
Based on these interactions, in late 2008, I got up the nerve to ask him to comment on an early draft of my discourse grammar. He agreed. I sent him the text and waited with a mixture of dread and impatience, not unlike awaiting exam results from a curmudgeonly professor. Several weeks later, I received a 20-page Word doc. Single-spaced with only 1/2" margins.
Some of it was musings:
Other of it was agreement:It occurred to me that Latin narrative uses inquit in the middle of directly cited discourse (not indirect discourse): Haec mihi numquam occurissent, inquit, nisi stultus fuissem. I don’t know if that’s relevant; Probably not.
Again, this goes to the core of what’s wrong about most current ancient Greek pedagogy and what needs to be done. I wonder to what extent what needs to be done can be done without the student becoming involved in formulating “well-formed formulations” – speaking or writing Greek...
Comment: it seems to me pretty obvious that both Mt and Lk have taken pains to reformulate Marcan narrative (which raises different questions about Mark’s Greek and about the schooling that Mt and Lk probably had).
This is something that the author of Eph 1 didn’t seem to understand very well, in my opinion. I remember reading – and having it called to my attention by one of the finest Latin professors I ever had – that Cicero (perhaps De Oratore) once made the assertion that the proper length for a Latin rhetorical period was about the length of four lines of dactylic hexameter verse. This professor was making this point with reference to the periodization of sentences across three or four lines of verse in Vergil’s verse. Of course the assumption with respect both to verse and prose is that we’re talking about the sequence of what is heard, not what is silently read.
Other of it was respectful but blunt disagreement, like him rejecting my chapter on the historical present!AMEN. Unfortunately this gets to the core of what is wrong with all too much of ancient Greek pedagogy: the preoccupation with describing Greek usage in terms of English grammar or how a phrase is best converted to idiomatic English expression.
HP with τότε: Yes, I think that makes pretty good sense.
He was correct on that last point, and his words haunted me for the next few weeks as I threw out the chapter and started over again from scratch by rereading the secondary literature in light of his comments. His voice was louder now, of course. I don't have access to the email account any longer, but a couple months later I sent him the completely rewritten chapter on the HP along with the other revisions. A few weeks after that, I received a kind of subdued acceptance comparable to that given by Farmer Hogget to Babe at the end of the movie; "that'll do." This version could account for the patterns he'd internalized.This is clearly a very important principle for your entire argument, but it strikes me as at least partly questionable.
I may be wrong but this argument strikes me as a bit circular; How are the paragraph boundaries decided by the editor? Does the HP play a role in that?
I find this section harder to make sense of. The final ¶ of 6.3 is not clear to me. Maybe I need to work back through this whole section again. Am I wrong in thinking that you yourself are not really satisfied with any current understanding of the Historical Present?
His persistence, curiosity, attention to detail, patience, respect for those with whom he disagreed, incredible memory, and an insatiable thirst to learn indelibly shaped my understanding of what it means to be a scholar. He is already deeply missed.
Steve Runge
Re: Tributes to Carl Conrad
What Steve said. I know my colleagues all well enough; I can estimate what they might say, how they’re likely to respond to an argument. I never dared assume I could anticipate what Carl would make of my ideas, not because he was arbitrary or capricious, but because his judgement was so much more richly funded with knowledge of the texts and with the experience of worked through them and taught them so fully and carefully.
I'm surrounded by great classicists here, all of them erudite and judicious. And I still think of Carl as my Greek-analytical conscience.
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Re: Tributes to Carl Conrad
I first stumbled on B-Greek in 1992, when it was a mailing list. At the time, I was living in Berlin, and I realized that the New Testament was the only book I read every day, but I could not read it in the original language. So I got my hands on the CCAT morphology and a couple of grammars and tried to start using it for my devotions.
When I discovered this list and started asking questions, most of the participants were experts who discussed things at a level well above my head. But Carl welcomed me graciously, answered my questions, suggested better ways to go about studying the language, and even putting me in contact with other people who could help. I never felt like he was talking down to me. He was always the consummate teacher, taking the time to understand how I was thinking about something before suggesting other ways that might be more helpful. For me, that was at least as important as his vast knowledge and deep intuitive grasp of the Greek language. Back then, there were very few useful resources for beginning Greek students who were not enrolled in classes.
Over the years, I picked up the mailing list when David Marotta decided he no longer wanted to run it, and Carl and I later chose to convert the list to phpBB. But for decades, Carl was the heart of this list and the intellectual center. Without Carl's help, I could never do the work I am doing now, and as I look around at the people I work with, quite a few of them also see Carl as one of their most influential mentors.
Eventually, Carl had to step down from his work on B-Greek because his eyesight was fading. I was able to visit him from time to time at his small home in the mountains of Western North Carolina, which was sort of on the way to where my parents lived in Kentucky. There, I saw a very different side of Carl. His family life had nothing to do with Greek, but he was still the same positive, patient, warm person. And that comes across much stronger face-to-face - a forum simply cannot convey that.
When Hurricane Helene hit, I called him on his cell phone, and nobody answered. Weeks later, his son Fred called me, saying he found my call on Carl's cell phone. He told me Carl was in the hospital. Later, I learned he was in a nursing home, then that he was in another nursing home. Velma was living with relatives. When Carl joined them, he gave me a call, which lasted for a good long time. We talked about many things, but a lot of it was about this list and about the people he had met on this list. He always had good things to say about people, and the things he said were true of those people, not flattery. He understood what was good about people. That's the last time I talked to Carl. I had hoped to see him in person again this year.
When Velma called, it hit me deeply. I miss Carl. He was an incredibly gracious and generous man, and the world is poorer for his loss.
When I discovered this list and started asking questions, most of the participants were experts who discussed things at a level well above my head. But Carl welcomed me graciously, answered my questions, suggested better ways to go about studying the language, and even putting me in contact with other people who could help. I never felt like he was talking down to me. He was always the consummate teacher, taking the time to understand how I was thinking about something before suggesting other ways that might be more helpful. For me, that was at least as important as his vast knowledge and deep intuitive grasp of the Greek language. Back then, there were very few useful resources for beginning Greek students who were not enrolled in classes.
Over the years, I picked up the mailing list when David Marotta decided he no longer wanted to run it, and Carl and I later chose to convert the list to phpBB. But for decades, Carl was the heart of this list and the intellectual center. Without Carl's help, I could never do the work I am doing now, and as I look around at the people I work with, quite a few of them also see Carl as one of their most influential mentors.
Eventually, Carl had to step down from his work on B-Greek because his eyesight was fading. I was able to visit him from time to time at his small home in the mountains of Western North Carolina, which was sort of on the way to where my parents lived in Kentucky. There, I saw a very different side of Carl. His family life had nothing to do with Greek, but he was still the same positive, patient, warm person. And that comes across much stronger face-to-face - a forum simply cannot convey that.
When Hurricane Helene hit, I called him on his cell phone, and nobody answered. Weeks later, his son Fred called me, saying he found my call on Carl's cell phone. He told me Carl was in the hospital. Later, I learned he was in a nursing home, then that he was in another nursing home. Velma was living with relatives. When Carl joined them, he gave me a call, which lasted for a good long time. We talked about many things, but a lot of it was about this list and about the people he had met on this list. He always had good things to say about people, and the things he said were true of those people, not flattery. He understood what was good about people. That's the last time I talked to Carl. I had hoped to see him in person again this year.
When Velma called, it hit me deeply. I miss Carl. He was an incredibly gracious and generous man, and the world is poorer for his loss.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
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Re: Tributes to Carl Conrad
Jonathan, I was somewhat active on B-Greek during your neophyte stage, and I remember well your engagement with the learning process. I'm quite sure that Carl was pleased to see you progress so well. Nothing else validates a teacher quite like the success of his students. "Well done!" to you and Carl both.
Randy Leedy
www.NTGreekGuy.com
Randy Leedy
www.NTGreekGuy.com