Reboot Your Greek. Darin H. Land
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Blow off the dust, and open it up. What does it smell like? Like a new book? Like an old book? Does the smell bring back any good or bad memories?
Look at the words on the page you opened. Are any of the words familiar? Now try looking up a favorite verse by using the reference. (If you need to, look in the table of contents to help you remember the spelling of the NT book names.) Flip through the pages. What do you notice? Hopefully this process rekindles some of your excitement for reading the New Testament in the original language. It might also rekindle some of the fears you faced when you couldn’t translate what your eyes were seeing. Push those fears aside and dwell in the excitement for a few moments.
By the way, which Greek NT are you holding? Perhaps it is the red-covered UBS edition, or maybe the blue-covered Nestle-Aland edition. Or maybe you’re reading on a Kindle, smartphone, or other electronic text-reading device. These are all really great, and any of them will serve you well down the road.
But I want to strongly suggest that you purchase the United Bible Societies’ The Greek New Testament: A Reader’s Edition if you don’t already have it.1 Honestly, this tool is by far the best one known to me for helping people read the Greek New Testament on a regular basis. I feel so strongly about this that I would advise you to put this lesson aside until you have the Reader’s Edition in your hands . . .
. . . The Reader’s Edition you are now holding is different from other Greek New Testaments. Instead of the usual apparatus (the listing of textual variants and other textual concerns at the bottom of each page), it has footnotes that provide English glosses for Greek words that occur fewer than thirty times in the New Testament.2 This allows you to glance to the bottom of the page to catch the basic meaning of the words that you probably don’t already know. Rather than having to suspend your reading for five or ten minutes each time you need to find a word in a lexicon, you can just glance at the bottom of the page, find a gloss for the word, and keep on reading. This greatly improves the speed with which you can read and therefore the enjoyment you receive from reading.3
By the time our forty-day journey is over, my hope is that you will be able to read much of the New Testament using your renewed understanding of Greek and tools like the Reader’s Edition Greek New Testament. (You’ll find discussions of other helpful tools on days 38 and 39.)
Exercise 1
Directions: Using the Reader’s Edition Greek New Testament or another Greek New Testament, accomplish the following instructions:
1. Find the listing of the books of the New Testament according to their Greek titles.
2. Based on your knowledge of the English titles, try to sound out the names of each book in Greek.
3. Notice that the titles of each of the Gospels begins with the word Kατά. Do you remember what that word means?
4. Notice that each of the titles of the Pauline Epistles (plus Hebrews) begins with the word Πρός. Do you remember what that word means?
5. Using the page numbers from the table of contents, turn to each of the books in the text. Notice the titles at the top of each page. Depending on which text you use, you will probably see that the titles are in capital letters. Try to sound out the titles using these capital letters. Look back at the table of contents for the more common lowercase letters if you get confused.
6. Spend the rest of your allotted thirty minutes (see the preface) further re-familiarizing yourself with the format of your Greek New Testament.
Reminder: If you committed to spending an extra fifteen minutes per day, be sure to set aside time to do that today, too.
1. The United Bible Societies (UBS) have several editions of the Greek New Testament. Any edition will meet your needs for the present purpose, so long as you choose one that is a reader’s edition—i.e., one that has an on-page or running dictionary with vocabulary entries at the bottom of each page.
2. A gloss is a one-word substitute for a word in another language. For example, love is an English gloss for the Greek word ἀγάπη. Of course, ἀγάπη has nuances and profundities that love does not have, and vice versa. So it is not proper to say that love is a definition (or even translation) of ἀγάπη. See the glossary at the end of this book for definitions of common terms such as gloss that will be helpful during your forty-day journey.
3. It is possible to use some electronic text resources to do much the same—except that they will give you a gloss for any word you happen to point at. This becomes a problem when you point to words that you should have known. Instead of activating your memory for words, you short-circuit the process of recall. You are less likely to progress very far in your facility with Greek. Nevertheless, if you stay alert to the possible pitfalls of using an electronic text, this can also be a viable option. See day 39 for additional information about electronic texts and Bible software.
Day 2: A Great Tool, the GNT Reader’s Edition
Yesterday I introduced you to the single best tool I know for helping to read Greek, namely, the UBS Greek New Testament: A Reader’s Edition. As I mentioned yesterday, the Reader’s Edition replaces the apparatus with footnotes. Each footnote gives the lexical form of the word to which it refers, together with a suggested gloss for that word. In addition, the following information is given depending on the part of speech:
Noun—genitive ending and gender
Adjective—feminine and neuter forms (if they exist)
Verb—full parsing
These bits of information, especially the gloss, save you many hours of stress and confusion in looking up words in a lexicon. Instead of flipping backward and forward through a lexicon to find the word you’re looking for, a quick glance at the bottom of the page gives you the information you need. You can take a peek at the word, then keep right on going with your reading. No need to break the train of thought as you pause to wade through the secondary resources. And all you need to carry with you is the one Greek NT.
To take full advantage of this useful tool, it is helpful to keep a couple things in mind. First, the words included at the bottom of the page are words that occur less than thirty times in the NT. (It also includes verbs that are more common in terms of NT frequency, but tricky to parse—especially second aorists.) There’s a good chance that you only learned words occurring fifty times or more in the NT during your first encounter with Greek. If that is the case for you, then there are a fair number of words that you will not have learned before that are not listed in the Reader’s Edition footnotes.
There are a couple of options for how to approach this situation. One is to get a vocabulary builder tool (such as Bruce M. Metzger’s Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek or Robert E. Van Voorst’s Building Your New Testament Greek Vocabulary) and learn the words in the gap. The second option is to use the appendix at the end of the Reader’s Edition, which consists of a simple lexicon of the words that occur thirty times and more in the NT. Whenever you encounter a word that you don’t know while reading, simply flip to the back of the text and look it up. The advantage of this method is that you don’t have to memorize words. Instead, you will eventually learn the words through use. The third option is a variant of the second one. For this approach, rather than looking up unknown words, use the context of the word to help you learn the meaning by observation. Probably a combination of option 2 and option 3 will yield the best long-term results.
As with any book, the Reader’s Edition GNT has some typographical errors, omissions, and other imperfections. Happily, there are very few of these kinds of problems in this edition. But when you encounter one, it can be frustrating. Most