Learning Koine Greek Lenten Course

Why Learn Greek

Why should we bother to learn Greek. There are many excellent English translations, so what is the advantage of learning to read the bible as it was originally written? After all we cannot possibly hope to get as good as those countless generations of Scholars who labored over the translations!

Well, there is the intellectual challenge of learning a new language, but I'm sure that most of us feel that we are intellectually challenged enough! We could point to the fact that the Christian religon is really alone in the major religions in that it does not encourage reading of the scriptures in the original language. But really neither of these reasons is sufficient. We should learn to read the Bible in Greek, at least to be able to navigate a good interliner, because only then can we really begin to understand how the original message must have been heard by the early Christians. No translation, however good, can give a 'feel' for this, one can only get this feel by reading the original, and to be able to get this feel is price less.

Methods of Learning Greek

There are traditionally two ways of learning a language:

• Learn it the way we learnt English, immerse your self in the language, learn it by ear, learn to read it, then to write in it, and Perhaps later on learn the grammar!
• Learn the vocabulary, and the grammar, then painstakingly learn how to put together phrases and sentences.

Unfortunately the first option takes too long, and in any case as Koine Greek is a 'dead' language, we could not immerse our selves in a Koine speaking community. The second option is the traditional way to go, and is the way most people learnt, and still learn, Latin. This however has several disadvantages; one never really becomes 'fluent' in the language; one is forever stopping to 'parse' a sentence; one never really learns the flow of the language. There is however a third option.

In this third method, we learn 'chunks' of Greek as phrases, sayings and sentences. When we have enough chunks, we will look at the grammar and the word vocabulary in detail. Luckily the Bible, particularly the Gospels is well suited to this method, as they were designed to be read out aloud, and to be memorized.

Traditionally it has been seminary students who have learnt Greek, in order that they may be able to perform exegesis -the minute parsing of the Greek text, so if that is your sole aim there is a lot to be said for going the vocab/grammar route. However as our aims are different - we want to try and get a feel for what the original Christians heard [reference top] - we need to use this third method

Modus Operandi of course

Click here for a basic idea of how this course will be conducted, and why it is conducted this way.

The Daily Lesson

Click here for the list of daily lessons.

Course Aims

People taking this course will have different prior experience and learning, and will also differ in the time and effort they can devote to it, so obviously they can expect different outcomes. Now this course is predicated on the idea that it is only by reading the Greek out loud, that we can turn it into a living language; it is only by this means that we can establish a firm basis for future development, so the major aim of this course is that at the end the student can read out the texts. Also hopefully they will have learnt certain key words and phrases and some very basic grammar, enough to make reading of an interliner translation possible and enjoyable. This is the minimum aim of the course, and I think one that every participant can aspire to! So to reach this aim I would say that if you have time for nothing else, at least read out aloud the daily passage, and match the English meaning with the words!

Others with more time, or perhaps more prior knowledge should have a knowledge of about 75% of the words in the NT; have a feel for Greek vocabulary; and have the rudiments of Grammar at their finger tips, and should be able to manage with a 'diglot' - a parallel columned Greek English translation. This I would hope is where most of you will be at.

A few very gifted, and I know that I didn't fall into this category, will have enough Greek that they can read most of the simpler passages without any aid!

A secondary aim of the course is to introduce you to an analytical Lexicon, but we will only do this in the final stages. The one I use is The Analytical Greek Lexicon Revised 1978 edition by Harold K. Moulton, now out of print, but I see several copies are available on Amazon for about $20. You can see what I say about it at http://www.biblegreek.net/books/index.php