Living Koine Greek Review – Part 1: My Background and Hopes

I have just received my copy of the Biblical Language Center’s (BLC) Greek materials for review. (As usual—I have purchased from them before—the package was shipped the next day and it arrived safely and quickly. Great service.)

Here is my plan for review.

Since this is a language learning program, and I want to genuinely test the program and the claims of some people for the benefits of “immersion” techniques for Hellenistic Greek (or, living language techniques), I won’t provide a one-time 1000 word review or anything. I’ll handle it in stages.

So, in this post I’ll explain my Greek background and why I’m interested and what my hopes are. In a second post in the next month or two I will outline and evaluate the materials to whatever point I’m at, also making use of the claims of its proponents. In a final post I will try to engage with the theory and practice of “immersion” with respect to a dead language. I envision this as a summer-long project.

MY BACKGROUND

I have been studying Greek since 2007 in my undergrad when I began with a year and a half of Classical Greek study and then moved on to Hellenistic Greek study thereafter. I first learned with Athenaze for Classical and then I moved to Mounce’s beginning grammar for Hellenistic. I have spent the last few years at McMaster Divinity College studying Greek with one of the foremost experts in the field. I’ve had the opportunity to take two Greek exegesis courses, an advanced grammar and linguistics course, Johannine studies with linguistic study applied to John’s Gospel, and I’m about to begin my last Masters course, linguistic modeling, and my thesis, which is investigating—and hopefully contributing to the field with my research—linguistic issues in Greek linguistics applied to John’s Gospel. I recently presented some of my research at a linguistics circle gathering and have been encouraged to move to publication in the near future.

So, I’ve got what would be considered a good background, I think.

That said, all of the training has been with tools that are reading based and use an English metalanguage to discuss Greek grammar. This is largely because Hellenistic Greek is a dead language; no one speaks it natively so we can’t learn it like we learn German today.

Or can we? This is a big question in Greek pedagogy.

I began with Erasmian pronunciation but last August I switched to Randall Buth’s reconstructed Koine pronunciation. The transition only took a week or so (maybe I can detail that on another occasion). My main three reasons for the switch were 1) to make use of the audio materials coming out of the BLC including readings of the Gospel of John and Letters; 2) to enjoy the sound of the language more in hopes that it sounds closer to a native pronunciation than Erasmian does; and 3) to be helped along in text critical matters as I investigate manuscripts and make sense of spelling changes and variants across texts.

HOPES

My number one hope is simply to continue to become a better reader of Hellenistic Greek. I’m a good reader now (I try to shun translation in reading so I don’t mean I’m a good on the spot translator) and I have a good handle on linguistic issues related to Greek. But, I want to go deeper, driving the language further and further into my mind. Audio materials should benefit me to that end.

My second hope is to be able to better navigate the debates occurring in Greek pedagogy. I’ve had opportunity to teach Greek and may yet again, so I want to decide what approach to take. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the immersion approach (yes, I’m sure there are disadvantages, contra one opinion!) and should it be used as supplementary to traditional approaches or can they take the place of them? Maybe I will be converted. Maybe I won’t. I’m open.

I think talking about Greek pedagogy is important for our own development in the language and for future generations of Greek students.

If you have any experience with these matters, what do you think about it all?

Reading the Bible in One Sitting

Yesterday morning I read the entire Bible in one sitting. No really, I did!

The English version I was reading has 1141 pages so quite obviously I was moving at a quick pace. In fact, I was flipping each page over at about 0.5–1 second each. So, can you call it “reading”? Well, I think so. Here’s why.

If I had never read the Bible before, this rapid pace of reading would have meant nothing to me. In fact, there are some Old Testament books that I’m not all that familiar with at this point (Jeremiah happens to be one of them) where a quick glance at a page means little.

But, this rapid speed read of the Bible had a purpose. The Bible is a large collection of 66 different books and I have read many of them many times and many of them few times. I have studied some in amazing depth and some I have only read a handful of times. The result of such a large diverse book is that if you don’t read 1 Kings or Nehemiah or 2 John very often, it’s easy to forget about their contents and neglect them in your biblical theology.

So, by going through the entire Bible in one sitting, I was bringing to mind the many years of Bible reading that I’ve had in a way that helped me remember what was in the Bible. It helped recall to my memory the sequence of events in diverse narratives and the contents of different psalms or wisdom pieces. My underlining and notes were quickly available to recall so that I now remember more about my previous study of Job than I had recalled before giving it this quick scan.

That, it seems to me, is a worthwhile reading endeavour—not to be done daily, but every so often to bring to mind areas of the Word you’re currently not studying. Give it a try!

Gregory P. Fewster – Word Studies, the Pastor, and the Layperson

The continuation of my interview series sees a good one here. Greg Fewster is a PhD student at McMaster Divinity College, adjunct instructor of Greek at Great Lakes Bible College and an assistant editor with the journal Biblical and Ancient Greek Linguistics. He has a book coming out this year with Brill Academic called Creation Language in Romans 8: A Study in Monosemy. I have read significant portions of it and it is top rate. I will certainly draw more attention to it when it is released.

Here I interview Greg on the topic of lexical semantics and word-studies.

AR: So-called “word studies” are popular amongst Christians, from scholars to pastors to lay people. Pastors and teachers, for instance, will sometimes talk about the meaning of a Greek or Hebrew word in a sermon and say it is the “literal” meaning. Or, interested lay people will attempt to look up all instances of a perceived key-word like “faith” or “justified” in the Bible or dictionary to give them a better understanding of those words.

Greg, you have been working in this area but have attempted to break new ground from an informed linguistic perspective. Can you give us some insight into what the discipline of lexical semantics is?

GF: Lexical semantics is a fairly broad discipline within linguistic studies. It seeks to answer the question of how words mean. Lexical semantics is not a specific model or theory that attempts to answer this question. Rather, it sets the agenda for particular questions we ask about language.

As you note, this is a question that is often raised in Christian circles, I think because Christians tend to take the words of the Bible pretty seriously. It is fairly common when we are interpreting a passage to ask the question, “Hmmm, what does that word mean here?” That essential question is the basis for lexical semantics.

AR: How does your research inform how we should handle words in the Bible?

GF: In a word: carefully. Possibly the biggest hindrance to excellent lexical semantic work is an implicit (or sometimes explicit) assumption that words, especially biblical words, are magical or something. We want to cram bucket-loads of significance into certain word choices. However, language studies in the last few decades have revealed that meaning in language is not a product of isolated pieces of information, but results from the melding together of these pieces. Meaning is greater than the meaning of its constituent parts, in that, the melding of those language pieces is what gives the pieces specific meaning. It is that specific meaning that we are trying to get when we interpret the Bible, right?

What that says to me is that if we focus too much on the meaning of these little pieces (words) we end up missing the whole point. Don’t get me wrong, words are really important, that’s why I have studied them so much. But that importance needs to be understood in relationship to the other meaningful components of language.

AR: Where do you see pastors and teachers most go wrong when handling ‘words’?

GF: There are a number of ways pastors and teachers can go wrong, a number of them have been identified in D.A. Carson’s little book Exegetical Fallacies. I’ll give you some of my own thoughts though.

1. They overemphasize etymology. The history of a word is not a clue to its meaning in a specific context.

2. They define the meaning of a word based upon one or two other examples. Just because a word seems to mean something in one context doesn’t necessarily imply that it will mean the same thing somewhere else. Look out for defining a word based on “how Jesus used it” or “how the Old Testament uses it.” These attempts often amount to oversimplification and can ignore what is going on in the passage you are reading. By the way, Philo and Josephus are not definitive resources for word meaning either. They can be useful resources but if you’re going to use them, consult other ancient non-biblical writers as well.

3. They confuse words with concepts. This is a tough one, but it means that a word, which linguistic, is different than a concept, which is a mental. So, a particular concept might appear in a passage without a particular word being used. On the other hand, a word is not a cipher for a large conceptual framework. In that case, we need to be careful about how we talk about word meaning since we can only talk about concepts etc. using words. Confusing, I know.

4. They see words as having multiple, discrete meanings. The problem with this view (something called polysemy) is that it enables a practice we like to call sense-selection. This is when we just go to a dictionary and pick the “meaning” that seems to work best in the passage that we are reading. Sometimes dictionaries over-divide the possible ways that a word can mean or give the impression that these distinct “meanings” are not as connected as I think they probably are.

AR: What advice would you have for those performing word studies in order to keep from making interpretive mistakes?

GF: The biggest thing I would suggest is that we need to change the question we ask about words. I think this would go a long way to improving our “word studies.” Rather than asking “what does this word mean and therefore what does this passage mean?” it is more helpful to ask, “how does this word contribute to the meaning of this text?”

Besides this major question let me add a few other suggestions.

1. Use concordances, but use them well. When examining a concordance for a word, try to see what sort of patterns occur. Look for the other words that seem to appear around your target word a lot. Look for the grammatical patterns that frequently associate with your target word. Look for certain concepts (remember these are bigger than words) that associate with your target word. Once you notice these patterns it can give you a better idea of how that word is contributing to the meaning of the passage. Remember, meaning is a product of these larger patterns, not the word itself.

2. Words are not always selected because of the specific content they may represent (though that will inevitably be part of it). Words may also be selected for some stylistic reason (rhyming, repetition, etc.) or because of how it might influence the relationship between the reader and the writer. For example, some words may be synonyms in their content but have different negative or positive connotations. Don’t get too excited about a particular word choice until you seriously consider all the reasons why it may have been used.

3. Don’t rely too heavily on commentaries. Unfortunately, there are lots of authors who have not taken the time to keep on top of lexical semantic theory and, as a result, they make the kind of mistakes that I have been warning about. Don’t ignore the commentaries but have a healthy level of suspicion. Check with other commentaries/dictionaries/etc., and feel free to do your own study.

AR: Do you have any advice to those who are constrained to working with the Bible in translation? What limitations should they be aware of?

GF: This is an important question, because we don’t all have the benefit of knowing Greek or Hebrew. My advice would actually be to avoid doing word studies with too much frequency. Bible translations are not consistent in how they translate Greek words. Sometimes one word will be translated using quite a few different “glosses” and the same English word might be a translation of several different Greek or Hebrew words. Unless you have Strong’s numbers or something, your English concordance won’t help to differentiate these things.

Don’t be discouraged, though. Remember, words aren’t the be-all and end-all of meaning. So if you can’t do an in depth word study for your upcoming sermon (or whatever) it shouldn’t affect the quality of your overall interpretation. That should go for those of us who do know the languages as well. Other options are to learn Greek (it’s a lot of fun!) or make friends with someone who knows it. Two heads are better than one at times anyways.

AR: Are there any good resources (current or forthcoming) for those interested that would help direct them to a more responsible handling of words?

Unfortunately there haven’t been too many studies written recently on this subject. Many are dated by now and some promote some of the ideas I warned about earlier. Many of these are still worth reading though.

If I can put a plug in for myself, I would recommend my own book. It is very technical and very expensive, but I hope worth the read if you are familiar with the Greek language. The book is called Creation Language in Romans 8: A Study in Monosemy. It is published by Brill Academic in their Linguistic Biblical Studies Series and will be hopefully coming out in the late spring or early summer.

You also might check out the following resources:

James Barr. The Semantics of Biblical Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.

D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996.

Benjamin J. Baxter, “Hebrew and Greek Word-Study Fallacies,” MJTM  12 (2010–11) 3–32.

Benjamin J. Baxter, “The Meaning of Biblical Words,” MJTM 11 (2009–10) 89–120.

Wally V. Cirafesi, “‘To Fall Short’ or ‘To Lack’? Reconsidering the Meaning and Translation of ὙΣΤΕΡΕΩ in Romans 3:23,” ExpT  (2012) 429–34. (This is an application of good lexical semantic principles)

M.A.K. Halliday, “Lexicology.” In Lexicology: A Short Introduction. Edited by M.A.K. Halliday and Colin Yallop. London: Continuum, 2004: 1–22.

J.P. Louw, Semantics of New Testament Greek (The SBL Semeia Series; Atlanta: Scholars, 1982).

Eugene A. Nida, and Johannes P. Louw, Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament: A Supplement to the Greek-English Lexicon Based on Semantic Domains. SBL Resources for Biblical Literature 25. Atlanta: Scholars, 1992.

Matthew Brook O’Donnell, “Some New Testament Words for Resurrection and the Company They Keep,” in Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes and David Tombs (eds.), Resurrection (London: T&T Clark, 1999) 136–65.

Stanley E. Porter, “Greek Linguistics and Lexicography,” in Andreas J. Köstenberger and Robert W. Yarbrough (eds.), Understanding the Times: New Testament Studies in the 21st Century, Essays in Honor of D.A. Carson on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011) 19–61.

Colin Yallop, “Words and Meaning,” in M.A.K. Halliday and Colin Yallop (eds.), Lexicology: A Short Introduction (London: Continuum, 2007) 23–93.