Tagged: Greek

The Dirty Truth about Lexicons

Do you study the New Testament in Greek? Are lexicons your best friends? Well, they sure are important.

What do you do when you come across, say, φλόξ, and you don’t know what it means and you can’t deduce its meaning simply from the context? You probably have some lexicon ready at hand, whether it be BDAG, LSJ, LN, or something else.

John Lee has written some important work on lexicography including a monograph on the history of New Testament lexicography, published in 2003, and an essay in a 2004 festschrift for Danker on the present state of lexicography.

In the essay he speaks about the importance of the lexicon and says:

Not only will lexicography be in demand, but it will continue to carry a weighty responsibility. This is because of the special character of lexicons. Lexicons are regarded as by their users as authoritative, and they put their trust in them. Lexicons are reference books presenting a compressed, seemingly final statement of fact, with an almost legal weight. The mere fact that something is printed in a book gives it authority, as far as most people are concerned. And understandably: if one does not know the meaning of a word, one is predisposed to trust the only means of rescue from ignorance.

But are lexicons infallible? His next words poignantly capture it:

Yet this trust is misplaced. The concise, seemingly authoritative statement of meaning can, and often does, conceal many sins – indecision, compromise, imperfect knowledge, guesswork, and, above all, dependence on predecessors. Lexicographers have to make a decision and put down a definite statement, and they are fallible like everyone else. But the ordinary user has no means of knowing where the mistakes have been made, where the ignorance has been covered up, what has been lifted from somewhere else without checking, and so on.

These are dirty truths that I fear schools who only provide a year of Greek study and maybe an exegetical methods course rarely disclose, if they are aware of it themselves. And I often wonder if some of the lexicons Greek students are raised on, along with a lack of linguistic understanding of how words work, lead them to think of glosses as the “literal translation” which leads to all sorts of messy stuff.

So, where does that leave the student who isn’t going to go far enough in their Greek studies to critically engage with the lexicons?

Well, among many things that might be said, I don’t think we can cite lexicons as the final word on any matter. Critical discussion should always be at hand. So, statements such as: “BDAG says…, therefore…” shouldn’t be found on our lips. Better would be: “BDAG says…. Does that make the most sense of the evidence…? Let’s look up every occurrence of the word in all extant Greek literature and decide for ourselves!” -> said no pastor ever. Or have you?

Porter et al.: Fundamentals of New Testament Greek

I may have an opportunity to teach Greek next year and so I’m thinking through pedagogy and textbooks. I started with classical Greek in my undergrad and used Athenaze. Once I had completed a year of classical I went through Mounce’s beginner’s grammar, Basics of Biblical Greek, on my own. I appreciate that the book is clear, easy to follow, and even mildly entertaining, but I don’t find his incorporation of semantic discussions of various morphological forms extremely helpful. That’s not to say I wouldn’t use this text with supplementary discussion, but I’m also interested in looking at other options. I did teach from Mounce once before.

Of course, a natural place for me to look (seeing as I’m an MDC student) is to the fairly recent Porter, Reed, and O’Donnell volume: Fundamentals of New Testament Greek, published by Eerdmans.

At this point I haven’t used the grammar so I’m not going to provide a full out review. Instead I thought I’d provide a number of links to reviews and helpful pages related to the book along with some of my initial impressions.

First, there is a website devoted to the book: portergreek.com. There you can view some chapters in both the text and the workbook, read D. A. Carson, A. C. Thiselton, and Craig A. Evans’s positive blurbs and gain access to accompanying study materials like paradigm charts.

Second, there is a blog post from the Eerdmans editor, Craig Noll. He highlights a number of exciting features of the book.

Third, there are some published reviews that contain both positive and negative elements:

RBL: Vance.
RBL: Coutsoumpos.
Themelios: Mugridge.

Fourth, blog reviews:

Paroikos analysis of 4 first year grammars.
There is another from Ricoblog but it’s making my computer freeze.

Finally, my impressions:

Just as others have picked up on, this is a serious first year grammar. In thinking about how to teach from it, I was a little scared at first but once I analyzed the ordering of the chapters and the layout of each chapter, I became more comfortable with it. I got a vision for how to set in front of the student the big picture at the start and produce a “map of the language” so that they don’t get lost moving through the chapters (helpful for any 1st year grammar perhaps).

And serious isn’t a bad thing. Porter et al. are consciously providing a rigorous first year grammar to challenge and bring students up to an excellent start in Greek. My only hesitation in this area is knowing the context of the students. I think that I would certainly use this textbook if teaching in a seminary/university environment. But I’m not yet sure about pastors and students who are currently in ministry and don’t have the same amount of time to devote to their Greek study. My hesitation is lessening as I become familiar with the text and think about how to approach that. I’m curious to get Porter’s thoughts on whether there are any groups of students he doesn’t think this book is for also.

Not surprisingly, I like the content. Aspect, as the primary semantic component of the tense-forms, is introduced with the introduction of verbs in chapter 4. The timeless model of the verbal tense-forms is explained. Great descriptions of the verbal moods and other parts of the verbs are given. My gripe with Athenaze and Mounce is that I felt the semantic component of verbs was not adequately dealt with off the bat. Or maybe I just don’t like the “list approach” to the verbs and cases: dative of time, dative of this and that; gnomic aorist, etc. For cases, I’ve found it much more helpful to begin with the core semantic component. For example, the genitive case signals restriction. I’d rather engage with that first than to be given a list of umpteen different uses with no real idea of how they hang together or to be told it means “of” in English, which it doesn’t.

And, I like the idea of starting with learning the aorist tense-form given it’s being the most frequent and its aspect (perfective) is the default one. I haven’t yet thought through how that affects the learning of the principal parts. It may be strange to me since I learned the present tense-form first.

More thoughts to come in the future as I look at it some more.

Reading Greek and Hebrew as Greek and Hebrew

It is so refreshing to read the following from John Walton:

“When people want to study the Bible seriously, one of the steps they take is to learn the language. As I teach language students, I am still always faced with the challenge of persuading them that they will not succeed simply by learning enough of the language to engage in translation. Truly learning the language requires leaving English behind, entering the world of the text and understanding the language in its Hebrew context without creating English words in their minds. They must understand the Hebrew as Hebrew text” (Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 9).

One of my contentions in modern study of the ancient languages is that this desire to teach and learn the languages for the purpose of only being able to translate has led to some major problems in the understanding of the biblical text amongst scholars and preachers. Being able to translate a text is not the same as being able to understand the text. And the best translators will be the ones who really understand the languages.

Will You Teach Your Kids the Languages?

We all have hopes and dreams for our children, do we not? Even if we are yet to be parents we sometimes think about what we would desire for our children.

I find myself right now searching online for classical/Hellenistic Greek and classical Hebrew resources for kids. I have a 2 year old and back before he could speak a word of English I thought it would be fun if his first word was Greek. Since some of his first sounds were “k,” “a,” and something resembling “oo” I tried, foolishly, to get him to say “ἀκούω,”  (akouo) the Hellenistic Greek for “I am listening.” But he didn’t get it. Why didn’t I try something easier like, “μεθερμηνευόμενον” (methermeneuomenon)? Oh wait, something easier like, “καί” (kai)? 3 syllables was too many! Well, hindsight is 20/20. I decided to let it be after that but only to be picked up at a later date.

When I think about the desires I have for my son, they are plenty. Primary among them is for him to desire to and, in fact, love Jesus. If only this happened I would be a happy man. Following from this I have many desires with respect to his character and education. Not only do I believe having desires for our children is good, I think it is inevitable that we will have them. Some may care more than others, but we have desires and we do have a responsibility with our children. We decide, at least in their younger ages, what they watch, what they learn, etc. I don’t want to be naive and think my wife and I have the only influence in his life (nor should we) but we are strong influencers with great responsibility nonetheless.

Of course this can be mishandled. Just as the failed wannabe NHL superstar can foist upon their son their own dreams of NHL stardom and work the kid ruthlessly through rep hockey, so I can foist upon my son the education I never had with wrong motives (My education wasn’t a poor one, it just didn’t include classical languages and the study of the Bible). And while this is a danger to avoid, we as parents do have control over many of the influences our children will encounter and the education he or she will receive. What are we going to do with that influence and responsibility?

If we care about the Bible as God’s Word to us, then chief among our children’s education should be a grounding in the Word; English, German, Spanish, whatever. And this next part isn’t for everyone, but maybe some of us will begin to teach our children the original languages of the Bible from a young age: Greek and Hebrew. I’m sure that sounds daunting for someone who doesn’t themselves know the languages, but for those of us who do (and maybe we can create resources and training for other kids) is it a worthy endeavor?

It seems to require wisdom based on the personality of the child, but how is teaching them Greek any different from teaching them math? I’m not sure yet if two years old is too young without immersion in a native context (which unfortunately doesn’t exist), but some exposure surely can’t hurt and I want to show my son that I love Jesus, love his Word, and love the study of it in the original. Something might rub off as I begin to teach him.

Give a child a modern language and they can read in their time. Give a child a classical language and they can read beyond their time. Hmm, doesn’t have the same ring as the “fish proverb” but I think it makes a point. Learning Greek and Hebrew wouldn’t be helpful only for biblical study but also to be able to read widely in classical literature and gain all that comes from being multilingual.

Have you considered this or in fact started this endeavor with your kids? I’d love to know how you’ve approached it. And if you have any resources to recommend, please share!

…

Two resources I have quickly found that look like they could be good (though I haven’t spent a good deal of time investigating them yet) are:

Greek for Children from Classical Academic Press; and

these Hebrew books from EKS Publishing Co.

All Have Sinned and Lack the Glory of God

You’ll have to take out your pens and correct your English Bibles and gospel tracts with this one! The latest issue of The Expository Times contains an essay by Wally Cirafesi of McMaster Divinity College challenging the translation equivalent, “to fall/come short,” for ὑστεροῦνται in Romans 3:23. He shows the over-reliance on the King James rendering (1611) and shows that ‘to lack’ would be the better translation equivalent. So, “All have sinned and lack the glory of God.”

‘To Fall Short’ or ‘To Lack’? Reconsidering the Meaning and Translation of ὙΣΤΕΡΕΩ in Romans 3:23