Tagged: Study Methods

The Use of Greek, Hebrew (and Aramaic) in Preaching

As I mentioned, the issue I brought up yesterday about pastors maintaining a certain acquaintance with scholarship in the biblical languages was predicated on the languages being important in the first place.

Andy Naselli has a post that highlights this issue, linking to Scott J. Hafemann’s thoughts (SBJT 3:2 (1999)), and quoting him at length on the best reason he has for pastors using the languages in preaching: tracing the flow of the argument of the text. The whole article (which includes other scholars) is worth reading but especially Hafemann’s thoughts on this issue.

The primary practical reason he gives to learn the languages is this:

[T]he confidence and humility it will bring to our ministries, while at the same time saving us countless hours of exertion and frustration. One hour with the text is worth ten in secondary literature. And at the more important theological level, learning the languages affirms the nature of biblical revelation, restores the proper authority of the pastor as teacher, and communicates to our people that the locus of meaning and authority of the Scriptures does not reside in us, but in the text, which we labor so hard to understand. We learn the languages because we are convinced of the inerrancy, sufficiency, and potency of the Word of God.

He said one other thing in there that lines up with one strand of my research that I will quote and leave for discussion another time: “…since every translation is the embodiment of thousands and thousands of interpretive decisions; a translation is a commentary on the Bible without footnotes.” I can see you salivating for more!

Keeping up to Date with Greek (Verbal Aspect)

Let me preface this post with my saying that I am not currently a pastor. What I say here should therefore be taken with a grain of salt, but I hope more than that that it would be weighed carefully. As a result, I will couch this in the form of a question with reflections.

Is it possible for pastors to keep up with current Greek scholarship on at least a marginal enough level that they are aware of the discussions and especially take into account developments in the last 2+ decades on verbal aspect?

I notice in sermons that pastors and speakers frequently say something about the Greek that lies behind the English version they are using and make an exegetical pronouncement about the text based on the verb that is questionable. The idea that either absolute time or ‘kind of action’ is the central feature of the verbal tense-form is an antiquated idea (with some debate as to whether time functions at all in it). I hesitate to provide examples lest I single pastors out. These pronouncements do not always affect the main point of the sermon but if I were preaching ideas that have shown to be false, I would want to have those things corrected out of integrity.

So, is it possible for a pastor to keep up with current Greek scholarship? I have two thoughts on this.

1) Scholars may be to blame in the first place. Commentary writers and popularizers of academic material have themselves failed to keep up and provide pastors with material that keeps up to date with the current understandings of the Greek language, especially the Greek verb.

I recently got my hands on a commentary that was released in 2010 (I won’t mention who) that fails to cite any Greek grammatical work beyond 1963, with the exception of two revised lexicons (1996 and 2000) which themselves are not in line with modern linguistics and Greek grammatical study. As such, the writer refers to tense-form usage in terms of its time-values and ‘kind of action’ that fails to recognize what all the major players of Greek grammar currently do and have for at least 2 decades: aspect, and not time, is the major contribution of the verbal tense-forms. Sadly this commentary is not alone in relying on dated grammars that were once magisterial (and no doubt they should be consulted) but have now been surpassed and even contradicted. How can pastors be expected to stay up to date if they are reading commentaries like this?

On the other hand, there are small glimmers of hope that the tide is changing as pastoral commentaries such as Kruse’s The Letters of John (PNTC) and Carson’s forthcoming Johannine Epistles (NIGTC) take verbal aspect seriously in their discussion of the Greek verb. Let’s hope for higher percentages.

2) Whatever the time commitments of the pastor, most (I hope) would agree that the preaching and teaching of the Word is central to the pastor’s job (cf. e.g., Acts 6:4; letters to Timothy). If that is so, the same pastors would agree that the faithful preaching and teaching of the Word is required. After all, to knowingly say something false would not be helpful. I don’t want to say that the pastor needs to be a scholar (there are varying gifts anyway) but should not some contact be maintained with the disciplines from when the pastor first encountered them in their seminary training (Greek as well as church history, theology, etc.)? After all, seminary does not teach everything the pastor needs to know so that they don’t have to read another book in their life, but it exposes the pastor to the beginning of a lifetime of study (I first heard this idea expounded by D.A. Carson in an interview).

Of course, all this is predicated on the idea that the languages are important for the pastor in the first place, a topic for discussion another time (but as I’ve heard many say and I myself believe: you don’t find pastors who have learned Greek well ever complain that it has not been fundamental in their study and teaching).

So, is it possible to maintain contact and stay abreast of the current discussion? I don’t have the final answer and won’t say more than I’ve just said for now except that if a pastor doesn’t think the languages are worth their time, should they quote Greek or refer to grammatical issues in a sermon in the first place?

Interested in your thoughts.

Reading with a Pencil

While, of course, we read with our eyes and think with our brains, I’ve come to learn that reading with a pencil is of great help to me.

I had never spent a lot of time with 1 Corinthians and had really wanted to get to know it better. So, I took out my English Bible and a pencil and began to underline and box conjunctions that signalled the flow of the text. It engaged my brain in a way that I don’t always engage when I’m reading and it kept me from zoning out. Days later I found that I remembered more about my study through 1 Corinthians than a lot of other reading I had done elsewhere. The same trend has continued in other sections of the Bible, not to mention my academic reading as well.

If you’re not in the habit of it, give it a try! There are no rules to this but you will probably develop your own approach as you go.

How I Study (in pictures and text)

I am currently doing exegetical work on the text of John’s Gospel and I thought I would share a bit of what it looks like.

I have taken two Greek exegesis courses at school with Stanley Porter and have benefited greatly from the method I developed for submitting my exegesis. We were required to translate and make notes on the Greek text (language and textual variants), theological issues, translational issues, etc. and any method that would show that interaction with the text was acceptable. I have found my approach to that so helpful that I continue to use it. Here is what the first page of hundreds looks like, this one being from my exegesis course on the Gospel of Matthew.

In order to get to this point I use several resources. The first, of course, is the Greek text. I consult two modern editions (NA27 and UBS3/4) and will consult the ancient manuscripts as needed. The modern editions alert me to where there are variants in the text and I have to make decisions about what text I think is original.

In addition, I have the OpenText.org analysis open on my Logos Bible Software which also houses more Greek texts, English translations, and Greek grammars. The OpenText.org analysis (www.opentext.org) is immensely beneficial for understanding the syntax of the Greek text, among other things.

Logos Bible Software (www.logos.com) is a wonderful piece of software that allows me access to thousands of resources at the click of a button. As an example, it allows me to select the verse I’m working on (e.g., John 1:1) and immediately pull up all the Greek grammars that refer to that verse. Or, I can select a word from the text (e.g., λόγος) and immediately pull up all the Greek lexicons I own that have an entry for that lexeme. That’s a small snapshot of what it provides me with.

One other thing I do, is try to track the aspect of the verbs and other linguistic devices (genitive absolutes, temporal markers, etc.) to see how the author is structuring their text. This gets me creative with making notes in colours and boxes and helps me note the structure and flow of the text.

Finally I also consult commentaries, books, and articles on the text to see what others have said. This step is important since I can’t claim that I will see everything there is to see in a text or ask all the right questions. I use print commentaries and ones on the Logos software as well.

After these steps I will be writing the studies you find here on this blog. All of this is, of course, bathed in prayer, seeking out God for understanding (2 Tim. 2:7).

So there you have it. My study in a nutshell.