Saturday, May 12, 2007
I did it!
Well, it took me about 16 months to get through a one-year course, but I've finally finished working my way through Bill Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek! I figure if I was taking this as a graded class I'd have probably gotten about a C, but I feel like I'm on my way to knowing something. I've even used the Greek text for Bible study and saw some things I didn't know.
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5 comments:
I got good grades in my seminary Greek courses although I never really felt like I had a very good grasp on it. Maybe the tests were just easy. But I never go and translate from the Greek to do an exegesis. Only very rarely do I open my Greek New Testament and then it's to find what word is used and then look it up in my lexicon to see what other meanings are associated with that word or root. I never parse anything anymore.
I do now a retired New Testament prof who takes his Greek NT to church with him and reads along in it when the lector is reading in English.
Randall Buth, a professor who's active on the b-greek mailing list, seems to think that people who learn Greek in terms of parsing are really at a disadvantage if they try to later actually "know" the language. For instance, if you learn to figure out meaning by first parsing and then putting it together you'll always be stuck with that sort of crutch.
This seems pretty reasonable to me so I've been purposely trying to just figure out what the Greek is saying and only parsing if I need further help figuring it out. It'll probably be longer before I'm actually proficient with this approach, and it's going to take an awful lot of reading, but I'm hopeful.
Congratulations! You are a good man to stick with it. Greek was never a favorite course of mine in seminary and therefore I rarely use it. I hope your new found Greek knowledge serves your ministry well.
Congratulations!
I'm impressed, and a little envious.
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