Thread by @DrPJWilliams

THREAD: Learning Greek to read the New Testament.

For anyone interested in the NT I recommend learning Greek to help you follow details more closely.

This thread reviews some of the ways you can do that.

Others are welcome to use it to advertise their favourite Greek links.

I'm a pedagogical pluralist, which means that I'm happy to encourage many different ways of learning.

The key ingredients for a course or teacher are:

(1) competence
(2) ability to inspire

The order in which you learn topics, or the pronunciation you use matter far less.

I also want to say up front that you should not be afraid of learning a little Greek.

'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing' doesn't apply provided you know that you know little and surround yourself with people who know more.

Just as most of us sometimes read ingredients on food packaging without thinking we're dietary experts, so we can study a little Greek, but please don't let's pontificate at a social event either on dietary matters or on Greek unless we're a genuine expert.

First up it's worth mentioning that some people teach New Testament Greek (or rather its broader context Koine Greek) as a living language.

I believe the inspiration behind this approach is Randall Buth (biblicallanguagecenter.com), who has trained many others.

@koinegreek_com (koinegreek.com) advocates this approach and has produced some great material.

E.g. a video of Mark's Gospel in Greek: youtube.com/koinegreek

Another approach is by @BibleMesh @BibleMeshGreek, which gets you reading the New Testament from lesson 1 and uses clever algorithms to help you learn vocabulary.

One of my friends, Dr Steffen Jenkins, has taught ab initio to reading Thucydides to a group of Cuban pastors in Spanish at @Tyndale_House. This was so that when they came to read the New Testament it would seem easy.

More about his teaching here:

https://twitter.com/UnionTheology/status/1253263595447767041?s=20

On twitter it's great that Benn Gladd @drglad offers a daily Greek verse (@dailygreekverse).

Rob Plummer will take you through the detail of a verse every day at @dailygreek.

You can follow along with Greek through free online programmes such as stepbible.org or biblehub.com. Even if you haven't learned Greek before you could try with one of these programmes and study words and see how much you can work out.

In @Tyndale_House's free magazine there's a whole issue on learning biblical languages here:

tyndalehouse.com/magazine/read/2

(@AF_TyndaleHouse)

One tool that helps is a Reader's Greek New Testament. These offer grammatical help and less common vocabulary, so you don't have constantly to use a dictionary.

There are currently 3 on the market, reviewed here:

biola.edu/blogs/good-boo…

I have an obvious preference.

You can also buy individual sections of the NT in Greek with extra spacing for you to make notes.

More details here:

https://twitter.com/dailygreek/status/1276774529742888960?s=20

I only taught Greek for a few years and there are many people on the web who know far more about the subject than I and I warmly invite them to contribute their thoughts.

Twitter profiles for NT Greek teaching are (in no particular order):
@CressidaRyanI
@sivartspeaks (@tryBibLing)
@ntestamentgreek
@_david_shaw
@goldmange
@DrJimDPhD

There must be many more. Please feel free to add them.

Others regularly writing about NT Greek on Twitter include:
@lettlander
@RickBrannan
@morphgnt @jtauber
@michaelgaubrey
@jeltzz

One final piece of advice:

Some people got rather obsessive about something called 'Verbal Aspect' in Greek and wrote a lot about it. Not all writers were equally knowledgeable. You can safely ignore all this literature until you've read all the New Testament in Greek.

END