New Testament Greek Courses

Folks,

Is anyone aware of any course sequences or certificates available for New Testament Greek? This might include a study of the Classics. As a frequent adult Bible instructor at the local Church of Christ, I'm often confronted with those who want to challenge the NIV, NASB, KJV and NKJV with what seem to be questionable new translations of important passages of scripture. While they might be right, they often are "grinding some doctrinal axe," so to speak. Or as F. Lagard Smith says, "Beware of Greek scholars bearing gifts!". Sure, I have many of the appropriate books but would like to find a course of study.

So my religious friends on Degreeinfo.com, do you have any advice on either non-degree or degree New Testament Greek programs? Australia or Zuid Afrika are OK.

Thanks,

Dave

 

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Dave I'm sure lots of schools offer DL classes in NT Greek, eg, American Christian College and Seminary I think does. You only need the classics, dave, in lexical research, or less frequently insight into questionable grammaticisms but this is available to the Greek reader or even English only somewhat by way of struggle in the sources edited by Brown or Kittel.. or such grammars as Wallaces or Robertsons. All you need is one year beginning Koine greek, one year advanced Greek, and a class or two in exegetics. Probably even beginning Greek would get the adult SS teacher by! Imagine how you could disconcert your audacious auditors by asking, " Yes, but what is the effect of the anarthrous predicate nominative of the second Theos in john 1:1---shuts em up everytime (hee,hee)! Translations, of course, need to be challenged as a part of study, nothing wrong with that! they need to be examined textually, grammatically, syntactically, and lexically. You will find much discrepency among those versions you mention which needs to be addressed!

Blessings on your noble pursuit!

 

Dave,

I highly recommend taking a look at www.teknia.com. The site owner, Dr. Bill Mounce, is the author of Basics of Biblical Greek (Zondervan, 1999). This is the introductory textbook used in most U.S. Christian colleges and seminaries. You can purchase audio recordings of Dr. Mounce's classroom lectures based on his book. The site also offers several free programs to aid with vocabulary, parsing, etc. I would suggest working through Mounce's book followed by a careful study of Dr. Daniel B. Wallace's, Basics of New Testament Syntax (Zondervan, 2000). The unabridged version of this work, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Zondervan, 1996), is used in two-thirds of North American schools that teach biblical Greek, including Princeton Theological Seminary and Yale Divinity School. Ample work in the above texts will give you intermediate proficiency in biblical Greek.

Incidentally, a number of free, online lectures are being offered at another site owned by Dr. Mounce. Biblical Training (www.biblicaltraining.org) offers a number of online audio courses developed by noted professors at accredited seminaries in the U.S. None of the courses are offered for credit. However, my understanding is that Dr. Mounce plans to make his lectures on biblical Greek available free of charge at this site, so it may be worth checking periodically.

If you need college credit, Moody Bible Institute offers two courses on basic Greek grammar (each worth four semester hours). See their catalog for external studies at www.moody.edu/ED/XS/pdf/IndStudies2001.pdf. My personal opinion, however, is that they're using an inferior textbook based upon an eight case system.

For help in evaluating various interpretive options in the text of the New Testament, I'd recommend making liberal use of the New English Translation of the Bible, available free of charge at www.netbible.org. The New Testament contains several thousand footnotes explaining the options faced by the translators, and a basic rationale for their choices. Many of the footnotes cite standard grammars, lexical tools, and Bible translations. It is an invaluable tool for understanding why Bible translations read the way they do. I have addressed this more fully in “The NET Bible: Filling a Unique Role on a Crowded Stage,” Christian Research Journal 23/2 (2000) 58-59. If you do not have access to the journal and would like an electronic copy in Microsoft Word format, please send me a private message through DegreeInfo.

Best regards,

Ed

 

Re: Re: New Testament Greek Courses

Bill,

Thanks very much and blessings to you in your ThD and DMin studies -- Wow, two at the same time?

Dave

 

Ed,

Thank you very much!

Dave

P.S. I knew you guys could help with some options...

 

Re: Re: Re: New Testament Greek Courses

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TWO at ONCE, that is right!.....North (also "at" ACCS) just sends me his work to resubmit in my name. , This is called recycling

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: New Testament Greek Courses

Bill,

Your courage is encouraging to me. I thought I was the only one crazy enough to start a second doctorate while finishing the first... And be shopping for my next academic foray while looking to the day that the first doctorate is behind me.

Dave

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: New Testament Greek Courses

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My two are in cognate areas and that will help, i hope!
I think I've good reason to believe that i might be able to finish these before i die (62 now). Dave ,my grandmother who raised me kept her mind quite sharp with various activities right up to her death at 96! I really want to keep sharp too. For her it was crossword puzzles and doing things for her family. For me it is degrees. And doing things for me. Oh well, not altrustic but honest at least!

 

Hellenistic Greek

Try the 'London Bible College'

 

On KJV issues

Also, my sound Greek exegeting friend, you might want to find a copy somewhere of the first edition of the AV in a library and talk them into xeroxing the preface. My church history buff Ph.D. friend says that it is stated there by the translators, "when this is no longer in the common language of the people (something like this) it should be re-translated."
Obviously, a first copy such as this would not "sell" as well in 1611, so they took out the preface and the second edition of the KJV began to sell just fine.
! Let me know if you find it.

 

Re: On KJV issues

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Well , obviously your church history buff PhD friend doesn't know what he's talking about since the KJV was verbally delivered by divine inspiration to the translators rendering it immutably useful and inerrently correct!. Perhaps they said that, but they must not have really known the irresistible, error overcoming grace, effected by tens of thousands of angels controlling every word and punctuation mark the translators wrote! w++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

Re: On KJV issues

Interesting point... I will go look for the original KJV preface. I seem to recall that Jack P. Lewis states something similar about the preface to the KJV in his book, "A History of the English Bible: From KJV to NIV."

Cheers,

Dave

 

Re: Re: On KJV issues

Exactly. I see no reason to attempt to re-translate this KJV verse from the Greek New Testament:

"But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? (1 John 3:17 KJV)"

;-)

Dave

 

Re: Re: Re: On KJV issues

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And such a tough fix for the preacher to say "bowels" means "heart". But then what are preachers paid for if not to struggle thru such heavy exegesis?

Surely the preacher and many of his congreants with their , shall we say less than academic interests in exegesis, would prefer that simple assignment rather than to explain the discrepency among translations in , say, John 1:18:

*the only begotten Son", KJV
*His only Son,Liv Bib
*The only Son, RSV
*the divine and only Son,Phillips
*God the only Son, NIV
*only begotten God, NAS

But here we face the textual problem of whether "son" or "God" is original and the lexical difficulty of what "monogenes" means.
Much, much easier to simply insist that the KJV is an inspired version! Don't you agree Dave? Why make it difficult?

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Text

A good textbook is; J.W. Wenham. Elements of New Testament Greek. Cambridge University Press. There is a key available for it as well.

 

WOW! Greek sounds so COMPLICATED! Why not just hang out at your local synagogue and take refuge in the clarity and simplicity of ancient Hebrew? I understand that that's what Jesus did...

Nosborne

 

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Nice try, Nosborne, but no thanks. Hebrew was a killer to me.

While Jesus probably regularly
spoke aramaic , the New testament including what traditionally is thought to be the words of Jesus are given in Greek. The evangelical Christian believes that his Bible, ie, the autographa, ( of both "Testaments', if i may call them that) is inspired just as the Orthodox Jew ( as I remember, I believe, you are not) considers his to be inspired, the words of God. But the problem as above shown (in our funning of the KJV only brethren) is that translations vary. They vary partly because of disagreements re the meaning of words and grammar but also because we lack the originals..having only copies which often contradict each other in words used.

So the task for the exegete , Dave's goal, is partially to try to determine the original words used , the meaning of the more important words, along with the grammatical and syntactical insights in any given passage. This is a noble goal and he has my respect for attempting it.

I'm sure this is boring and not really fitting here, so I'll shut up, sorry

 

It wasn't boring as far as I am concerned, anyway. I knew about Jesus and Aramaic, of course. Talmud is written largely in Aramaic which has consequences...you're bopping along thinking you understand the argument then SUDDENLY you are at the end of the phrase and realize you're completely bewildered!
Well, of course Talmud has many terms of art and is confusing even in English.

Nosborne, JD

 

What? And miss the NT's big finish to whole story?

Cheers,

Dave

 

Thanks for your thoughts. For other readers of this thread... There are many reasons to study NT (Koine) Greek. It is important to understand how Textus Receptus (on which the KJV is based) differs from some of the earlier (and thought to be more accurate) NT manuscripts -- we do even have copies of the NT manuscripts old enough to be first copies of the gospels and letters to the churches. Another reason is that doctrinal understandings and cultural influences do influence translations into modern languages, so it's important to be able to at least look at the Greek text of the NT and understand the choices that the translators were faced with. For a straightforward example, just recently I was faced with explaining what "ransom" meant in the NIV's translation of Mark 10:45 -- a rudimentary knowledge of Greek is helpful for that. Another example is that the JW's New World Translation is decidedly Aryan with respect to the deity of Christ -- the meaning of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ loses much of its meaning when you deny that Jesus was God incarnate. (Of course, I still hold out hope of convincing my Jewish friends that true Christianity and true Judaism are completely parallel understandings of the same God, except for the Jesus Christ question.) Still another example would be that the KJV unabashedly promotes Calvinism -- try teaching people that they can choose to enter a covenant relationship with God through Christ and stop sinning when they read about "predestinated" in Eph 1:5,11. Yet, I ramble...

One of my favorite online resources for looking up the Greek text associated with English translations of the NT is at http://www.studylight.org. One can also look up Hebrew words in the OT. I'll report back if I find some other NT Greek courses available through distance learning.

Blessings,

Dave