How to brush up on your Greek

Breathes there a Rev. with soul so weak Who never to himself did speak: "I've got to brush up on my Greek"?

I came to the ministry from another career, and my only exposure to Greek was a 20-week semi nary crash course for those who, like me, hadn't already taken a two-year dose of the language while getting a degree in theology.

It was a good class. My professor was a first-rate linguist and teacher. Though I'm certainly no scholar, by the time I finished her five-month "intensive" I could—at least in the Gospels—hold my own pretty well with my maroon Greek New Testament, and I knew how to use the study tools to ferret out what I didn't know.

But then came my first church assignment—and what with the weekly scramble for a sermon topic, the phone calls, the visiting, the Bible study groups and prayer meetings, I began to descend the slippery slope down which most Greek students eventually slide. And when I arrived at the bottom I gazed back regretfully at the modest heights I'd reached while in school, when I still knew what kai and de and luo meant.

The idea of scrambling back up that slope didn't appeal to me—because I thought there were only two routes to the top, and I didn't like either of them. I assumed that either I had to rely on my interlinears and hope that George Ricker Berry or Alfred Marshall or Jay P. Green always translated correctly, or I had to pry my maroon Greek New Testament and my Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich lexicon loose from the shelf behind my desk, blow off the dust, and wearily get to work writing out word-for-word translations.

I was wrong.

There's a third route—a vastly easier one—you can travel to brush up on your Greek. I warn you, it's unconventional and it might cause a bit of uneasiness among the purists. But it has brought me to the point where Greek is not only fairly familiar again—it's actually injecting bright shocks of life into my sermons.

What I'm suggesting works best if at the beginning of the week you already know the basic topic or passage you'll be preaching on the following weekend. I found that getting back to the Greek was a lot harder when I faced the additional trauma of having to select a passage sometime during the same week I planned to preach it. The further ahead I know my Scripture passage, the more relaxed I am about taking the time for Greek. I've gotten into the habit of planning the basic schedule of my sermons a year in advance.

Now, let me tell you what has worked for me as I have tried to brush up on my Greek.

Invest in a couple books

First, I invested in a couple "tools."

Nobody gives me a sales commission on the Nestle-Aland Greek-English New Testament (NAGENT),¹ but I firmly assert that this book can be the key to recapturing your Greek. The NAGENT costs around $15, maybe a bit more in some bookstores, but it's a treasure. It is a small volume, measuring the same dimensions as the Nestle Novum Testamentum Groece but twice as thick. On half its pages it contains the text and apparatus of the twenty-sixth (latest) edition of Nestle, and on the facing pages the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of 1971 with an apparatus containing variants taken from the King James Version (KJV), the English Revised Version (1881), the American Standard Version (1901), the RSV of 1946, and the Catholic edition of the RSV.

So why should you spend $15 on this book?

Picture yourself in bed Sunday night. You've chosen next week's sermon passage, and you want to read yourself to sleep with it. You take your NAGENT and begin to study the RSV.

A word catches your eye. It seems unfamiliar, and you suspect it was translated differently in the KJV. But instead of reaching over and pawing through the books on your nightstand for a KJV, you simply glance at the bottom of the page. Sure enough, you see that the KJV shows a different, perhaps more archaic, word.

All right, what was this word in the original? Again, no need to trek out to your study to get your Greek New Testament. Simply glance across to the facing page of NAGENT. With a little guesswork, together with a shrewd elimination of kai's and hoti's and autou's, there's a good chance you'll hit on the word that corresponds to the English.

Do you see how priceless such a tool is? It's not only perfect for bed reading, but delightfully portable for carrying with you in your car.

Now that you've found your Greek word, or at least narrowed it down to two or three possibilities, what do you do for an accurate translation? Do you rear yourself out of bed, pad into your study, wrestle your Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich down from the shelf, and take it back to bed?

Not if you're willing to spend a bit more cash.

If you don't already have one, get a good manual lexicon. (Manual means you can actually hold it in your hand without straining your wrist tendons.) One classic that has been reprinted recently is Abbott-Smith's "Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament. It's light and easy to hold, and not only gives you an accurate English translation, but it takes an educated guess at the risky business of tracing word roots. It also informs you—in case you're interested—whether the Greek word you're seeking was used in the Septuagint, and if so, which He brew word it was translated from.

You may prefer instead Barclay Newman's A Concise Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament.

Photocopy the Greek text

Next I began the practice of photo copying the Greek text of my sermon passage to make notes on. I use the maroon American Bible Society's Greek New Testament for this because the print is larger. After photocopying the page that contains my passage, I tear off the dark edges of the copy and make several more copies of the torn square alone.That way I end up with the Greek passage squarely in the center of a white sheet of paper, with plenty of space on all sides for taking notes. Using the NAGENT and Abbott-Smith, I familiarize myself with the Greek. And when I make an interesting discovery in the text, I circle the Greek word or phrase and make a note in the margin.

For the next several days I continue to add notes or comments to this sheet. Then, at the end of the week, when I put all this linguistic study together with the theological truths I've discovered, I have the deep satisfaction of knowing I have come much closer to the actual meaning of the text than I may have otherwise.

My NAGENT, my Abbott-Smith, and the photocopied Greek page brought me to a certain level of proficiency in using the Greek New Testament, but the fun really began when I took on another challenge.

Teach a Greek class

After taking a deep breath, and after a bit of careful preparation, I taught a five-session "Fun With Greek" class for lay persons. This isn't as scary as it might sound. If you've studied Greek in a class room setting, you're already more than a match for someone who hasn't—even for a layperson who may have done some private study. If you don't make extraordinary claims for yourself, if you prepare your lessons carefully, and if you really stick to the basics (like how to pronounce the words, how to read and translate John 1:1 and 3:16, how to use a Young's or Strong's concordance or an interlinear correctly), you'll be safe.

There's more than one reason that you may want to become involved in teaching the basics of Greek to the laypersons in your church. For one thing, teaching does indeed increase your own proficiency—when you teach another per son, you learn a lot more about the subject than you would otherwise. Also, the demand for such classes is rising. In almost any religious bookstore, you'll find a card or two advertising Greek classes taught at local churches.

In addition, teaching your own class offers you an opportunity not only to explain the language to your parishioners but to demonstrate how our denomination's beliefs accord with the original Greek. And teaching such a class assures your parishioners and others that just as their surgeons and dentists and lawyers know their subjects on a far deeper level than the layperson, you too have plumbed the depths of your discipline.

Finally, as you instruct your classes, you'll rejoice with them as together you share the tremendous confidence today's Christian can have in the Holy Scriptures, which God has protected so care fully down through the centuries.

I don't think I was ever obsessive about brushing up on my Greek. I didn't forsake my other ministerial duties to concentrate on it- Using the tools I've mentioned, I just let it happen. And it really has come back to me.