Where to go from here

Greek Koine and Biblical and Medieval Greek
1

Hello!

I finished Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek and am about halfway through Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics and I had a couple questions I was hoping some of you could offer me some advice.

  1. For vocabulary, I have been making flash cards and am attempting to learn all the words occurring 20 times or more using Trenchard’s Complete Vocabulary Guide but I’m wondering if this is the best way to go about it. I notice there’s a cognate word groups section in the book and I’m thinking this might be better? Just wondering what you all have found to be the best way to learn vocab.

  2. Once I complete Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, do you have any suggestions on where to go from there? I’ll start working through the New Testament but I know that I’m not nearly ready to just read through it on my own. I have a Greek and English Interlinear by Mounce that helps at a high level with parsing but I’m wondering if there’s something else that maybe goes more in depth in helping translate. My learning of Greek has been entirely self-study with no instruction or anything so I feel a little lacking in guidance on what my next steps should be.

  3. Any suggestions of commentaries (especially from a Catholic perspective) that will give me a chance to use what I’ve learned? I’m not sure if this question makes sense but I started learning this just for personal Bible study and would like to know the best way to go about this.

I apologize if these have been addressed elsewhere I’m new to the site

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Thank you!

2

Vocabulary Acquisition by reading texts and seeing words in context.

I’m not a fan of flashcards. Reason being in 1990-92 I read J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida early work on lexical semantics. Also Moises Silva Biblical Words and Their Meaning, still worth reading. In 2001-2002 I read Reinier de Blois’ critic of Louw & Nida. Just recently read Dirk Geeraerts’ Theories of Lexical Semantics which compares Cognative and Generative frameworks. Michael Aubrey told me about this work. Flashcards don’t lead to language competence. Memorizing an English gloss or two doesn’t get you anywhere. Find a copy of Moises Silva Biblical Words and Their Meaning which is readable by people who haven’t the background for reading more technical stuff.

Is a diglot better than interlinear?

Reading with a diglot format is one step away from an interlinear. You don’t need to buy anything. The STEP bible has column view, interlinear, and interleaved formats. It also has three different presentations of lexical[1] information all linked to SBLGNT, NASB, ESV and several other bibles. So if you set up a two column display with SBLGNT + NASB you can read without ever opening a new window. The lexical information will display when you hover with the mouse over a word. If you click on the word a whole panel of lexical and grammatical information opens up on the right without obscuring the text.

This layout is so effective I have gradually transitioned to STEP and left Accordance behind.

https://stepweb.atlassian.net/wiki/display/SUG/Quick+overview#Quickoverview-Comparisonstranslationsinanylanguage:

https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=SBLG


[1] There are scholars working on the STEP word meaning (lexical) resources. They are updating and improving existing standard lexicons which are either in the public domain or have been donated by the copyright holders. These lexical resources will continue to improve over time. They are already very good. I seldom find any reason to consult the big books when I am just reading a passage in the GNT. I have all the lexicons and still consult them while doing exegesis.

Commentaries and the Historical Critical Framework

Once you get beyond devotional commentaries you enter domain of “Biblical Studies” which is an alien universe. You should find out something about the myriad issues about worldviews and hermeneutical approaches. It isn’t safe to just march into “Biblical Studies” without a map.

Books addressing biblical hermeneutics and exegesis are published too often to read all of them. I was amazed that Osborne, Grant R. The Hermeneutical Spiral became a textbook and went through several editions. It was not even a shadow of what it replaced, Bernard Ramn Protestant Biblical Interpretation. I have read several works by Kevin Vanhoozer and Anthony Thiselton. Vanhoozer is focused on “post modernism” and Thiselton reminds me of Carl F. Henry God, Revelation & Authority, (6 Volumes). If you manage to get through the prolegomena you will probably not want to read the rest.

Books critically evaluating Historical Critical Framework are often too technical to be of much use to anyone outside the academy. The history of the secularization of biblical studies is traced in David Laird Duncan The Canon, the Text, the Composition, and the Interpretation of the Gospels, History of the Synoptic Problem … others.

Difficult reading:

Thiselton, Anthony C. Hermeneutics: An Introduction. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Is There a Meaning in this Text? Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998.

More “accessible” books that I did not find particularly enlightening:

Porter, Stanley E. and Jason C. Robinson. Hermeneutics: An Introduction to Interpretive Theory. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

Köstenberger, Andreas and Richard D. Patterson, Invitation to Biblical Interpretation. Nashville: B & H, 2011.

3

Looking at the STEP Bible now and it seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. I’ll check out Biblical Words and Their Meaning as well. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels with the flashcards

Thanks so much for the info

4

biblical studies?

how about a detour to classical greek material that focus on reading like JACT or Athenaze?
the NT and Septuagint would be easier after much exposure to the classical reading so they say

5

I’m wondering if there’s something else that maybe goes more in depth in helping translate.

I thought it had already been translated.

After Wallace you should be adequately prepared, with the help of a dictionary, to read the original. (I understand Catholics are allowed to do that these days, and may even receive indulgences for doing so, provided they don’t harbor heretical beliefs.) I expect you already know what it says, which will make it easier.

6

I understand you said it tongue in cheek, but the prohibition was actually for reading unauthorized translations, not the original. And indeed there is a plenary indulgence under the usual conditions for the faithful who piously read the Bible for at least 30 minutes (Ench. Indul. Conc. 30)

7

The best thing you can do is read the actual text. I used flash cards a lot in my early studies of Greek, before anybody knew they were bad for you (sort of like smoking, I guess, although I never started that habit). I either made up my own, or before starting grad school, used the Vis-Ed series for Classical Greek. What I found was that having done so, I would not always recognize the word I had learned from the flash card until I looked it up in the lexicon, but then I would remember it as a flash card word, and that seemed to help me with it long term. But it was really seeing the word in context in an actual author that secured it for me.

So I suggest just read the NT, and read it over and over again. Read lots of other texts, both materials closely related to the NT (LXX, early church fathers and so forth), materials somewhat contemporary (Josephus, Epictetus), and good ol’ Classical authors. It helps greatly. Otherwise, you tend to treat the NT as though it’s some sort of artifact with no connection to the culture and literary traditions of the ancient world. There is something about seeing a word or a syntactical construction in hundreds of different contexts which really makes a difference. You’ll laugh at your friends who find Acts or Hebrews difficult. and you’ll also find out that extra-biblical authors have a lot of intrinsic value in their own right.