Dean053: My advice would remain the same - use Hansen's Greek: An Intensive Course, which is a first year grammar of Classical Greek. It has worked wonders for people, and once you get into the collections on Perseus, you'll find that NT Greek is relatively straightforward. Every grammatical point is reinforced through specific readings and exercises, and that is the way to go in my opinion. F. F. Bruce once said (and I wish I made a note of the reference) that you can't really know NT Greek without reading the literature of the wider Greek world.
My advice would remain the same - use Hansen's Greek: An Intensive Course, which is a first year grammar of Classical Greek. It has worked wonders for people, and once you get into the collections on Perseus, you'll find that NT Greek is relatively straightforward. Every grammatical point is reinforced through specific readings and exercises, and that is the way to go in my opinion. F. F. Bruce once said (and I wish I made a note of the reference) that you can't really know NT Greek without reading the literature of the wider Greek world.
Well, if we're going to 1st year classical grammars, my preference is Crosby & Schaffer which I used in college. It has a large number of excerpts from Greek literature and thus exposes the student to a variety of texts. The printing/publication which I used was not very good in that the printing was smudgey, but I believe the current printing is quite good.
georgegfsomsel
יְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן
I would second this recommendation. Hansen is very good. It was what I used a couple of decades ago when I began my Classics studies.
Fred GrecoSenior Pastor, Christ Church PCA, Katy, TXWindows 10 64-bit; Logos 7.1 SR-2 (Reformed Platinum)
Dean053:F. F. Bruce once said (and I wish I made a note of the reference) that you can't really know NT Greek without reading the literature of the wider Greek world.
What a quote!!! If you find where it comes from, please share...or I'll have to quote you...lol!
Is Mebin: Dean053:F. F. Bruce once said (and I wish I made a note of the reference) that you can't really know NT Greek without reading the literature of the wider Greek world. What a quote!!! If you find where it comes from, please share...or I'll have to quote you...lol!
A quick search yielded a quote - it's probably the one I'm thinking of:
Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon deals primarily with classical Greek, but no student of the New Testament can afford to ignore classical usage. I have met students who claimed to ‘know Greek’ on the basis of their acquaintance with the Greek New Testament; even if that latter acquaintance were exhaustive, it would no more amount to a knowledge of Greek than acquaintance with the English New Testament would amount to a knowledge of English.
So if a person took 4 years of piano and was well versed in the science of the instrument and the music but couldn't really play one, that would roughly be the state of colleges and seminaries graduating students of Biblical Greek, but they being unable to actually pick up a Greek book and read it or tell you what a word meant outside the context of the Bible. Is that too harsh? Or does our educational approach to teaching Greek need to be adjusted?
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Jerry M: So if a person took 4 years of piano and was well versed in the science of the instrument and the music but couldn't really play one, that would roughly be the state of colleges and seminaries graduating students of Biblical Greek, but they being unable to actually pick up a Greek book and read it or tell you what a word meant outside the context of the Bible. Is that too harsh? Or does our educational approach to teaching Greek need to be adjusted?
I wouldn't want to say it, but I've yet to meet anyone who has learned it that route, and frankly I would have to see it to believe that any even could learn Greek via the Mounce/Wallace track. We have to go easier on the memory - the memory is for paradigms and vocab - reading copious examples and illustrations in the target language is for imprinting it on the mind, not endless definitions and grammatical over analysis. I'd love the chance to teach some solid classical Greek in seminary and have students actually reading the NT within two years. It shouldn't be rocket science.
I would agree that the educational approach to teaching Greek needs to be revised with regard to the New Testament. While the discovery of the Oxyrhynchus papyri revealed that the NT was not written in a "Holy Ghost Greek" but was the language common at the time with somewhat different usages from classical Greek, it must not be forgotten that a great deal of the usage in the NT is carried over from classical. I would recommend that Greek instruction begin with classical and then proceed to koine with extensive readings in Greek of the period drawn from disparate sources. Reading of Greek from other sources is the key.
So, for someone who knows koine Greek, reads from the NT daily, and has many Greek works in L4 ( Philo, the Apostolic Fathers, and now the Perseus collection) where would be a good place to start expanding outside of the NT.
Jim L. West: So, for someone who knows koine Greek, reads from the NT daily, and has many Greek works in L4 ( Philo, the Apostolic Fathers, and now the Perseus collection) where would be a good place to start expanding outside of the NT.
While you should expand beyond anything too similar to the NT, you might start with Epictetus and Lucian in the process of getting your feet wet since they aren't too different from the NT language. Later you can expand into differing periods.
Xenophon's Anabasis. This is available in Perseus and is the traditional first "real" classical Greek work that students tackled.
Thanks to both George and Hapax. Both are helpful. I have both of them in Greek, in L4, and have read both in English, so at least have some idea of what they are about. On to reading Greek.
Alan Charles Gielczyk:I appreciate all the dialog, I really do, but I am looking for a first year grammar. I have all the intermediate grammars except for Porter's, and I am looking for something to go through and reinforce the foundation.
Wonder about reading Greek New Testament Insert => logosres:chapman;art=s.1.0.0
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