The Greek alphabet song: now with MORE COWBELL!

Pretty funny. It also uses the tune I've used to teach the alphabet:

(I would quibble about American pronunciation of the a's [as in bad rather than father] just a tad.)

h-t Andy Naselli

Getting started in Greek

I promised a post for folks who may be a bit daunted by advanced syntactical discussions. Here it is.

Teachers counsel different approaches to starting the study of Greek. Go through a grammar, learn vocabulary, etc. All of that makes sense. My own approach was different.

The Lord saved me when I was a senior in high school. I had been a completely undisciplined student. If a subject interested me, I applied myself... a bit. If it didn't, or if it was hard, I didn't.

My conversion ruined every career plan I had, and slapped my aimless worldview around, so everything was a-jumble. I knew I was filled with a burning desire to know the Word, do the Word, communicate the Word to others. I wanted my life to count for the glory of God.

A pastor I knew told me he believed I was gifted to become a pastor myself, and invited me to join the training school he was starting. I was overwhelmed. It made perfect sense of my desires -- but there was that whole study thing. The thought of hard, continuous, disciplined study was very daunting.

And particularly, I knew I'd have to master Greek. He stressed that. It made sense to me. After all, how could I teach a book written in Hebrew and Greek, without knowing Hebrew and Greek?

So I decided to get a head start. I got a Machen grammar, as this would be our text. From it, months before school started, I learned the alphabet—just the alphabet. How to write it and say it, how to read and say words written in Greek.

Then I went to our public library, and found the Greek section. It had a Greek New Testament. I sat down with it, figured out how to find passages I knew, and read them.

This was over thirty-three years ago, and I still remember it vividly. I strained to say those words. I think I even broke out in a sweat, it was so hard to begin with. But there, in John 1:1, was that word λόγος. I recognized it from other words like logic, and I think I'd heard the pastor talk about it. Then there was that word θεὸς. I knew that! It was like in theology! This was exciting. Before too long, I'd read my first whole verse, in Greek.

I kept that up as Greek classes approached, looking up favorite verses, picking out Greek word-equivalents. I continued the same practice as I began Greek. I followed along in my Greek NT during sermons. It made Greek alive and exciting to me. I picked things out that translations didn't quite communicate -- tenses, numbers, prepositional phrases. The more I learned, the more I saw. The rewards increased as my knowledge deepened.

And so, when I've taught Hebrew and Greek, I've encouraged my students to do exactly that. Don't wait until you've had a year of the language to start looking at the testaments. Get the alphabet down cold, and start looking at the original texts now. You'll start noticing things early-on. The study will start rewarding you, right from the beginning.

That taste will help keep you going when you get to irregular verbs, hapaxes, and prepositions with scores of possible meanings (did someone say ἐπὶ?).

This also gives me the opportunity to stress one more time the importance of learning the alphabet. I encountered the greatest resistance to this in teaching Hebrew, because its alphabet is so much stranger to English readers than Greek is. Too many students treat the Hebrew alphabet as if it's a series of coded symbols. They only learn it well enough to find them in BDB, not well enough to read them. This guarantees failure.

If you're starting, start with mastering the alphabet, and reading the actual Greek NT aloud. It isn't essential that you understand it at first; it is essential that you get your brain used to it. Then the rest will come much more easily.

"'Ere, what's all this, then?" (blog mission statement)

Turns out I have more to say than two blogs can contain... or so I imagine.

This, however, is the most narrowly focused of my three blogs. Here's what I'm doing.

My cred

I have been studying Greek basically daily for the last ~34 years. Not interlinears, not just commentaries or concordances, but the Greek New Testament itself. I've read the whole Greek New Testament many times, and individual books and chapters many dozens of times.

Though seminary-educated, I will not write as an academic. Rather, I write as a lover of God's Word, as He originally gave it in Hebrew and Greek. You don't love and read and study and translate and write about and preach something that long without noticing and learning a few things.

This blog is about sharing some of what I've learned, along with my enthusiasm and love for God's original Word.

My aim

I really don't have time to do another blog featuring only studied, edited, re-edited, and re-re-edited posts. So these posts will vary in content. Here's the range of what I plan:

• "Ooh, look at that cool syntax"
• "Neat wordplay. Too bad it's impossible to translate!"
• "Every English translation messes this up"
• "This will preach!"
• "Nobody ever explains or even seems to notice this. Here's what I think"
• "This is strange; what does it mean?"
• "This is usually translated X; I wonder whether it should be Z"
• "Here's a cool thing about this word"
• "Preachers often mess this up. If only they used their Greek!"

I hope that what I write will encourage and inspire every Greek student who visits. If you too have been reading Greek for a long time, I hope it will give you some fresh takes, maybe give you a friendly nudge towards being sure to notice and savor what you read.

If you're a pastor who left his Greek in seminary, I hope this will nudge you towards repentance, rethinking, and re-prioritizing. You, sir, are a professor of ancient Greek and Hebrew literature. You must know the languages if you are to teach the literature as a voice, rather than an echo.

Either way, they say enthusiasm is catching. I mean to share mine—and I want you to catch it!

My audience

I am only writing this for people who can read Greek, whether pastors or not. That doesn't at all mean that non-Greekers are unwelcome! It just means I'll be aiming at those who already know (or are starting to know, or re-commencing to know) Greek. So I really won't be explaining it for those who don't.

Being a pastor at heart (though not by employment, at the moment), I am likely to slant what I write towards preaching, teaching, communicating. But if you are learning the Greek New Testament, wherever you are in your studies, you will find something of profit in at least some of the posts to come.

And just pardon one more word. There is no substitute for learning Greek. Interlinears, commentaries, concordances—none of these things teach you the Greek New Testament any more than looking up a few words in Webster's means that you understand any given English sentence.

Your part, should you choose to accept it

There are a few things that you can do, if you would:

• Invite your pastor (or your fellow-pastors) to visit this page
• Announce it, and link to it on your blog or web page
• Email the URL to your maybe-interested friends
• Comment, contribute (—you can see that this has already been going on in the comment threads, below)
• If you're a Greeker, and want to, email me your own Greek observations. Maybe they'll make The Big Time!

That's it. I have a ton to share, in my head and in my notes. Should be fun.

Learning Greek: part one

I started reading Greek within months of my conversion. When the Lord saved me (which you can read about here and here), my career plans were in shambles. A pastor told me he felt I was gifted to be a pastor myself, and he invited me to start studying in the school he was about to start.

This answered to the deepest desires of my heart—but there was a problem. Greek.

I had never been a disciplined student. The teachers had always told my parents I had great potential, but it was unrealized. The reason for that was simple: I just really didn't care. I didn't care about my grades, I didn't care about the subjects in school. School didn't so much bore me as appall me, as a terrible interruption of my activities.

So I had developed no discipline, none whatever. I could read with fascination if interested, but could not make myself stick to anything.

Now everything changed with my conversion. Here was something I desperately wanted to learn—the Bible. But really studying it would take concentration, focus, discipline. And particularly, I knew that to be a pastor, I had to learn Greek.

Aside: I had no idea that so many pastors shrugged off Greek and Hebrew studies, felt them unnecessary and irrelevant, felt they could authoritatively teach a book that they were completely unable to read except in translation. Thank GOD for that ignorance. Would that more shared it.

So here was me, and there was the object of my desire, and in between was an obstacle: total lack of focus and discipline. What to do?

More, later.