This text is titled Reading Koine Greek, in part to indicate that it covers not just NT Greek but also the wider range of Bible-related Greek, especially the Septuagint (LXX) and to some extent the Pseudepigrapha and the Apostolic Fathers. The Greek of all these texts is very similar. Before you plunge in, either as a student or as a teacher, it is worth taking the time to orient yourself to the task before you and how this book is designed to help you accomplish your goals.
Students will encounter the textbook (and Koine Greek) for a variety of reasons. Some will enroll in a Greek class because it is required in their major. Others will take such a class because it fits their schedule—and they might be curious about Greek. Others will be classics majors who are interested in the ancient world; they may have already studied Classical Greek or Latin, or this might be their first exposure to one of the classical languages. Some may be linguistics students or language majors seeking to add another language to their comparative stock. Still others will be religion or ministry students (either undergraduate, graduate, or seminary) who are interested in the Koine corpus covered by this textbook due to their interest in the content of such writings (i.e., primarily the Septuagint and New Testament but perhaps also the Pseudepigrapha or Apostolic Fathers). Some in this group may approach these texts as repositories of ancient religious thought and nothing more. Others will view the NT and LXX as canonical texts containing divine revelation.[1] Any of these interests (and variations of them) may be well served by studying Koine Greek with this textbook.
You deserve to know that I write as a Christian who accepts Scripture as an authoritative text. I teach in a theological seminary where the primary goal is to prepare students for pastoral ministry in churches that acknowledge the authority of Scripture. I have not, however, made this a theology book. It is first and foremost a language textbook. At times you may notice (or think you do!) my theological perspective. Although I would be pleased if all of you shared my perspective, I realize that will not be the case—even other Christians would surely disagree with some of my theological understanding, though I would be surprised if such matters were conspicuous in this book. I will be quite content if this book helps you learn to read a significant body of literature. You will need to come to your own conclusions as to the significance of that literature’s content. In learning Koine Greek, you will be gaining the ability to interact with important texts firsthand. No longer will you be totally dependent on secondhand or thirdhand translations and commentaries. Direct access to such literary works is a crucial ability, whether you seek to understand some of these texts as authoritative divine revelation that you will then proclaim to a congregation, or whether your goal is an accurate understanding of the ancient world. The scholarship essential for either of these goals mandates that you be able to read the relevant primary source materials.
Why include the LXX in a book like this? Don’t most introductory textbooks intended to teach Koine Greek focus on only the NT? Yes, they do. There is, however, value in reading a wider corpus in your initial study. There is value in reading the LXX (as well as the Pseudepigrapha and the Apostolic Fathers) in Greek for the content of these other texts, even if your primary interest is in the NT. The broader scope provided by the additional texts helps you understand the thought world in which the NT was written. Likewise, if you read only the NT, you can easily end up with a fragmented view of Koine Greek as a language, since you will have isolated it from the cultural context in which the language was used.
There is a key pedagogical value as well: you are probably not as familiar with these other Koine texts outside the NT and do not have passages from them memorized, as you may for parts of the NT. That means that you have to be able to actually read the text, not just figure out enough to know what the verse is supposed to say. You will discover that the initial examples in each section are almost always from the NT, with material from other texts appearing later. If your teacher decides to use only the NT examples (and there is adequate material to do just that), you can later return to the other examples as a means of extending your abilities.
The workbook sections of this text (all the two-column examples) have been deliberately designed in parallel columns so that you can use a piece of paper to cover the right-hand column where English equivalents are given. Do not just read the right-hand column! Study the Greek text carefully in light of the previous discussion. See how much you can figure out from the left-hand column before removing the paper to reveal the right-hand column. If you make a habit of doing this, you will learn the relevant principles more quickly. The blank space to the right in some sections is not intended as a place to write an English translation (though some teachers may want you to do that). Rather it is where you ought to make notes or jot questions about the meaning of the Greek text. Producing an English translation is not the primary goal; the goal is rather understanding the Greek text and how it communicates meaning. Sections in which I have given a parallel English translation are intended to help you identify the construction or grammatical form involved despite the fact that you may not recognize all the other forms or the vocabulary in the text cited.
a If a current lexicon such as CL is not economically feasible, the best lexicon freely available online in pdf form is Abbott-Smith’s Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament. It is old (1936) but serviceable; it does not, however, provide definitions for Greek words, only translation glosses.
The pronunciation of Greek in its various historical stages is debated by scholars. Several proposals have been made. This textbook provides two choices. One is a form of what is called Erasmian pronunciation. This is usually selected for its pedagogical value, not for historical purposes. Some form of Erasmian pronunciation is fairly standard in academic circles. It is not what Greek sounded like in the Koine of the first century, but it has the pedagogical advantage of distinguishing vowel sounds, many of which have similar pronunciations in other systems. Some people think Modern Greek pronunciation should be used to teach Greek, but that is anachronistic and certainly not accurate, though it may be closer to Koine than Erasmian. Others have proposed what is probably a fairly accurate reconstruction of first-century Koine. One of the better-known proposals is Randall Buth’s “Reconstructed Koine” (for further information on this system, including audio material, see http://www.biblicallanguagecenter.com). That would be a better option than the modern system, and your teacher may prefer that you use it. If so, see the alternate pronunciation given in chapter 1 along with whatever supplemental materials your teacher may provide.
For students learning to read Koine Greek for academic or ministry purposes, pronunciation is mostly (but not entirely) a convenience. Personally I use a traditional Erasmian system, freely acknowledging that it is not an accurate representation of exactly what Jesus and Paul sounded like when they spoke Greek. If you were learning to speak Greek (either Koine or modern), then pronunciation would obviously be far more important.
More depends on the teacher than on the textbook when teaching an ancient language. Good teachers can accomplish their purpose with just about any textbook, but a good textbook certainly helps. I think you will find that this one offers some advantages over other choices that are available, but in the end, it will come down to your making the language come alive for your students.[2]
There has been a fair bit of discussion in recent years about how Koine Greek ought to be taught. Since I am stretching some traditional models, let me sketch for you the way it has been done, how some propose that it ought to be done, and where my approach falls among those models. The traditional approach (by which I refer to the typical approaches used in the twentieth century, though it runs back into the nineteenth century and earlier as well) has been very deductive: a set of charts giving grammatical forms to be memorized, some brief explanations of them, a list of vocabulary to memorize, and then a set of exercises. This final section typically consisted of “made up” Greek sentences intended to be simplified examples of what the student knew to that point. As a result, there were many sentences of this sort: “the angels chased the demons down the road”—not exactly the sort of Greek that you will read in real texts such as the NT or LXX. There also were frequently English-to-Greek exercises (of similar syntactical profundity) that resulted in students producing very mechanical Greek quite unlike what any native Greek speaker would have thought to say. When students had mastered such a textbook, they could read the examples given, but they had read little real Greek. That made a Greek NT or a LXX a puzzling experience.
In the second half of the twentieth century, one of the key developments that has impacted both the study and teaching of Greek is the rise of modern linguistics.[3] Several introductory Greek grammars have appropriated some features from this study. The first was Goetchius, The Language of the New Testament, an insightful text but too complicated for the average student (and the average teacher too).
One outcome of this linguistic study has been a push in some circles for the use of second-language learning techniques, that is, to teach Koine Greek the way modern languages are taught—which has also been part of linguistic study. The goal then becomes oral fluency. There are certainly some advantages of this approach. If Greek could be taught as a spoken language, and if it reached the level of oral comprehension, then there would be greater facility in dealing with written texts as well. A drawback of this approach is that it requires a total-immersion environment to reach a level adequate for a realistic payoff. Those who could afford (both time and money) to learn in such a setting would certainly benefit. If they could then figure out how to maintain that skill level when they return to a normal environment, this could even have long-term benefit. That, of course, is the rub. Since most students learning Greek do so in college, university, or seminary, there are some obvious limitations in terms of environment and curriculum. An oral-fluency approach requires far more instruction hours than is possible in the curricular offerings of most colleges and seminaries. Unless a program is designed to be a major in Koine Greek alone, I do not think it is possible to provide sufficient instruction to reach the level of oral fluency within the limits of an undergraduate major or a seminary MDiv intended for ministry preparation. Were an oral approach attempted within the usual majors where Greek has traditionally been taught, such an approach might produce a level of proficiency seen in a year or two of a modern language in high school or college—with about as much retained use several years later.
At the opposite end of the spectrum of approaches to teaching and learning Greek are those who advocate the use of technology. Now, I have no objection to an appropriate use of technology—I use a fair bit of it in my own teaching.[4] But adapting various technologies is not what some have in mind. Rather they propose that since we have such powerful Bible study software programs available that identify and parse everything in the text, we ought to be teaching students how to use this software and explaining what the various bits of information mean. Once again, I can hardly object to the use of the major Bible study programs. This grammar would have been impossible without extensive use of such software. Students do need to learn to make effective use of such tools. The question, however, is whether the most appropriate goal is to teach software for accessing information about Greek or to teach Greek, which may be studied with software tools. I have concluded that the better approach is to teach Greek first. Apart from a working knowledge of the language, there will not be an adequate framework for properly understanding the bits of information provided by software—and no ability to interact with the Greek text apart from the software. There will be a constant temptation toward an unjustified grammatical maximalism, a “golden nuggets” approach to the text that does not reflect sensitivity to how the text as a whole communicates meaning. There is considerable difference between having access to large quantities of data and having knowledge.
As a result, this grammar has more in common with the traditional approach than with other methods. It does, however, attempt to benefit from linguistic study. I have also adopted a more inductive, reading-based approach in which the student is reading real Greek from the very beginning rather than chasing demons down the grammatical road. This is not a purely inductive approach, but it embeds inductive elements in a deductive framework that introduces material progressively. Rather than a separate workbook, this text includes numerous examples in each section of each chapter with various degrees of explanation provided in a graduated fashion.[5] Each chapter ends with an extended passage of real Greek text.
These features mean that this book may seem larger than some other introductory texts, since it is in essence two volumes in one: textbook and workbook/reader. You should not feel obligated to discuss in the classroom all the material in every chapter. Chapter 6 is a good example; it is long, but you can safely omit some large sections of it and leave the rest for reference when it is needed later. The abundant examples are intended to provide students with adequate material to explore the language after they leave your classroom. I do not emphasize translation as such (though there will inevitably be some of that), but I try to enable students to understand meaning—and how that meaning is communicated grammatically in the text.
Another reason for the somewhat larger size of this grammar is that more intermediate Greek material has been included than is sometimes customary for introductory texts. That material is typically in the notes or in separate sections titled “Advanced Information for Reference”; this can be skipped when teaching at the introductory level. The reason it is provided is simple: I have found that students repeatedly and habitually turn to their first-year grammar in later years when they need help with a perplexity in a text. Though the answer might in many cases be found in the more advanced grammars, having some introduction in the first book for which they reach has its advantages, especially if the question concerns not just a syntactical issue but is related to the forms of the language (often not included in intermediate or advanced texts).
The examples and texts included are drawn primarily from the NT and LXX, though with some scattered examples from other Koine texts. The title, Reading Koine Greek, is not intended to suggest that it encompasses all Koine texts. It is rather focused on two of the major Koine corpuses related to the Bible. In the example sections that have a parallel English translation, there will often be words or forms that the student has not yet learned. Many of these are not glossed, either because they can be identified easily enough with a lexicon (e.g., the nominative form of a third-declension word) or because the English parallel makes it obvious what they must be. In other words, the student can usually figure out what it says even if they do not understand why certain forms are spelled the way they are. That is not a problem, and you need not think that you must explain every detail. So long as they can understand the construction in question, that is sufficient. Students will pick up a great deal of Greek without realizing it by reading these examples, so that when they later meet a particular construction it will already seem familiar to them.
Vocabulary assignments are included in almost every chapter in fifteen-word groups, a total of 465 words. The selection initially favors NT usage, though LXX frequency is increasingly weighted toward the end of the book. I have not given simply a list of English glosses—a traditional approach that, I think, tends to give students a false confidence of what words “mean.” Instead I have provided definitions along with the glosses. These definitions are not intended to be original lexical contributions or to represent fully a word’s semantic field. (For that, an unabridged lexicon is needed.) I have highlighted the major and most frequent uses based on NT usage, though with an eye on LXX data as well. I have prepared these definitions on the basis of the standard lexicons, particularly those that provide actual definitions: BDAG, Danker’s more recent CL, Louw and Nida’s pioneering work in this area (LN), and for the LXX, Muraoka’s lexicon (MLS).[6] At times I have tried to simplify definitions; other times I have incorporated phraseology that appears in one (and sometimes several) of these lexicons. Occasionally I have used a definition as it stands in one of them. My intention is not that students memorize these definitions (heaven forbid!) but that they read the definitions carefully as they learn the vocabulary.
A note regarding frequency figures: At a number of places in this book, including the vocabulary lists, figures are given for the frequency of particular words, grammatical forms, or constructions as found in the NT or the LXX (and occasionally other Koine literature). These are not intended as exact statistics upon which specific conclusions can be based. Their purpose is rather to give students some idea of how often they will see these phenomena. The figures used (which are sometimes rounded) are based on the tagging in the various text modules in Accordance.[7] Since there are sometimes multiple editions (especially of the NT) available as well as minor changes in later editions of these texts, the numbers may not match exactly what you find by doing a similar search, whether in Accordance or in one of the other Bible programs. The figures given, however, should be sufficiently reliable for their intended purpose.
You will soon discover that this book is written primarily for the student’s benefit. I have in mind students who are not at a given moment seated in your classroom and who do not have a teacher or teaching assistant present. It is in these homework settings that a textbook is most needed. In the classroom a bare-bones book with little explanation may suffice since it will be supplemented by the teacher’s art. The challenge is to provide the help needed when the teacher is not present to explain or answer questions. This perspective is also true of online courses, where the teacher is one step removed from student access. Though not primarily intended for independent study, the additional explanation may prove useful in that setting as well.
The student focus also accounts for the inclusion of English grammar discussions in many chapters. This is not because Greek is to be understood on the basis of English, but it is to enable students to understand the categories that are employed in describing Greek. Some of these features are nearly identical between the two languages (e.g., grammatical number), but others have significant differences or involve altogether new categories that do not even exist in English (e.g., the middle voice). This enables students to learn by comparing and contrasting the two language systems, relating new material to similar or contrasting elements in their own language.
A word on inclusive language: In areas of English where there has been significant and long-term change in the use of gender language, I have generally used language that reflects contemporary usage. An area where this is more complicated in a first-year grammar is the translation of Greek examples. Where a Greek sentence is best understood as referring to both men and women, I have tried to reflect that in the parallel English translation. But to avoid confusing the beginning student, I have refrained from gender-inclusive translations where it would have required rearranging or rewording the text. In such cases, I have used more formal equivalents and also generic he when there were no easy alternatives. This is most noticeable in the early lessons; as the lessons progress, I gradually introduce more alternatives, including singular they. But even in later lessons, some examples simply required too much “adjustment” for the translation to be helpful to a first-year student. In my own classes, I discuss the issues involved in gender language fairly extensively with my second-year students, but it is too much to address directly in a primer. You are welcome to depart from the translations I have provided as your own preferences dictate.
Other emphases not commonly found in traditional textbooks include a focus on the aspectual value and function of the Greek verb, the incorporation of current study of the voice system (e.g., the traditional, Latin-based system of deponency is not found here), and lexical semantics. Although there is not complete agreement on some of these issues, there is a general consensus that we now have a more accurate understanding of the language in several key areas. I have indicated my conclusions on such matters but have also attempted to indicate some of the unresolved questions so that teachers can adapt my presentation to fit their own emphases and conclusions. I have not included documentation for many such discussions (the bibliography is voluminous), but occasionally I note a key book or article.
More information on these and related subjects is provided in the Teacher’s Packet that supplements this textbook. That resource also provides numerous other teaching materials that you can adapt for your own use in the classroom. See the textbook website, http://www.bakeracademic.com/readingkoinegreek, or contact the publisher for further information about this resource.