Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
How to Cheat in Koine Greek
Author: Jane McLarty
Journal Title: PRS-LTSN Journal
ISSN:
ISSN-L:
Volume: 1
Number: 2
Start page: 169
End page: 175
Return to vol. 1 no. 2 index page
A large proportion of those who study Koine Greek at university are theologians for whom New Testament Greek is a compulsory option. They are not primarily linguists and see the language as a means to an end. For the teacher, therefore, the challenge is firstly to keep up their morale and make the classes as enjoyable as possible; then, to remember that knowledge of grammatical terminology may be nonexistent and experience of language learning techniques also lacking. It is important that students are enabled to see some reward from their studies as quickly as possible, and so aids to language work such as an analytical lexicon or grammatical analysis will help keep the student motivated. Web resources can also make the task of language learning fun, and provide useful aids for the teacher, whose patience, humour, and determination to get the students through the examination, in the end constitutes the best resource for the students.
I must start by confessing that I am a turncoat: my first degree was in Classics. Subsequently I worked in the City for five years, returning to Cambridge when I could stand City life no longer, to study for a two year M.Phil. in Theology. I soon discovered myself in demand to help undergraduate theologians with their Greek (I recommend Professor Moule’s Idiom Book of NT Greek as a quick conversion course for classicists) and found that I enjoyed supervising these students. Three years ago I was asked to take on one of the theology faculty’s New Testament Greek Beginners’ classes; last year and this I taught two classes and I am now Paper Co-ordinator.
I have some understanding of the task that faces these theologians since I started Classical Greek at eighteen myself, not unusual these days when so few schools are able to offer Greek. I had studied Latin since the age of twelve, and in preparation for the Cambridge Entrance Examination my Latin teacher offered me Greek lessons after school. I was full of excitement at the prospect of learning what I saw as an attractively “secret” language, and with one-to-one tuition, and of course building on the basis of all the Latin grammar endured over the years, we got off to a roaring start.
The situation for students in the Theology and Religious Studies Faculty is rather different—hence the title of this paper. Our policy is that all students must study a biblical language in their first year. The choice is Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, or New Testament Greek. Unsurprisingly the majority plump for Greek, and are roughly sorted into four groups depending on their experience of language learning. I teach what we call the Beginners’ group, i.e. those who have little or no experience of language learning. Consequently, for the first lesson of term many of the faces arrayed before me exhibit a sort of sullen apprehension at the thought of the ordeal that lies before them.
So, one of my major concerns when dealing with these nonlinguists is to build up morale. The technique I favour is a relentless cheeriness, which means that as term wears on one comes more and more to resemble Joyce Grenfell in one of her more manic incarnations. A fair proportion of the class are there simply because they have to be, and therefore I see it as important to make the experience as painless as possible, and perhaps even enjoyable. Even those who are interested in the language do not have the same attitude towards it as a classics undergraduate does; they are theologians, and see the language as a means to an end. Of course they recognise that being able to refer to the original will be useful when they are dealing with New Testament texts, but still their primary concern is theology or ethics or religion, and not the language itself.
After morale, the next hurdle to overcome is the language of grammar itself. I think this particular problem may diminish in a few years, as the government now prescribes some quite complex grammar training for primary school pupils, but at present it is still important to make sure you use no technical term such as adjective or adverb without explaining it. This is why the first items on the attached bibliography are there. The problem of terminology need not be a major one, so long as you are prepared for it and take care not to assume that students will know what you may think of as the simplest of grammatical terms.
So, after terminology, what are the difficulties? Simply using a lexicon can be a major undertaking. As a relatively late beginner in Greek, I still remember the frustration of spending five or ten minutes trying to track down a verb in Liddell and Scott. It was therefore a revelation to me as a classicist to discover the joys of the Analytical Lexicon, various editions of which are readily available for New Testament Greek. Every word of the New Testament is in it—you simply look up what you see and it tells you the parsing. Some may well feel that this is an unacceptable level of “cheating”, but the student still needs to know the implication of the imperfect, the perfect, the aorist, and so on, for translation. Moreover, for students who are non-linguists, it is important that they feel that they are getting somewhere and translating some Greek as soon as possible, since they do not have the love of language learning in itself to keep them motivated. In our end of year examination, students are given an extremely compact lexicon (not analytical) to use, and so we do practise the techniques of word finding in class.
Another point to remember is that non-linguists may never have learned any vocabulary in any kind of structured manner. This too is a technique like any other and can be taught. There are fun little programs you can download from the web which will suddenly pop up on your computer screen at random moments and test you on Greek vocabulary (I am not sure whether this is an attractive prospect or not). There are also books available that list vocabulary in the order of its frequency within the New Testament. I think it would be a keen student who used them, but they are extremely helpful for the teacher when assigning vocabulary to be learnt.
There is another step in support beyond the Analytical Lexicon and that is the Grammatical Analysis, which verse by verse parses almost every word in the New Testament and explains grammatical idioms. I must confess that the classicist still lurking within me is aghast at this level of help (while wishing I had had it for Aeschylus), but it can be a huge aid to learning if used as a support for the student’s own efforts rather than a substitute for them.
than a substitute for them. So far I have mostly dealt with printed resources—what about the web? Interactive on-line material can be great fun to use and I have listed a couple of useful gateway sites on the bibliography. There are grammar-learning sites where you can practise parsing. There are sites containing the whole of the New Testament where you can click on any word and have it parsed for you. There are invaluable sites for the teacher where you can define the grammatical category you want to see (e.g. second aorist subjunctive or third person singular) and you will see listed on the screen all the occurrences in a particular book.
I cannot resist a rather sentimental ending: all of the above are useful resources but the greatest resource is the language teacher, with his or her patience, sense of humour, and frank admission that the aim of the class is to shoehorn students through their compulsory exam as efficiently as possible. At the end of every year, I have students who come up to me and say, “I didn’t expect to enjoy the Greek, but in the end I really did.” One or two of them even decide to carry on with more Greek in their second year and this is what, of course, makes it all worthwhile.
The following is intended just to give a flavour of the resources available.
English grammar:
S. Russell, Grammar, Structure and Style: A Practical Guide to A-level
English, (Oxford 1993).
Readable and helpful section on “the grammatical structure of English”
L. Jones, Progress to Proficiency (Cambridge, 1991).
Aimed at foreign language students—very readable, good as reference
work (there is a teacher’s and a student’s edition).
Help with vocabulary and grammar:
Analytical Lexicon of the New Testament—there are editions by Mounce
and by Perschbacker.
Enables students to look up the form as it appears and get the parsing. Especially
useful for those who will be continuing Greek on their own (e.g. vicars!).
M. Zerwick, SJ, and M. Grosvenor, A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek
New Testament (Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1996).
Parses, translates difficult phrases, comments on implications for meaning.
C. L. Rogers Jr. and C. L. Rogers III, The New Linguistic and Exegetical
Key to the Greek New Testament (Zondervan Publishing House, 1998)
Similar aims to the Grammatical Analysis. Better laid out; but does not always
explain the points beginners find difficult. Useful references to commentaries
and other dictionaries.
Resources on the Web:
http://www.christianorigins.org
Maintained by Dr Justin Meggitt, University of Cambridge
The New Testament Gateway
http://www.ntgateway.com
Site maintained by Dr Mark Goodacre, Department of Theology, University of Birmingham
The author of this site describes it as “the web directory of internet resources related to the New Testament”. Its coverage is extremely comprehensive, ranging from material on Christian art and film to links to societies of biblical scholars, but for the purposes of this review, I shall focus on the linguistic tools available through the site (with just a brief survey at the end of the other kinds of resources covered, for those who might be interested to explore further).
The site is a gateway site, in other words, it is fundamentally a collection of links to other websites. A good gateway site saves the internet surfer a great deal of time by performing something of a quality assurance role: gathering together useful sites and telling you a little about what they offer. This site is excellent in that it is clearly laid out, easy to navigate, and gives a brief description of every link which enables you to home in on the material useful to you and also alerts you to any quirks of the particular site (for example: whether you need a particular font in order to view Greek characters).
The linguistic material is gathered together under the main menu option Greek NT Gateway, and contains many links invaluable to the language teacher and to students. Under Greek New Testament Texts are links to twelve (at the time of writing) on-line Greek New Testaments, plus Dr Goodacre’s “all-in-one” facility allowing the user to search several of these texts from one page. The site I’ve found invaluable in teaching is the late Tony Fisher’s on-line New Testament search tool. This will display selected chapters, and you can then highlight words with the cursor and have them parsed for you; or, you can enter a desired word or form (e.g. aorist active imperatives) and it will display all occurrences in a specified text, such as John’s gospel. A marvellous site for painlessly constructing handouts on particular aspects of grammar, such as the subjunctive!
The Learning New Testament Greek section has links to on-line textbooks and courses, to sites aimed at developing vocabulary, and even to sites which test your knowledge of Greek accents. Under Grammars and Lexica you can support this learning by using on-line resources such as the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon, or a Bible Dictionary keyed to Kittel and the TDNT. The beginner and intermediate student can obtain guidance on printed texts from the Bibliography section, which has links to sites listing and describing the major dictionaries and grammars. This is useful: often students who have taken a Beginner’s NT Greek course are given little indication of the resources they’ll need for more advanced independent study. Incidentally, the Bookshelves section accessible from the main menu enables the user to order on-line—Dr Goodacre states that he includes books that are recent, that have been recommended by others, that he has found helpful or that he thinks will be useful to those using the site. Featured books also appear at the relevant menu levels— for example, Mounce’s book on the Basics of Biblical Greek currently features on the Greek NT Gateway page.
Turning to the Language option, the student can obtain detailed “applied” help on the text—notes, parsing and diagramming. If after all this you are still foxed by a tricky verse, there is a discussion list focussing on analysis of the Greek New Testament and the Septuagint where you can converse with real live people.
Both teachers and students will appreciate the links to sites offering free software. The Fonts section leads you to a range of Greek fonts, many available free, an especially useful link for students. Under the Computer Software menu option is a range of programs—computerised flashcards, a Greek “hangman” game, and a particularly (to me) entertaining free program to be downloaded onto your computer, where it sits as an icon on the screen and every so often pops up to test your vocabulary. I described this program to my Greek class, and strange to say, they were rather less enthusiastic about the idea than I am.
I have also found useful another collection accessed from the main menu, Bible Translations, which links to sites offering collections of searchable translations, so that you can for example compare the King James Version of a passage with the Worldwide English New Testament. This is a great resource for producing hand-outs which get students to think about why translations vary.
I have described above only three of the main menu items— there are a dozen or so more offering links to material on specific New Testament books (e.g. on-line articles, discussion lists) and on apocryphal texts; your surfing can take you from maps of Paul’s missionary journeys, to a whole section on the Synoptic Problem (featuring diagrams and texts coloured to show their relationships), to on-line galleries of religious art.
Dr Goodacre’s site is, I think, an outstanding resource. Credit should also go to Viola Goodacre who has carried out the design work, making it a site that is both attractive and easy to use. I do have a warning for users however—such is the site’s range and scope that it is far too easy to wander in it for hours …
Return to vol. 1 no. 2 index page
This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
