About Reading Greek Deeply

The goal of this book is to help you read the Greek of the New Testament (NT) deeply by harnessing the latest research in linguistics. More specifically, I want you to be able to read the Greek NT quickly and easily, understand what you read as the original audience would have understood it, and describe the grammar in accurate ways. As a higher-level goal, this book attempts to bring the world of linguistics to the world of NT Greek grammatical studies. This has been done to some extent, but a clear difference in literature can be seen by simply comparing the bibliographies of this work to others in NT Greek linguistics. I have sought to take the best, most influential theories of language and apply them to the study of NT Greek. Ultimately, the hope is that this will make for better exegetes of the text.

This textbook is also aimed at building fluency in NT Greek. While fluency is not defined consistently, I use it here to refer to the ability to use language quickly at a subconscious level. Although this is often associated with speaking (and speaking is an integral component of building fluency), you may be fluent at any of the language skills. Because the language this book is concerned with is bound up in texts, we focus primarily on reading fluency. There are, however, no exercises within the textbook itself. This is not because I believe you can become fluent without using the language – on the contrary, using the language is the only way to becoming fluent, but this is best done outside of the textbook itself. Each lesson in this book is paired with a lesson in Biblingo, a software platform designed to immerse you in the Greek language and culture so that you can become a fluent reader. If you want to read the text fluently, you must put in the time using the language. One does not learn the violin in music theory class, but in hours and hours of practice. While talking about Greek can be useful, it will not teach you Greek, just as a course in music theory might help you with the violin but will not teach you how to play. To learn Greek, you must use Greek.

It may seem like becoming fluent and reading Greek deeply are two separate goals. You can play the violin extremely well while knowing minimal music theory, and you can be a professor in music theory without being able to play the violin at all. However, that does not mean the two are not synergistic. Being able to play an instrument gives you intuitions about how good music sounds without the theory, but theory can still help you refine and perfect what your intuitions are telling you. Reading a text closely in a foreign language is much the same. Developing fluency gives you intuitions about what the text is saying, and as these intuitions are honed, the meaning of the text opens up more easily without analysis – just like you are (hopefully) not parsing and analyzing every word of this paragraph to try to figure out what I am saying. However, when the understanding of a text is truly ambiguous or obscure, employing a robust grammatical theory can help you resolve the ambiguity.

By and large, NT Greek language classrooms have neglected fluency for the sake of exegesis. This has meant that intuitions in the Greek language have not been nurtured, and it has resulted in exegetical mistakes that would not otherwise be made. The better you know a language, the more apt you will be at engaging in a close reading of a text in that language. This does not mean native speakers are always good at engaging in close readings of texts. The claim is that they would be worse if they did not know the language to begin with. On the other end of the spectrum, communicative Greek language classes (which are more similar to the Biblingo app) rarely delve deep into the grammar. This textbook is, therefore, not only an attempt to unite the fields of linguistics and NT grammatical studies; it is also a push for those serious about exegesis to incorporate fluency as well as a push for those serious about fluency to incorporate grammar.