I never took Greek in college. I thought it’d be too difficult on top of school and work schedules. I thought I couldn’t devote the time required to memorize a new lettering system, new words and all those declinations. And of course to justify my decision I told myself it wasn’t important.
Sometime after college, however, I started recognizing that to take my study of the Bible to the next level I had to at least get a basic understanding of Greek. But by then there were no classes, no instructors, no tutors that could help me on my way. I decided to take the step and do it myself.
Just recently I picked up my Greek New Testament after studying Greek on my own and started reading the gospel of John.
Now I’ve spent countless hours studying the gospel of John. Reading books on the gospel of John. Writing on the gospel of John. I feel like I know John pretty well. I’ve spent more than ten years studying John. But with a matter of minutes of reading John in Greek I discovered something I had never seen before.
Over the last couple posts I’ve been talking about Bible translations. I hope you know by now that English is not the language the Bible was written in. Every English version is a translation. Every time you read an English version you are reading someone else’s translation.
There is of course nothing wrong with that. But as I showed in my first post there is something less than to be desired through reading an English translation. While you get about 90% or more of what the original authors meaning, there is that important 10% that you are certainly missing.
If you value the Bible and want to get all from it that you possibly can there is now no excuse for you not to take the next step and learn to understand it in its original language yourself.
It really does help with bible study. The problem doing word studies is that you never know which word to study. I used to look up words and find that they meant exactly what the english translation said they meant. WOW! That was special. In learning Greek, I found that a lot of the people who said a word meant something really spectacular – weren’t all that revealing. It’s like a magician who wows you because you don’t know what he’s doing. Learn Greek and you won’t be fooled but people who say they know what there talking about.
You don’t need to take a class. The internet is chalk full of resources to infuse you with the knowledge necessary for you to make a go of it on your own.
1. Write it out – over and over and over again. Doesn’t take long before you know the letters and how they sound.
2. Listen to it spoken.
3. Use flash cards.
4. Get
