Greek in the Study

This module is about what happens to the Greek you have learned once the course is over and Sunday is coming. Everything so far has been taught one point at a time: the alphabet, the tools, the cases, the verb, the sentence, words, the text. A working pastor does not meet the Greek New Testament one point at a time. He meets a passage, on a Monday, with a sermon or a Bible study due at the end of the week and a dozen other demands on the same days. If the grammar does not become a routine, it will become a memory, and within a year or two it will be gone. So the first lesson of the module is a routine.

Ezra is the right man to begin with, because Ezra 7:10 states the whole shape of a teacher's week in one verse: 'For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, to practice it, and to teach its statutes and ordinances in Israel.' The verb behind study is the Hebrew darash, to seek or inquire, the same verb used for seeking God himself. Before it comes the heart: Ezra had set, fixed or prepared his heart, a settled decision rather than a passing intention. After it comes practice, and only then teaching. That order is a rebuke and a relief. It is a rebuke to the preacher who opens his Bible on Saturday night. It is a relief to the student who thinks he must master Greek before he may teach: Ezra's qualification was not genius but a heart set on study.

Notice too what the surrounding verses say. The king granted Ezra his requests because 'the hand of the LORD his God was upon him' (Ezra 7:6), and again on the journey 'the gracious hand of his God was upon him' (7:9). Then verse 10 begins with for. The text does not choose between God's grace and Ezra's diligence; it puts them in the same breath. Every routine in this lesson assumes the same: study is something you do, and it is also something God does in you. A week of study that never stops to pray over the passage has misunderstood what it is handling.

There is one more thing in Ezra's story that matters for a student of Greek. When Ezra read the Law to the returned exiles in Nehemiah 8, he did not do it alone. The Levites 'read from the Book of the Law of God, explaining it and giving insight, so that the people could understand what was being read' (Nehemiah 8:8). The Hebrew word behind explaining is uncertain, and scholars debate whether it means reading distinctly, reading section by section, or translating into Aramaic for people whose Hebrew had weakened in exile; the text does not settle it. But either way the scene is the one every Greek student is preparing for: a reader who knows the text standing before people who do not, making sure they understand it. That is what your Greek is for. It is not for you.

Before the routine itself, be clear about the job the Greek is doing, because a student who expects too much of it will either give up or start inventing. The track description promised enough grammar to weigh a translator's decisions for yourself. That is a modest goal and a very valuable one. It means that in an ordinary week the Greek has three tasks. First, to show you where your translation has made a choice, so that you know which words in your English Bible are carrying a decision. Second, to let you check whether a claim you have heard about the passage, in a sermon, a commentary or online, is true. Third, to slow you down, because reading a verse word by word with an interlinear forces you to see things your eye slides past in your mother tongue.

It is not the Greek's job to give you a meaning your translation has hidden from everyone else. If you find yourself, in the middle of the week, discovering that a verse means something no translation has ever seen, stop. The translators of every major English version, and of the Bible in your own language, knew far more Greek than this course can teach. When you disagree with all of them, the likeliest explanation is that you have made a mistake. That does not mean translations are never wrong, and the lesson Weighing a Translation Yourself showed how to test one honestly. It means that the burden of proof sits with you, and that your conclusion should be written in pencil until someone who knows more has checked it.

A good rule of proportion: most of the week's study is not Greek at all. It is reading the passage many times in your own language, reading the book it belongs to, praying over it, and thinking about the people who will hear it. The Greek is a sharp tool used at a few points, the way a carpenter uses a chisel for the joints and a saw for everything else. If the Greek work is taking more than about a third of your study time, you are probably either over-reading small details or doing work the tools could do for you. If it takes none, you have stopped using what you learned.

Two warnings from earlier in the track belong at the front of your notebook. The first is from the lesson What the Tools Cannot Do: a word does not carry all its possible meanings into every sentence, a word's history is not its meaning, and a later English word that happens to come from a Greek one tells you nothing about what the Greek meant. D. A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies and James Barr's The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961) are where those warnings were first pressed hard, and every routine in this module assumes them. The second is from the lessons on the verb: a tense label is not a theology. The aorist does not mean once for all, and a present tense does not always mean keep on doing it. The Greek tells you how an action is presented. It rarely tells you how often it happened.

What follows assumes that you teach or preach once a week, that you have a phone with Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible, a notebook and a pen, and roughly thirty minutes a day. If your week is shaped differently, move the days; keep the order. Each day has one task. Doing one task well is better than doing all of them badly on Saturday.

Day one: read, and only read. Choose and bound your passage, as the Homiletics lesson Choosing and Bounding the Text explains. Read it at least five times in your own language, once aloud, and read the chapter before and after. Then write down, in plain words, everything you notice and every question you have. Do not open a Greek tool yet. The reason is simple: if you go to the Greek first, the tool will tell you what to look at, and you will miss what the passage itself would have shown you. Most of the questions the Greek will answer later are questions you can only ask once you have read the English slowly.

Day two: compare translations. Read the passage in three or four translations side by side, as the lesson Comparing Translations taught. STEP Bible and Blue Letter Bible both let you show several versions in parallel. Mark every place where the translations differ in a way that changes the sense, not just in style. Those places are your list for the week. Where translations agree word for word, the Greek is usually plain and you need not spend long on it. Where they part company, the Greek is doing something, and that is where your Greek time should go.

Day three: the interlinear and the parsing. Open the passage in an interlinear and work through it word by word, sounding out each Greek word as you learned in Reading Your First Verse. For every main verb, write down its parsing as the tool gives it: tense, voice, mood, person and number. For every participle, note its case, number and gender and ask what it hangs on. If two tools give different parsings, write both down, as the lesson Reading the Parsing Codes recommended; a form can be ambiguous, and the tools are interpreting too. By the end of the day you should know what the main verbs of the passage are, which is often the single most useful thing the Greek can tell you.

Day four: the words and the connections. Take the two or three words that the passage turns on, or that the translations rendered differently, and look them up with the lexicon tools, then look at where else the same author uses them, as Word Studies Done Right taught. Ask what range of meanings the word has and which one this context selects; do not choose the meaning you like best. Then go through the passage marking every connecting word, gar, oun, de, kai, hina, as The Little Words That Join Thoughts taught. Those small words are the joints of the argument.

Day five: phrase the passage and write the main idea. Write the passage out by hand in phrases, the main clauses at the left margin and the dependent clauses indented under the words they explain, as Phrasing a Passage showed. Then, and only then, write one sentence that says what the passage is about and what it says about it, the exegetical idea of the Homiletics lesson One Main Idea. If you have a commentary or study Bible, read it now and see what you missed. Day six is for turning the study into the sermon or lesson, which is the subject of Greek in the Pulpit later in this module. And keep one day free of all of it.

The short week. Many pastors who will take this course earn their living another way and pastor on top of it. If you have three sessions, not six, combine them like this. Session one: read many times, list questions, compare translations. Session two: interlinear, main verbs, the two or three key words. Session three: phrase the passage, write the main idea, check a commentary if you have one. That shorter routine still does the essential Greek work: it finds where the translations differ, it identifies the main verbs, and it tests the key words. It does not need more than an hour and a half across the week.

Here is the routine worked on a single verse, so that you can see what each day yields. The verse is 2 Corinthians 8:9: 'For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.' It is short, it is much preached, and it rewards every step.

Day one. Reading the verse in its chapter, the first thing you notice is that it is not in a chapter about doctrine. It is in the middle of Paul's appeal for the collection for the poor believers in Jerusalem. The chapter opens with the Macedonian churches, whose 'abundant joy and deep poverty overflowed into rich generosity' (8:2). So the riches and poverty of verse 9 are being used to talk about money. Your questions might be: in what sense was Christ rich, and in what sense poor? What kind of riches do the Corinthians get? Why does Paul call this grace? Those questions come from the English and the context alone.

Day two. Comparing translations, you find that most agree closely. The main difference is small but real: some render the middle phrase though he was rich, others being rich, and some versions word the end as by his poverty rather than through it. Write those down. They point at two Greek features you will check: a participle, and a dative.

Day three. In the interlinear the verse in the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) begins γινώσκετε γὰρ τὴν χάριν (ginōskete gar tēn charin, for you know the grace). Tap γινώσκετε and the tool gives present active indicative, second person plural, you know. Here is a lesson in itself: the present active imperative, second person plural, is spelled exactly the same, so the same letters could be a command to know. The tools choose indicative, and the context agrees, because Paul is reminding them of what they already know, not commanding it. But you have learned that a parsing is sometimes an interpretation. The main verb of the that clause is ἐπτώχευσεν (eptōcheusen, he became poor), aorist active indicative, third person singular, of πτωχεύω, to be poor. With a verb that describes a state, an aorist often presents the entry into the state, which is why translations say became poor; grammarians call this an ingressive use, and it is the context, not the tense alone, that makes the label fit. Then comes πλούσιος ὤν (plousios ōn, being rich). ὤν is a present active participle, nominative singular masculine, of εἰμί, to be. There is no word for though in the Greek. The translators have judged that the participle is concessive, that is, it states something that might have prevented the main action and did not, and they have supplied though to make that plain in English. That is a translator's decision, and now you can see it.

Day four. The key words are the riches and poverty family: πλούσιος (plousios, rich), πλουτέω (plouteō, to be or become rich, here the aorist subjunctive πλουτήσητε, ploutēsēte, you might become rich), πτωχεία (ptōcheia, poverty) and πτωχεύω. A search shows that πτωχεύω appears only here in the New Testament, while πτωχεία also appears in 8:2, of the Macedonians, and in Revelation 2:9. That small fact is worth having: Paul uses the same word for the Macedonians' poverty and for Christ's, which ties the doctrine to the appeal. The connecting words are γάρ (gar, for), which makes the verse the ground for what Paul has just said in 8:8 about proving their love, ὅτι (hoti, that), which gives the content of what they know, and ἵνα (hina, so that) with the subjunctive, which gives the purpose. Notice too δι’ ὑμᾶς (di’ hymas, for your sake): διά with the accusative means because of or for the sake of, not through, which is what it means with the genitive. And τῇ ἐκείνου πτωχείᾳ (tē ekeinou ptōcheia, by his poverty) is a dative of means, with ἐκείνου, that one's, set before the noun.

Day five. Phrasing the verse puts the main clause at the margin, you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and indents under it the content: he became poor, for your sake, though being rich, so that you might become rich, by his poverty. The exegetical idea might be: the grace of Christ is that he, who was rich, became poor for the Corinthians' sake so that they might become rich through his poverty, and Paul offers it as the reason their giving should be generous. Now you check a commentary, if you have one, and you find interpreters discussing whether the present participle ὤν means that Christ remained rich in some sense while he became poor, since a present participle normally describes something going on at the time of the main verb. Write that in your notebook as a possibility, not a finding, because a present participle with an aorist main verb can simply describe the state he was in when the action began, and the verse does not stop to define the riches. That question will return in the next lesson, on Philippians 2, where Paul says something similar at greater length.

Notice what the week produced. You did not discover a secret meaning. You discovered that the verse belongs to an appeal about money, that the main verb presents Christ entering poverty, that though is the translators' faithful reading of a participle, that Paul ties Christ's poverty and the Macedonians' with one word, and that one question you might have been tempted to preach as settled is in fact open. Every one of those findings will make your teaching more accurate, and none of them requires you to say the word Greek from the pulpit.

A routine leaves something behind, and what it leaves is a page. Over years those pages become the library you could never afford. Lay each page out the same way so you can find things again. At the top: the date, the reference, and where and to whom you will teach it. Down the left two thirds: your observations and questions from day one, the translation differences from day two, the main verbs with their parsings from day three, the key words with their range and the connecting words from day four, and your phrasing and main idea from day five. Down the right third, rule a narrow column and head it Confidence.

The confidence column is the most important thing on the page. Beside every claim you make about the Greek, write one of three words. Certain: the form is unambiguous, the tools agree and the translations agree, as with ἐπτώχευσεν being an aorist. Probable: the tools or the context point clearly one way but another reading is possible, as with γινώσκετε being an indicative. Possible: a reading that some interpreters hold and the grammar allows, but which you could not defend against a capable objector, as with the idea that Christ remained rich while becoming poor. When you come to teach, you will say certain things plainly, probable things with a word like most likely, and possible things either not at all or explicitly as a suggestion.

This habit protects you from the most common failure of a preacher with a little Greek: presenting a possibility as a certainty because it came from the original language. The congregation cannot check you. That is precisely why you must check yourself. The apostle's standard is the one in 2 Corinthians 4:2: 'We do not practice deceit, nor do we distort the word of God.' Distortion is rarely a lie; usually it is a probable reading preached as a certain one, or a possible one preached as the key to the passage.

Keep a second, smaller list at the back of the notebook: questions you could not answer. When a variant puzzles you, when the tools disagree and you cannot decide, when a word's meaning will not settle, write the reference and the question there. You may find the answer months later in another passage, or in a commentary you borrow, or by asking someone who knows more. Many questions on that list will never be answered, and that is no failure. Some questions in the New Testament have divided the best Greek scholars for centuries, and a student who knows exactly which questions are open is far more useful to a congregation than one who thinks they are all closed.

When the week goes wrong, as it will, keep the order and shorten each step rather than skipping to the end. If you have only one evening, read the passage many times, compare two translations, find the main verbs, and write the main idea. That is twenty minutes of Greek and it will still catch most of what matters. And if a week passes with no study at all, do not abandon the routine. Start it again on Monday. Ezra set his heart; he did not claim never to have been tired.

Your practical step this week. Choose the passage you will next teach or preach, or the passage for next Sunday if someone else is preaching. Rule a fresh page as section 5 describes, with a narrow Confidence column on the right. Then work the routine for that passage, one task a day, writing the results on the page. On day three, write the parsing of every main verb from Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible. On day five, write your main idea in one sentence. At the end of the week, count how many entries you marked certain, probable and possible, and write one sentence about what that count tells you about how confidently you should speak.