Using an Interlinear

An interlinear Bible prints the original language on one line and an English word or two under each original word on the line beneath, so that you can see, word by word, what stands behind your translation. The idea is old. Students of Latin and Greek used interlinear texts for centuries, and teachers of those languages complained about them for just as long, because a student who leans on the English line can pass an examination without learning to read. For this course the complaint does not apply in the same way. The aim of this track is not that you will read the Greek New Testament fluently without help, though some of you will, but that you will be able to see what the Greek says and weigh what a translator did with it. For that aim the interlinear is the first tool, and on a phone it costs nothing.

There are two kinds, and you should know which one is in front of you. A true interlinear keeps the Greek in its own order and puts an English gloss under each word, so the English line reads like broken speech: 'make every effort yourself approved to present to the God'. A reverse interlinear does the opposite. It keeps an English translation in normal English order and attaches the Greek word, or a number pointing to it, to each English word. The first shows you the Greek sentence as a Greek reader met it. The second shows you which Greek word lies behind each English word in a translation you already know. Both are useful, and they answer different questions.

Blue Letter Bible, a free website and phone app, gives you both. If you open a verse in the King James Version with Strong's numbers switched on, you see the English words with a number after each one, such as 'Study G4704 to shew G3936 thyself G4572'. That is a reverse interlinear, built on the KJV. Beside each verse there is a Tools button; it opens a set of tabs, and one of them is called Interlinear. That tab lists the Greek words one to a row, with the English words each lies behind, its Strong's number, its dictionary form and its grammar. Buttons above the table let you arrange the rows in the order of the English translation or in the order of the Greek, so the one tab can work as either kind of interlinear. STEP Bible, built by Tyndale House in Cambridge and also free, lets you build an interlinear yourself by choosing a Greek text and switching on the lines you want to see.

Both tools also let you choose which Greek text you are looking at, and this matters more than it first appears. Blue Letter Bible offers the Textus Receptus, abbreviated TR, the printed Greek text behind the King James Version, and the mGNT, its Morphological Greek New Testament, which Blue Letter Bible describes as very similar to the Nestle-Aland 27th edition, a modern critical text. Its interlinear follows the Greek text behind the translation you have open: with the KJV it shows the TR, and with a modern translation such as the NASB it shows the mGNT. STEP offers several Greek texts, including the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT), the free critical edition this track quotes. In 2 Timothy 2:15 these texts agree word for word. In some verses they do not, and an interlinear will silently show you whichever text it is set to. Module 8 of this track deals with those differences; for now, simply learn to check which text your screen is showing before you draw any conclusion from it.

Websites change their menus, and a lesson that tells you to tap a button by name may be wrong by the time you read it. So the steps below describe what to look for rather than promising exact labels. If a label has changed, look for the thing described, and it will almost certainly still be there.

On Blue Letter Bible, in the app or at blueletterbible.org in your phone's browser, search for 2 Timothy 2:15 and choose a version from the list. Find the Tools button or link beside the verse; on a phone it sits at the start of the verse line. Tap it, and look among the tabs that open for the one labelled Interlinear. You will see a table, one Greek word per row. For each word, look for four things: the English word or words that this Greek word lies behind, the Strong's number, the dictionary form of the word (the root or lemma), and the form actually printed in the verse. Look also for a short code giving the word's grammar. Tap it and the tool spells it out in full. Above the table, look for the name of the Greek text being shown and for a way to put the rows in Greek order. If you opened the verse in the KJV, the Greek shown is the TR; to see the mGNT instead, open the verse in a modern translation and look again.

On STEP Bible, at stepbible.org in your phone's browser, type 2 Timothy 2:15 into the search box and choose a Greek text from the version list, such as SBLG, STEP's name for the SBLGNT. The list carries a key of letters beside each version; G marks a version tagged for grammar, V one tagged for vocabulary and I one that can be shown as an interlinear. Then open the display options, which sit behind a small cog icon at the top of the passage, look for the interlinear options, and tick the lines you want: English, Greek, transliteration and grammar. Tap any word and a side panel opens with its meaning, its grammar spelled out in plain English and a list of related words. On a computer, a quick summary may also appear when you rest the mouse over a word; on a phone, tap the word instead.

Do this now with 2 Timothy 2:15, before you read further, and keep the screen open. The rest of this lesson reads the verse with you, row by row. If your phone has no data at the moment, copy the Greek from this lesson into your notebook and come back to the tools later; nothing in this lesson depends on having both tools open at once.

The verse in the SBLGNT has thirteen words. It opens with σπούδασον (spoudason, make every effort), a command addressed to one person, Timothy. The dictionary form is σπουδάζω (spoudazō, to hurry, to be eager, to do one's best), Strong's number G4704. Next comes σεαυτὸν (seauton, yourself), then δόκιμον (dokimon, approved, tested and found genuine), then παραστῆσαι (parastēsai, to present), an infinitive that completes the command: make every effort to present yourself. The phrase τῷ θεῷ (tō theō, to God) follows, and the interlinear will often gloss it 'to the God', because the small word τῷ is the Greek article. English leaves it out here. Greek uses its article in places English never would, and with the word for God it is normal.

Then comes ἐργάτην ἀνεπαίσχυντον (ergatēn anepaischynton, an unashamed workman). The first word is an ordinary word for a labourer, used of farm workers in Matthew 20:1 and of those who work for the gospel; the second, Strong's G422, occurs only here in the New Testament. Next is ὀρθοτομοῦντα (orthotomounta, cutting straight, handling accurately), Strong's G3718, from ὀρθοτομέω (orthotomeō). Last comes τὸν λόγον τῆς ἀληθείας (ton logon tēs alētheias, the word of the truth), where the article appears twice again and the BSB rightly translates simply 'the word of truth'.

That is everything an interlinear gives you at a glance: the order of the Greek, the printed form of each word, its dictionary form, a number for finding it elsewhere, a one-word or two-word English gloss, and a label for its grammar. Each of those is valuable. The order tells you, for instance, that Paul put the command first and the word for truth last. The dictionary form lets you look the word up. The Strong's number, which the next lesson explains properly, lets you find every other place the word appears. And the grammar label tells you that σπούδασον is a command and παραστῆσαι is an infinitive, before you know enough Greek to see it yourself. Lesson 3 of this module teaches you to read those labels without help.

Notice what the interlinear has already done for you. You can now see that the KJV's 'Study' and the BSB's 'Make every effort' translate the same Greek word, and so can check for yourself the claim that this verse commands Bible study. It does not. The verb means to be diligent or to do one's utmost, as its other uses show: Paul was 'eager' to remember the poor (Galatians 2:10), and he tells Timothy, 'Make every effort to come to me quickly' (2 Timothy 4:9). The KJV translators chose 'study' because in the English of 1611 the word could mean to strive or be zealous. The application to careful reading of scripture is not wrong; the rest of the verse, and the whole letter, support it. But the command is broader than reading. Timothy is to throw himself into being a worker God approves.

The danger of an interlinear is that it feels like reading Greek when it is really reading a list of English glosses. Five things in particular are hidden by the format, and every one of them can mislead a careful student.

First, a gloss is not a meaning. The word under ὀρθοτομοῦντα on your screen may be 'rightly dividing', 'cutting straight' or 'handling accurately', depending on the tool. None is wrong, and none is the meaning. A gloss is a short English label, chosen by an editor, that is good enough to point at the word. What the word means in this verse has to be worked out from its use, which for a word used once in the New Testament means looking further afield. Blue Letter Bible's lexicon entry for this word, drawing on Thayer's lexicon, points to Proverbs 3:6 and 11:5 in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, where the verb describes paths made straight. The BSB of Proverbs 3:6 reads, 'He will make your paths straight.' So the picture behind Paul's word is likely a road or a line cut straight, and the sense is handling the word of truth without swerving from it, which fits the people in verse 18 who 'have deviated from the truth'. That reading is the one most commentators take, though a few have connected the word with cutting stone or cutting a sacrifice. What the evidence does not support is the use of this verse to teach that scripture must be divided into sections or eras, whatever one thinks of any system that does so on other grounds. That idea leans on the English word 'dividing', not on the Greek.

Second, the interlinear hides the grammar that joins the words. On the screen, thirteen words sit side by side as equals. In the sentence they are not equals. The command σπούδασον governs the infinitive παραστῆσαι; σεαυτὸν is the object of presenting; and ὀρθοτομοῦντα is a participle that describes the workman, which is why the BSB turns it into 'who accurately handles'. Its grammar label tells you it is accusative, masculine and singular, matching ἐργάτην, and that agreement is how a Greek reader knew which word it belonged to. An interlinear prints the label but does not draw the line between the two words. You have to draw it, and the later modules of this track teach you how.

Third, the interlinear hides how much the English line owes to a translation. On Blue Letter Bible the English attached to each Greek word is taken from a tagged translation, often the KJV, so the interlinear's English is that translation cut into pieces. If the KJV's choice was unusual, the interlinear will carry the same choice and make it look like a plain fact about the Greek. Fourth, it hides the editors. The commas, capital letters and paragraph breaks in a printed Greek New Testament are added by modern editors, since the earliest manuscripts had very little punctuation; and the verse numbers come from the sixteenth century. Fifth, as section 1 said, it hides which Greek text you are reading unless you check.

None of this is a reason to abandon the tool. It is a reason to treat what an interlinear shows as evidence to be weighed rather than as an answer. The honest rule is simple: an interlinear tells you which Greek word stands behind an English word, and gives you a handle to study it. It does not tell you what the word means, how the sentence fits together, or whether the translation is right. Those are the questions the rest of this track equips you to answer, and in every one of them the interlinear is where the work begins, not where it ends.

It is fitting that the first tools lesson is anchored on this verse. Paul writes to a young pastor in Ephesus who is surrounded by people misusing words. They quarrel over them (2:14); they produce 'irreverent, empty chatter' (2:16); and two of them, Hymenaeus and Philetus, are teaching that the resurrection has already occurred (2:18). Into that setting Paul does not send Timothy a new technique. He tells him to be a certain kind of worker: one who does his utmost, who is tested and found genuine before God, and who handles the word of truth straight.

Tools serve that calling or they betray it. A student who learns to open an interlinear can now do two opposite things with it. He can check, humbly, whether a claim about the Greek is true, as you just did with the word 'Study'. Or he can use the Greek on his screen to produce exactly what Paul forbids: a new quarrel about words, carried on with an air of authority that most of his listeners cannot test. The difference between the two is not skill. It is whether the student is trying to hear what the text says or trying to win.

So begin with a habit that will save you from much embarrassment. Whenever you notice something in an interlinear that seems striking, write it down with a question mark, not an exclamation mark. Then ask three questions before you say it aloud. Which Greek text am I looking at? Is this a meaning, or only a gloss? And does a good translation already say this, in which case the Greek has not told me anything new? Most striking discoveries in an interlinear fall to one of those three questions. The ones that survive are worth the trouble, and over this track you will learn to recognise them.

This track ends with a full study of one passage of your own choice, using every skill the modules teach. Each lesson in this module adds one piece of that study. Today's piece is to choose the passage and lay it out. Choose four to eight verses of the New Testament that you care about: a passage you will preach or teach, one that has puzzled you, or one your church leans on. A single paragraph of a letter often works best for a first study; a short scene from a Gospel works too. Write the reference at the top of a clean notebook page.

Open your passage in an interlinear, on Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible, and check which Greek text it is showing. Choose a critical text if you can: on Blue Letter Bible, open the passage in a modern translation so that the interlinear shows the mGNT; on STEP Bible, choose SBLG. Write the text's name beside your reference. Then take the first verse only and rule three columns down the page. In the first column copy each Greek word as printed, slowly, letter by letter. In the second write its transliteration as the tool gives it. In the third write the interlinear's English gloss. Leave space on the right of the page; later lessons will fill it with Strong's numbers, lexicon notes and grammar.

Finally, look at your column of glosses and your BSB side by side, and mark with a small star any place where the BSB's English seems to have no Greek word behind it, or where a Greek word seems to have disappeared from the English, as the article did in 2 Timothy 2:15. Do not try to explain the stars yet. Simply mark them, because you now know where to look. Copying the Greek by hand is slow, and that is the point: it makes you see every word, and it is the first step toward reading them.