Keeping Your Greek Alive

Second Timothy presents itself as the last letter Paul wrote. 'I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time of my departure is at hand' (2 Timothy 4:6). He is in prison, he has been deserted, and 'Only Luke is with me' (4:11). Many scholars regard the letters to Timothy and Titus as written in Paul's name by a later follower, and many others hold that they are Paul's own; this course has taken up that question in the New Testament Survey track and will not repeat it here. On either view the letter gives us the portrait of an apostle at the end, and in the middle of that portrait is a sentence so ordinary that readers often hurry past it: 'When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.'

In the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) the second half reads καὶ τὰ βιβλία, μάλιστα τὰς μεμβράνας (kai ta biblia, malista tas membranas, and the scrolls, especially the parchments). τὰ βιβλία (ta biblia, the books or scrolls) is the plural of βιβλίον (biblion), a common word for a written roll, usually papyrus. τὰς μεμβράνας (tas membranas, the parchments) comes from the Latin membrana, a skin prepared for writing, and occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. φέρε (phere, bring) is a present active imperative, second person singular. The verse does not say what the scrolls or the parchments contained, and every proposal is a guess: copies of the Jewish scriptures, Paul's own notes, documents for his trial, early collections of the sayings of Jesus.

One proposal deserves mention because it rests on a small Greek word. The usual meaning of μάλιστα (malista) is especially or above all, and that is how the BSB translates it. T. C. Skeat, a papyrologist at the British Museum, argued in a short article in 1979 that in some letters of the period μάλιστα can mean that is or namely, so that Paul would be saying bring the books, I mean the parchments, perhaps parchment notebooks. Some commentators have found the suggestion attractive; others think especially remains the natural reading. The choice makes no difference to the point this lesson draws from the verse. Either way, a man who expected to die soon asked for his reading.

That is the lesson for anyone who has learned some Greek. Study is not a stage of life that ends with a certificate. Paul had been reading the scriptures since childhood, and he had been a missionary and teacher for decades, and he still wanted his books. The pastor who finishes this track and never opens a Greek text again has not done anything wicked, but he has let go of something it cost him a great deal to gain, and his people will be the poorer for it.

It is worth being honest about what happens to Greek. Many pastors who studied it at seminary, with a teacher, exams and far more hours than this course has asked of you, cannot read a verse ten years later. That is not because they were poor students. It is because a language is kept by use. The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, in his experiments on memory published in 1885, described what is now called the forgetting curve: without review, most of what is learned is lost quickly, and what remains fades more slowly after that. His experiments, and much research since, showed that each review makes the next forgetting slower. Greek obeys that curve like everything else.

The good news is in the same finding. Small, regular review keeps far more than large, occasional effort. Ten minutes a day, six days a week, is an hour a week, and over a year it is more than fifty hours of Greek, spread in the way memory likes best. A pastor who reads ten minutes a day will, after a year, be better at Greek than he was at the end of this course. A pastor who promises himself a long Greek session on his day off, and keeps that promise twice a year, will lose almost everything.

The second thing that keeps Greek is reading, not drills. Paradigm charts and vocabulary lists have their place, and the lesson The Words That Matter Most gave a method for learning vocabulary by frequency. But the aim of this track was never to recite endings. It was to read a passage with the tools and weigh what translators have done. So the daily habit should be reading real Greek, with help, and noticing more each time. The grammar you need will be reinforced by meeting it again and again in sentences, which is how you learned your mother tongue.

The third thing that keeps Greek is purpose. Greek studied for its own sake is easily dropped when the week is full. Greek used each week for the passage you will preach or teach, as in Greek in the Study, has a reason to be opened. If you join the two, reading a little continuous Greek each day and using the routine on the week's passage, your Greek will be fed from both sides. Martin Luther, arguing in 1524 that German towns should found schools that taught the biblical languages, called the languages the sheath in which the sword of the Spirit is kept, and warned that if the languages were neglected the gospel itself would in time be lost. A pastor will not lose the gospel by losing his Greek, but he will lose one of the means God has given for keeping it clear.

Choose a time and a place, and keep them. For many readers, early morning before the household wakes is easiest. For others it is the walk to work, a break at midday, or the last ten minutes before sleep. It matters less which you choose than that you choose. Put the Greek reading at the same point in the day as something you already always do, after morning prayer, before the first cup of tea, so that the one carries the other.

Choose where to begin. The easiest Greek in the New Testament is generally agreed to be the Gospel of John and the letters of John, which use a small vocabulary and short sentences, followed by Mark. Begin with 1 John 1 or John 1. Do not begin with Hebrews, Luke's preface, or 2 Peter, whose Greek is among the hardest. Read a few verses a day, not a chapter. Move on when the verses become easy, not when they become perfect.

Read in two passes. On the first pass, open the passage in an interlinear on STEP Bible or Blue Letter Bible, read the Greek aloud, as you learned in Reading Your First Verse, and tap every word you do not know. Say its meaning aloud. On the second pass, cover the English with your thumb or switch to the Greek text alone, and read the same verses again, trying to understand each word before you check it. If you can, read the same few verses again the next day before going on. Re-reading is not wasted time. It is how a text moves from the page into you.

Here is what three days on a single verse can yield. 1 John 1:1 in the SBLGNT begins Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς (Ho ēn ap’ archēs, that which was from the beginning). On the first day you sound it out and tap the words, and you notice that the same little word ὅ (ho, that which, what) begins four clauses in a row, so the verse piles up its objects before it ever says what it is talking about. On the second day you look at the verbs: ἀκηκόαμεν (akēkoamen, we have heard) and ἑωράκαμεν (heōrakamen, we have seen) are both perfect active indicative, first person plural, while ἐθεασάμεθα (etheasametha, we gazed upon) is aorist indicative, middle in form, first person plural, and ἐψηλάφησαν (epsēlaphēsan, they touched) is aorist active indicative, third person plural. Third person? You look again, and see that the subject is αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν (hai cheires hēmōn, our hands): in Greek it is the hands themselves that touched. On the third day you notice that the sentence has no main verb yet; after περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς (peri tou logou tēs zōēs, concerning the word of life) it breaks off for the whole of verse 2 and only resumes in verse 3 with ἀπαγγέλλομεν (apangellomen, we proclaim), so the BSB supplies this is the Word of life to complete verse 1 in English. None of that needs a commentary. Whether the change from perfect to aorist carries meaning is a question the aspect debates of the lesson Tense and Aspect would leave open, and your notebook should mark it possible. But a reader who has spent three days on that verse will never read it quickly again.

Keep a short list. In the back of your notebook, write each new word you look up three times in a week, with its meaning and its Strong's number. Those are the words your reading is teaching you you need. Review the list once a week. If you have a phone that can run it, the free flashcard program Anki can do that review for you on a schedule built on the forgetting curve: the Android app and the web version are free, while the iPhone app costs money, so check before you rely on it. A paper list works just as well, and needs no battery.

Join the reading to the week. On the days you are working the routine of Greek in the Study on Sunday's passage, let that be your reading. On the days you are not, read continuously through a book. Over a few years, ten minutes a day will take you through the whole of John, the letters of John, Mark, and much of Paul. A reader who has worked through those books slowly has a better grasp of New Testament Greek than many who passed an exam in it.

When you miss a day, do not try to catch up by reading twice as much the next. Simply read your ten minutes. When you miss a month, go back a few chapters and start again from somewhere easy. The habit matters more than the record. Paul's instruction to Timothy, ταῦτα μελέτα (tauta meleta, practise these things, be diligent in them), uses a present imperative, a command presented as ongoing, and 1 Timothy 4:15 gives the reason: 'so that your progress will be evident to all.' Progress, not perfection, is what is asked.

The tools named throughout this track are free, and they are enough for a lifetime of reading. It is worth listing them in one place, with an honest word about each, so that you know what you can rely on.

STEP Bible, made by Tyndale House in Cambridge, runs in a phone's web browser and as an app. It shows the Greek text with an interlinear, a parsing for every word, a brief lexicon entry, and searches by Greek word. It includes the Tyndale House Greek New Testament (THGNT), a careful edition of the Greek text published in 2017, and it offers other editions and translations alongside. Blue Letter Bible, also free on the web and as an app, shows Strong's numbers, the parsing, Thayer's nineteenth-century Greek-English Lexicon and other older reference works, and a concordance for every word. The two tools sometimes parse a form differently or choose a different text, which, as Reading the Parsing Codes taught, is a reason to use both rather than either alone.

The SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT), edited by Michael W. Holmes and published in 2010 by the Society of Biblical Literature with Logos Bible Software, is the edition this track has quoted. It is free to read and download, and its apparatus shows where it differs from other major editions, which makes it useful for the variants studied in Manuscripts and Variants. Older works now in the public domain can also be found free online: Thayer's Lexicon, Strong's dictionary, and J. Gresham Machen's New Testament Greek for Beginners (1923), a clear, old-fashioned grammar that many still learn from. They are dated, and modern scholarship has corrected them in places, so use them as help, not as final authority.

There are also free teaching resources that help a reader keep going. Daily Dose of Greek, started by Robert Plummer of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offers a short video each day reading and explaining a single verse of the Greek New Testament, free on its website and on video platforms. BiblicalTraining.org offers free recorded courses, including beginning Greek. These require a data connection, which costs money in many places, so download what you can when you have wifi and use it later. None of these resources is necessary. Each is a help.

One caution about all of them. A free tool is not a neutral tool. Every interlinear has made choices about how to gloss a word; every lexicon reflects the scholarship of its time; every edition of the Greek text has made decisions about variants. The lesson What the Tools Cannot Do warned you about the limits of the tools, and those limits do not disappear because the tool is convenient. The point of daily reading is that, over the years, you will depend on the tools less and see their choices more clearly.

Paul at the end was not only asking for his books. He was asking for people: Timothy, Mark, and the brothers who had not deserted him. 'As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another' (Proverbs 27:17), and 'a cord of three strands is not quickly broken' (Ecclesiastes 4:12). The single most effective way to keep Greek alive is to read it with one or two other people. A reader alone gives up quietly. A reader in a group is missed.

A Greek reading group needs very little. Two or three people who have done this course, or who are working through it, are enough. They can meet in person once a week for half an hour, or keep in touch on a messaging app where each records a voice note. Choose a book, perhaps 1 John, and agree on a small portion each week, three to five verses. Each member reads the portion daily on his own. When the group meets, each in turn reads one verse aloud in Greek, names its main verb with the parsing the tools give, and says one thing the Greek showed him that his translation made him look for. Then the group reads the portion together in their own language and prays.

Keep three rules in the group. First, nobody shows off. The member who knows most should ask the most questions and give the fewest answers. Second, every claim is checked in the tools before it is accepted, by anyone. Third, nobody is shamed for not knowing, for missing a week, or for pronouncing a word differently; the lesson Breathings, Accents and Sound showed that Christians pronounce Greek in more than one defensible way. A group that keeps these rules can last for years.

There is a further reason to read together, and it is the reason Paul gave Timothy: 'entrust these to faithful men who will be qualified to teach others as well' (2 Timothy 2:2). The best way to keep what you know is to teach it. A pastor who teaches two younger leaders in his church the alphabet and the use of STEP Bible, and then reads 1 John with them, keeps his own Greek alive and multiplies it. In many churches without a seminary within reach, that is how Greek will spread: one reader teaching two, and each of them teaching two more.

Your practical step this week. Choose your time and place for ten minutes a day, write them in your notebook, and begin tomorrow with 1 John 1:1-4 in STEP Bible or Blue Letter Bible, reading in two passes as section 3 describes. Read the same verses for three days before moving on. Start a word list at the back of your notebook. Then think of one or two people in your church or area who have studied some Greek, or who would like to, and invite them to read 1 John with you, three to five verses a week, meeting in person or by voice notes. At the end of the week, write how many days you read, and what one thing you noticed in the Greek of 1 John that you had not noticed in English.