Why Learn Any Greek?

The scene in Acts 21 is a riot. Paul has been seized in the temple courts on the rumour that he brought Greeks past the barrier into the holy place (21:28), the crowd is trying to kill him, and the Roman commander of the garrison has waded in with soldiers and had him carried up the steps of the barracks because the mob is too violent to walk through (21:35). At the top of the steps Paul speaks to the commander, and the commander is startled: Ἑλληνιστὶ γινώσκεις; (Hellēnisti ginōskeis? Do you know Greek?), as the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) prints it, with the Greek question mark, which looks like an English semicolon. The verb γινώσκεις (ginōskeis, you know) is a present active indicative, second person singular, of γινώσκω (ginōskō, I know). The commander had assumed his prisoner was an Egyptian revolutionary (21:38). An educated Greek sentence told him otherwise.

That moment tells you a good deal about the world of the New Testament. The commander was a Roman officer; his name, given later as Claudius Lysias (23:26), is a Greek name joined to the name of the emperor Claudius, and he says he paid a high price for his Roman citizenship (22:28), so he was very probably a Greek-speaker by birth. Paul spoke to him in Greek, and Greek, not Latin, was the language in which a Roman officer in the East did his business. Then Paul turns from the commander to the crowd and speaks to them in their own language, and the crowd falls silent (21:40, 22:2). Jerusalem in the first century was a city of at least three languages, which is why the notice on the cross was written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek (John 19:20). Greek was the one that crossed borders.

It had become so because of Alexander the Great. His campaigns between 334 and 323 BC carried Greek armies, Greek settlers and Greek administration from Egypt to the edge of India, and the kingdoms his generals divided among themselves after his death were ruled in Greek for three centuries. Out of the old regional dialects of Greece, chiefly the Attic dialect of Athens with a strong admixture of Ionic, there grew a common Greek that a merchant in Alexandria, a soldier in Antioch and a tax collector in Ephesus could all use with each other. The Greeks called it ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος (hē koinē dialektos, the common dialect), and that is why scholars call the Greek of this period Koine. When Rome conquered the eastern Mediterranean it did not replace Greek; Roman officials in the East governed in Greek, and educated Romans learned it as the language of literature and philosophy. Scholars commonly date the Koine period from about 300 BC to about AD 300.

The Greek of the New Testament is this common Greek. For a long time that was not obvious. Its vocabulary and style differ from the classical Attic of Plato and Thucydides that European schools taught, and some nineteenth-century scholars concluded that it was a special language, a kind of Holy Spirit Greek made for revelation. Then, from the 1890s, excavators digging in the rubbish heaps of Egyptian towns, most famously Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt at Oxyrhynchus from 1896, began pulling out tens of thousands of papyri: letters, receipts, contracts, school exercises, complaints to officials. The German scholar Adolf Deissmann, in Light from the Ancient East (first published in German in 1908 as Licht vom Osten), showed from those papyri that the words and constructions that had looked peculiar in the New Testament were the ordinary words of ordinary people. The apostles wrote in the language of the marketplace.

That fact is itself a piece of theology. God did not wait for a sacred language or speak only to the educated. The New Testament writers used a range of Greek, from the polished, literary sentences of Luke's prologue (Luke 1:1-4) and the letter to the Hebrews to the plainer Greek of Mark and the Greek of Revelation, which sometimes breaks the ordinary rules on purpose or by habit. But all of it was written in the language that the greatest number of people in that world could read or have read to them. The track you are beginning studies that language for the same reason the writers chose it: so that the word can be understood.

A word of honesty about one question you will meet. How much Greek Jesus himself spoke is debated. Most scholars think his everyday language was Aramaic, and the Gospels preserve some of his Aramaic words, such as 'Talitha koum!' (Mark 5:41) and 'Abba' (Mark 14:36). Galilee had Greek-speaking cities, including Sepphoris a few miles from Nazareth, and some scholars argue that a craftsman there would have needed working Greek, perhaps for conversations such as the one with the Greek woman of Syrophoenician origin (Mark 7:26) or with Pilate. Nobody can settle it from the evidence we have. What is not in doubt is that the Gospels that report his words were written in Greek, so the Greek text is the earliest form in which we have his teaching, and that is the form a translator works from.

There is a second reason Greek matters, and it is easy to miss. Long before the New Testament was written, the Jewish scriptures had been translated into Greek. The translation began in Egypt, in the city of Alexandria, where there was a large Jewish community whose members spoke Greek and were losing their Hebrew. The five books of Moses were translated first, probably in the third century BC, and the rest of the Old Testament over the following two centuries or so. The whole collection is called the Septuagint, from the Latin septuaginta, seventy, and it is abbreviated with the Roman numerals LXX.

The name comes from a story told in a document called the Letter of Aristeas, written probably in the second century BC. It claims that King Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who ruled Egypt from 285 to 246 BC, wanted a copy of the Jewish law for his great library, and that the high priest in Jerusalem sent seventy-two elders, six from each tribe, who completed the translation in seventy-two days. Later retellings, by Philo of Alexandria and then by some church fathers, embroidered it further. Historians treat the story as legend, but its core claim, that the law was put into Greek in Alexandria in the third century BC, is generally accepted. Seventy-two became seventy in the retelling, and the name stuck.

Why should a preacher care? Because the Septuagint was the Bible of most of the early church. When the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they very often quote it in a form that matches the Septuagint, and sometimes the Septuagint's wording differs from the Hebrew text in ways that matter to their argument. The letter to the Hebrews quotes it constantly. Paul's churches in Galatia, Corinth and Rome were full of Gentiles who had never learned Hebrew; when Timothy is said to have known the Holy Scriptures from infancy (2 Timothy 3:15), the son of a Greek father in Lystra (Acts 16:1) may well have known them in Greek. Here is a fact worth pausing on: the apostles regularly preached from a translation, and the Spirit did not hold that against them.

The Septuagint matters for vocabulary too. Many of the New Testament's most important words had already been given their religious sense by two or three centuries of Jewish use in the Greek Bible. In the Septuagint as the early church read it, κύριος (kyrios, lord) stands where the Hebrew has the divine name, so that when Paul calls Jesus κύριος he is using the word that his Greek Bible used for the God of Israel. (A few early Jewish copies wrote the divine name itself in Hebrew letters instead, and scholars debate which practice the first translators followed; the church's Greek Bible read κύριος.) The translators used Χριστός (Christos, anointed one) to translate the Hebrew word for an anointed king or priest, which is where Messiah comes from. They used ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia, assembly) for the assembly of Israel. A word study that looks only at classical Greek authors and skips the Septuagint has left out the dictionary the apostles actually grew up with. You will learn in Module 2 how to see Septuagint usage in the free tools.

One caution belongs here. The Septuagint is not one translation made at one time by one team, and its books vary a great deal: some are very literal, some are free, and in a few books, Jeremiah most famously, it reflects a Hebrew text noticeably different from the one in our Hebrew Bibles. Scholars still debate how the Greek and Hebrew traditions relate in those books. A student does not need to settle any of that to use the point that matters for this track: the Greek of the New Testament was shaped by the Greek of the Old, and the writers expected their readers to hear the echoes.

This track will not make you a Greek scholar, and it does not pretend to. It aims at something more useful for a pastor with a phone and no library: enough Greek to see what a translator has done, and to say why. That is a modest goal and a real one. Here are four things a little Greek, used with free tools, can do for you within this year.

First, it lets you see what English hides. English uses the same word, you, for one person and for many. Greek does not. In Luke 22:31 Jesus tells Simon that Satan has asked to sift them like wheat, and the Greek pronoun is ὑμᾶς (hymas, you, plural): all the disciples are in danger. In the next verse he says he has prayed περὶ σοῦ (peri sou, for you, singular): for Simon in particular, who will deny him and then strengthen the others. The BSB, to its credit, prints 'all of you' in verse 31 and 'for you, Simon' in verse 32, so a careful reader of the BSB can see it. Many translations cannot show it at all. Or take 1 Corinthians 3:16, 'you yourselves are God's temple.' The verb is ἐστε (este, you are), second person plural, and the Spirit dwells ἐν ὑμῖν (en hymin, in you, plural). Paul is speaking about the congregation together as God's temple, and the warning in verse 17 is a warning against wrecking a church. A preacher who knows that preaches the verse differently.

Second, it lets you see when one English word stands for several Greek words, or one Greek word for several English ones. The inquiry showed you two Greek words behind the English 'Greek'. In later modules you will meet bigger cases: English love for several Greek words, English word for logos and rhēma, and the reverse case where one family of Greek words, all built on the same stem, comes out in English as justify in one verse, righteous in another and righteousness in a third, so that an English reader cannot see that Paul is hammering on one idea. Seeing the repetition is often seeing the argument.

Third, it lets you find where the translations are making a decision. When you lay the BSB beside the KJV and two or three other versions and they disagree, a little Greek lets you open the interlinear and find out whether they are reading a different Greek text, choosing a different meaning of the same word, or taking the grammar a different way. You will not always be able to decide who is right. You will be able to say what the question is, which is more than most people in your congregation can, and more honest than pretending there is no question.

Fourth, it opens the commentaries. Good commentaries, including the free older ones on Blue Letter Bible and STEP Bible, discuss Greek words and grammar constantly. Without the alphabet and a few terms, those paragraphs are a wall. With them, you can follow the argument, check it against the text yourself, and notice when a commentator is guessing. A student who can read the parsing a tool gives him, and knows what an aorist or a genitive is, can use resources that were written for seminary students and are now free on a phone.

Alexander Pope wrote in 1711, in his Essay on Criticism, that 'A little learning is a dang'rous thing.' He might have been describing the pulpit. More bad teaching has come into the church through a little Greek used with confidence than through no Greek at all, because the speaker sounds learned and the congregation cannot check. You have probably heard some of it. The word for power in Romans 1:16, δύναμις (dynamis, power), is said to mean dynamite, when dynamite was named after the Greek word by Alfred Nobel in 1867, eighteen centuries after Paul's readers first heard the word. The word ἀγάπη (agapē, love) is said to be a special divine word for a love only God has, when the Septuagint uses the noun and its verb for Amnon's lust for his half-sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13:15), and the New Testament uses the verb for Demas loving this present world (2 Timothy 4:10). The aorist tense is said to mean once for all, when it means nothing of the kind, as Module 4 will show. Each claim sounds like a discovery and each is simply false.

D. A. Carson's book Exegetical Fallacies (first published in 1984) catalogues these mistakes and many more, and the Scottish scholar James Barr laid the groundwork for the critique in The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961). Module 2 will teach the main fallacies by name. For now, take the general lesson. A word does not carry a hidden treasure of meaning that its translators missed. It has a range of ordinary uses, and in each sentence the context selects one. The preacher who finds a meaning in the Greek that no translation shows has, in almost every case, found a mistake.

A little Greek also cannot overturn the translators. Every major English translation was made by a committee of people who have read Greek daily for decades, who argued about every hard verse, and who wrote down the choices in their footnotes. If you think they have all missed something obvious, the likeliest explanation is that you have. That does not mean translations are beyond question; they disagree with each other, and Module 8 teaches you to weigh their disagreements. It means that the right posture for a student with a little Greek is to ask why the translators chose what they chose, not to announce that they got it wrong.

And a little Greek cannot replace reading the Bible in your own language. The Greek text tells you what the words are. It does not tell you, by itself, what the passage is doing, how it fits its book, or what it asks of your church; those are the questions of interpretation, and a person who reads no Greek at all can do them very well with a good translation, as the church has done for most of its history. If your congregation reads Swahili, Hausa, Portuguese or Tagalog, the Greek is a tool for helping them hear their own Bible better, not a reason to make them feel that their Bible is second best.

The phrase 'the Greek says' does a particular thing in a sermon. It moves authority from the text, which everyone in the room can read, to the preacher, who alone can read the Greek. Sometimes that is necessary, when the English genuinely hides something that matters. More often it is a way of winning an argument or impressing a congregation, and the hearers learn the wrong lesson: that the Bible in their hands cannot be trusted without an expert. The Reformers translated the scriptures into the languages of the people precisely so that ploughboys could read them; a preacher who uses Greek to take the Bible back out of their hands has missed the point of learning it.

So here is a working rule for this track. When the Greek helps, say what the text shows, in words the congregation can check. Not 'the Greek really means', but 'in Luke 22:31 the word you is plural; Jesus is talking to all of them, and the BSB shows that by saying all of you.' Name what you saw, point to where they can see it in their own Bible if they can, and move on. If what you saw is debated, say that it is debated. If the translations disagree, say that they disagree and why. The congregation should leave trusting their Bibles more, not less.

There is a deeper humility too. Greek was not a holy language. It was the language of Caesar's tax receipts, of Egyptian marriage contracts, of slave sales and of letters home from soldiers. God chose it for the New Testament because ordinary people spoke it, and he has since let that word be translated into thousands of languages, starting with Latin, Syriac and Coptic in the first centuries. Paul himself wrote that he would rather speak five words with understanding than ten thousand that nobody could follow (1 Corinthians 14:19). The goal of learning Greek is that understanding, in your hearers more than in yourself.

Finally, an honest word about what this track asks of you. Learning even a little of a dead language takes steady work: some minutes every day, most days, for months. The alphabet will take you a week or two. Reading slowly with the tools will take this whole track. You will make mistakes, and some of them you will make in front of people. That is fine, if you are honest about what you know and do not claim more. A pastor who says 'I am still learning this, but here is what I can see' teaches his congregation something about humility that is worth more than any Greek word he explains.

This track ends with a full study of one passage of your choice, done with every skill you will learn, and each lesson's practical step builds toward it. You need three things: a notebook kept only for Greek, the free tools on your phone, and the passage. Begin all three this week.

First, the notebook. Take a notebook, or a section of one, and write on the first page: My Greek notebook. Leave the next two pages blank; in the next two lessons you will copy the alphabet there by hand. On the fourth page write: My passage. Everything you learn in this track will end up on pages that come after it.

Second, the tools. Install the Blue Letter Bible app from your phone's app store, or open blueletterbible.org in your phone's browser; both are free. Then open stepbible.org in your browser as well; STEP Bible is made by Tyndale House in Cambridge and is free. In Blue Letter Bible, find Acts 21:37, tap the verse, and choose the interlinear or tools option (the menu wording differs a little between the app and the website). You will see the Greek words with English under them. Find Ἑλληνιστί, the word for 'in Greek'. Copy it carefully into your notebook, letter by letter, with the transliteration and the English gloss the tool gives you. Do the same in STEP Bible, where tapping or hovering on an English word shows the Greek behind it. Do not worry yet that you cannot read the letters. You will be able to in two weeks.

Third, the passage. Choose a passage of between five and twelve verses from the New Testament that you expect to preach or teach in the coming months, or one that matters to your church: a paragraph from a letter, a short story from a Gospel, a section of a sermon of Jesus. Do not choose a passage you have already decided what to say about; choose one you want to understand better. Write its reference at the top of the My passage page, and copy the passage out in full from the BSB, or from the translation your church reads. You may change your choice in the next few weeks, but by the end of this module you should have settled on one.

Last, go back to what you wrote in the final inquiry question, the 'Greek really means' claim you once heard. Write it under the heading Claims to test, on the last page of the notebook. You will not be able to check it yet. By the end of Module 2 you will, and you may find it was right, or partly right, or wrong. Whichever it turns out to be, you will know why, and that is the whole aim of this track.