Ben Zartman
Puritan Board Junior
I have been subjected much lately to the insistence that "Koine Greek allows for far more precision than English." The reason for that, according to these enthusiasts, is because Greek verbs have voice, tense, mood, etc., and nouns have gender and all that. They claim (though they still can only read Greek with an interlinear, and need a website like blue letter bible to parse the words for them), that "the Greek really pops out and means a lot more than you think it does" once you start paying attention to parsing and to sentence structure.
While not denying that learning grammar and sentence structure is good, my question is: does not English do the same thing? We have imperatives; we have possesives; we have prepositional phrases, participles, infinitives, subjunctives, even nouns and verbs! It seems to me, after suffering though a very basic Greek class, that all these things are pretty visible in English.
An example: "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" The preacher will spend fifteen minutes telling us that in the Greek it clearly states that we are emphatically to stop right now being shaped according to the world, BUT-a conjunction of opposite-hood; instead of that, rather than that, in the Greek "but" means so much more than "but," if only you knew Greek and could see that!- be continually present-indicative-imperative-whateverive-being transformed! Don't you get it?! If you could read Greek this would actually mean something! Well, to me it does. In English. Without diagramming the sentence. Am I alone in this?
Again, I don't deny the necessity of Greek proficiency for those writing commentaries or preparing sermons, but is it correct to insist that Greek is a more precise and more expressive language than English? Can English not be unpacked and parsed and worked over in the same way? It seems to me that if one were to learn English grammar (which I suspect many of these Greek enthusiasts never did--that's why finding out that Greek has grammar blew their minds), one could actually read the Bible in English and know what it says.
While not denying that learning grammar and sentence structure is good, my question is: does not English do the same thing? We have imperatives; we have possesives; we have prepositional phrases, participles, infinitives, subjunctives, even nouns and verbs! It seems to me, after suffering though a very basic Greek class, that all these things are pretty visible in English.
An example: "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" The preacher will spend fifteen minutes telling us that in the Greek it clearly states that we are emphatically to stop right now being shaped according to the world, BUT-a conjunction of opposite-hood; instead of that, rather than that, in the Greek "but" means so much more than "but," if only you knew Greek and could see that!- be continually present-indicative-imperative-whateverive-being transformed! Don't you get it?! If you could read Greek this would actually mean something! Well, to me it does. In English. Without diagramming the sentence. Am I alone in this?
Again, I don't deny the necessity of Greek proficiency for those writing commentaries or preparing sermons, but is it correct to insist that Greek is a more precise and more expressive language than English? Can English not be unpacked and parsed and worked over in the same way? It seems to me that if one were to learn English grammar (which I suspect many of these Greek enthusiasts never did--that's why finding out that Greek has grammar blew their minds), one could actually read the Bible in English and know what it says.