One Suggestion For Keeping Your Greek

“Taking a year or two of Greek (or more) and not using it is like buying a pair of New Balance 993s and then running the rest of your life in your bare feet.” —Thomas W. Hudgins

Yeah, I just quoted myself. Anyways, after I dropped off my dissertation, I spent some time with one of Dr. Black's Greek students. Last semester, I really enjoyed the times I substituted for him in his Greek classes. You can see two of the classes here and here. We talked about how to not lose what you've been working so hard to acquire over the past year. While we covered a number of things that someone can do after a Greek course is over, one thing I recommended is carrying your Greek New Testament (GNT) everywhere you carry your English Bible.

You don’t carry it around to showboat. In fact, most people don’t even recognize I have mine with me. When someone sees it and says, “Hey, you know Greek,” or something like that, you can just respond—“I’m learning it,” “I’m trying to learn it,” or “I’m studying it.” Let me free you from what I believe is an unspoken law floating around: knowing all the vocab used in the GNT is not a prerequisite for carrying your copy around and using it every chance you get. I’ve found that having it with you as much as possible is as much a positive discipline for maintaining (and growing in) your Greek as, say, keeping up with vocab via Metzger or some other resource.

On Sundays, I always enjoy when our pastor says, “Let’s stand for the reading of God’s Word.” Even if I’m not very familiar with the passage in Greek, I have my GNT open and follow along as he reads it in Spanish.

This past Sunday I noticed something really interesting about the translation of ὁ νεκρός in Luke 7:15. Almost all the English translations have something like “the dead man” or “the dead boy.” In Spanish, however, no translation that I’ve seen has el muerto. Why? A dead man cannot sit up. Before he sits up, he has to be made alive. And so if he sits up, he is not “the dead man” but rather “the man who was dead” (or, el que había muerto).

The NASB has this: “The dead man sat up and began to speak. And Jesus gave him back to his mother” (Luke 7:15). The English translations actually show the transition from death to life by the way that they translate this verse. Spanish translations, however, seem to avoid any possible misunderstanding by rendering the phrase more explicitly. If the verse were translated, “El muerto se incorporó y comenzó a hablar, y Jesús se lo entregó a su madre,” one might (however briefly) stumble over the idea of a dead man sitting up and speaking.

The more common Spanish rendering, el que había muerto, is more emphatic and vivid. It draws attention to the wonder of what has just happened: the one who was being carried out, who was truly dead, is now alive and speaking. In this way, the Spanish translation arguably captures the marvel of Jesus’ life-giving power even more clearly.

At the same time, it raises the broader issue of translational tradition. Sometimes in translation, it is difficult to move away from “the way it has always been translated,” even when another rendering might communicate the sense of the passage more clearly. This was one of the critical issues raised during my dissertation defense with Dr. Black.

I’m planning to write in the future on the Greek word μαθητής and some of what we discussed during that defense, so please keep checking back. Another well-known example can be found in Matthew 28:19: “baptizing them in the name…” or, perhaps better translated, “immersing them [in water] in the name…” (βαπτίζοντες αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸ ὄνομα). I haven’t heard, but maybe the SBC is thinking of renaming itself the SIC—the Southern Immersers Convention. Naaaahhhhhh.