[B-Greek] relative value of re-reading the Greek NT versus following the advice of Conrad and Buth

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sun Feb 24 07:37:24 EST 2008


On Feb 23, 2008, at 11:36 PM, James Ernest wrote:

> Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com> asked:
>
>> Is there anybody out there who ignores Conrad and Buth and
>> just reads the Greek NT and feels this is working?
>
> I'm sure that there is, and that the feeling is delusional.
>
> Well, I could and maybe should qualify that pronouncement, but  
> instead I'll
> move on to what I wanted to throw in, which is this: whether it's  
> reading NT
> or reading other Greek or getting oral/aural, I suspect that Greek  
> learning
> is like geology, or Stephen Jay Gould's notion of evolutionary  
> progress: for
> moving from one level to the next, steady progress is not what will  
> get you
> there. It will take the equivalent of an earthquake or a mutation-- 
> whether
> that's a 4-week total-immersion ulpan, or a year or two of slogging
> through Euripides and Plato and Herodotus in MA courses, or  
> something else I
> haven't thought of.
>
> If that's a depressing thought--well, maybe I'm wrong. (Am I?)

I won't try to respond to Mark Lightman's message in toto, but I might  
offer a comment or two on the fundamental question:
(1) I don't really believe that it takes an earthquake or a mutation  
to give one a real mastery of Greek; what it takes is more intense and  
sustained effort on the part of one endeavoring to achieve it. But  
even that effort must be methodical rather than haphazard. I've  
described my own process of slogging through Homer hour after hour,  
night after night, and the exhilaration upon coming, eventually, to  
reading line after line of text -- not so much effortlessly, as  
confidently and with understanding. I think that one must do this  
slogging with each new author one tackles, to some extent --  
particularly an author with a distinctive style and a distinctive  
lexical range. And, as I've said recently with regard to use of the  
lexicon while reading, one needs to take pains with lexicon entries  
and not just scan them quickly for the gloss that will permit one to  
go on with the passage currently being read: one needs to take pains  
with the recurrent words that have significant nuances in different  
contexts. As for the reading itself, I remain convinced that the more  
one keeps reading Greek that is unfamiliar or less familiar, the  
better equipped one will be to come back and read the GNT again.

(2) Another key element in this problem and its solution (how to  
achieve mastery of Greek), it seems to me, is the extent to which  
analytical investigation of the text is primary or secondary. At the  
textbook level this is a matter of (a) the traditional method of new  
lessons introducing new vocabulary, new grammar items, and a few  
context-less sentences or phrases illustrating the new construction(s)  
and employing the new vocabulary -- vs. (b) new lessons built around  
extensive texts of connected prose (or verse) while having at hand the  
lexical and syntactical aids that will assist mastery of those texts.  
The traditional approach focuses on analytical skills: memorization of  
paradigms for declension of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives and  
conjugation of verbs -- parsing of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and  
verbs -- identification of categories and subcategories of case or  
tense or mood usage. I don't say that the analytical process is  
worthless but that it does NOT naturally lead to comprehension of  
connected prose or verse texts. What one must aim at is thinking in  
Greek as one reads, not sentence-by-sentence searching for subjects  
and predicates and modifiers but reading words in the order that the  
Greek-speaking mind finds "natural" and grasping the cumulative  
meaning in successive phrases. The interlinears and parsed texts may  
occasionally be useful when one does analytical exploration of how a  
passage works to communicate its meaning, but I honestly do not  
believe that they will teach one how to think in Greek. I am inclined  
to think that the predominant approach in current Biblical Greek  
pedagogy, as indicated by textbooks as well as by analytic tools and  
electronic resources being made available to students of Biblical  
Greek, focuses upon the analytical skills rather than upon reading.  
And that, I think, is why so few students of Biblical Greek arrive at  
the ability to READ Greek.

An analogy might make this paradox clearer. I remember being  
surprised, when first reading Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, to find  
him insisting that lectures on morality are useless to those who do  
not already practice good behavior, and that children learn to behave  
rightly by growing up in an environment where right behavior is  
practiced. It seemed to me that this was tantamount to saying, as Jane  
Austen might say, that it is "good breeding" that makes people good,  
that parental and peer behavior is the primary factor in acquisition  
of good character -- although one knows that the "well-bred" can  
behave in selfish and dishonorable ways just as surely as those raised  
on the wrong side of the tracks, and Jane Austen's novels themselves  
amply illustrate that truth. What Aristotle really meant by insisting  
that lectures on morality are useless to those who do not already  
practice good behavior is that moral philosophy attempts to examine  
the "whys" of right behavior, not the "hows." Comparably, it seems to  
me, the analytical approach to learning Biblical Greek tends to focus  
on the "whys" of good grammar (Why a dative with this verb? Why a  
subjunctive in this construction? Why an aorist rather than a present- 
tense form in this narrative sentence?) instead of the "hows" of good  
grammar. One learns the "hows" of good Greek grammar (i.e. how lucid  
and intelligent Greek speakers/writers express themselves in order to  
be understood by intelligent Greek listeners/readers) by reading Greek  
texts and/or listening to Greek speakers, NOT, in the first analysis,  
by parsing the words of their sentences and explaining the  
constructions of their cases, moods and tenses.




Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)





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