From: Dave Reigle (reigles@paonline.com)
Date: Sat Nov 04 2000 - 12:58:32 EST
> Greek. They should rely more on what they know. We all have our "gifts"
> (if you will), but we are not all Greek scholars. Why can't we get that
> through our heads? :-)
>
Just a thought on why people who aren't Greek scholars try to be:
Many laymen such as myself and many others, have come to believe in the
scriptures as God's Word, either by early training or conversion. We
rejoiced when
we discovered that there are Bible scholars out there and looked to the
works
of such with anticipation and wonder, only to have our hope turn to dust and
ashes.
Instead of new insights into the word we read things like: Paul couldn't
have written
this, or this was obviously written generations later and modified by the
church, and so on.
Please understand, I am not criticizing the scholars who write these things,
I am trying to
explain a part of the non-scholar/scholar situation. When this crisis
occurs, one may retreat
from all scholarship as the work of the devil, or press on to find out what
it is all about. It seems
to the layman that the one big obstacle in the way of being able to
intelligently discuss the works
of these men is a knowledge of Greek. If one is steadfast, (all-right
stubborn) one can obtain a
very rudimentary understanding of Greek, enough to discover that knowledge
of Greek has very
little to do with what these scholars are reporting. In fact it is much
more a matter of the assumptions they are starting with and the methods they
decide to use.
At this point the slightly educated layman relaxes and forgets about it as
irrelevant, or discovers that he loves learning about Greek and continues to
pursue it for the pleasure of doing it. If after years of studying the
language, he comes across a forum like this, well I tell you he thinks he's
died and gone to hog heaven!
The point I'd like to make is that I know that a suspicion that one is being
hoodwinked has driven many to the study of Greek, and that's not all bad. I
don't use an interlinear anymore, but it was very helpful to me to use one
to build a working vocabulary, and to start seeing what Greek looked like in
it's native environment. I used BibleWorks in the same way when I was
learning the tense forms, immediate feedback is wonderfully encouraging. So
I conclude that if tools like interlinears can be used to aid someone to
learn Greek, they can be beneficial. I still cringe when I hear someone say
"The Greek really says such and such" or worse, "This word really means_",
but I think this kind of abuse would occur whether or not interlinears
existed.
Dave Reigle
Elizabethtown, PA
reigles@paonline.com
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