Greek

Greek is a paradox. On the one hand, now with some background in it from years ago, a whole year of undergraduate Greek and the better part of a year of graduate level Greek, one would think I'd finally be comfortable with the language. Up until recently, I didn't think it would ever happen; nevertheless, even without that, there is something amazing about reading a so-called “dead language” and bringing it back to life, especially when one realizes the words one is reading are the words God inspired. If, as Christians believe, the Bible is God's written account of His entering into this world, how amazing it is to see a grammatical construction — even if it is extremely frustrating — and think, “wow, that was written by the author of John, it is not an attempt to reconstruct what was written by the author of John in English. This is the real thing.” A frustrating periphrastic construction can suddenly seem almost exciting (admittedly, it is not always so).

In the midst of that, as of this weekend, I finished translating the book of 1 John for class. I've read through all of 2 John and 3 John in Greek as part of an assigned 10 minute devotional reading each day, and I've read some interesting key parts of the Gospel of John for the same assignment (you can read anything Johannian you feel like, other than Revelation). Doing that much translation — and I've tried to translate all of 1 John twice in the last month, once on the official class scratch paper, and once on the final assignment pages — along with the timed, non-translated reading, I realize I am not yet thinking Greek, but I am beginning to. I can anticipate common phrases used in these books. When I do not recognize a word, often I can figure out enough from the rest of the words to know what it means with some degree of certainty — it is starting to feel more like reading unmodernized Chaucer than reading untranslated Beowulf.

That's pretty neat; I'm excited. I'd still like to expand into Classical Greek, but one step at a time…