It's been a week since I arrived. This might be a good time to describe exactly what we are doing here at our lovely House of Blessing overlooking the Galilee.
"Except ye...become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.." One might rephrase this: except ye become as a little child, ye shall not be able to speak Koine Greek." When I came here a week ago, I can quite accurately say that I could not speak a coherent sentence in Greek, Koine or otherwise. I had a fairly large recognition vocabulary, good analytical skills, and could puzzle my way through most any text with the help of a dictionary. I could parse verbs with the best of them. But I could not speak, nor would I call what I was doing with those texts as "reading." No, I was translating.
To be fair to my professors, speaking Greek (or for that matter, Latin) was never a goal of my classical education. I simply was not taught that way. It may have been the case that young English schoolboys of the previous century, starting Latin and Greek at the tender age of six or seven, may have had the ability to do so. No, the basic philosophy was (and is) that ancient Greek and Latin are "dead" languages, killed by (among others) Dante and Chaucer and Erasmus and Luther, who spearheaded the move from these languages to the vernacular. And thank heavens for that, to, or we would never be able to read the Bible in our own language if it weren't for their efforts.
But there is a wave of change spreading through the world of Ancient language acquisition. Led by scholars such as Randall Buth and "Terentius" Tunberg, there has been an effort to teach people how to speak and read Biblical Hebrew, Koine Greek, and Latin as if they were still living languages…
Skeptics will immediately say that not only is this pointless (they are NOT "living" languages) but that it is also virtually impossible to do so based on some pretty big roadblocks on the road to fluency. For one, pronunciation. This is not the place to tackle this controversy in detail, but suffice it to say that Buth and others claim that the so-called "Erasmian" pronunciation usually taught in Classical and Koine Greek courses is in a word, utterly inaccurate (o.k., that's two words, but you get the point) For more on the controversy, see:
So back to my first day. I can't speak, I don't understand the pronunciation, so even the words that I do know, I cannot recognize. The Greeks had a word for my condition: aporia. ("The state of utterly lacking resources" approximates a translation.)
Resist? Scoff? ("It's a pretty parlor trick, but a waste of time") Or humble myself? I chose the latter. And now, a week later, I can speak some Greek. Haltingly, stumbling over verb forms, but gamely trying to press on. There are times when I find myself utterly frustrated at my inadequacy, and it's tough to be constantly corrected on my pronunciation. To be honest, I am often filled with irritation and my inner monologue is more Anglo-Saxon than Koine Greek.
And yet, I can understand the usefulness of this process. To have noun and verb forms inside me, to know well enough to produce them instantly, would allow me to do what, after all, I wanted to do from the very start: to read Greek quickly, with comprehension, and, (wonder of wonders) with enjoyment.
And so, as a little child, I press on...
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