Archaic Christianity

A number of years ago some friends and I started a company and produced an interactive software tutorial for learning to diagram in Greek. Tonight we are putting this software out for free for personal use. You can download it off of the Lexel Software website. I hope you find it useful.

And, of course, stay tuned for other useful Greek resources!

During my week of coding last week I did get a little reading done. Part of that little reading was a trip through Luther's An Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate. I found a public domain copy of the work online (there are a number of things by Luther on the Project Wittenberg website). Unfortunately there are many things to correct in it, so I'll probably put up a copy with corrections here on the site and alert the Project Wittenberg folks of the changes.

Protestantism has a problem; it is very hard for us to agree. For some the unifying factor is a creed (explicitly stated or not) of "no creed but the Bible". Of course we can see how using the Bible alone has worked out in Protestantism as a unifying factor.

I am still somewhat perturbed about Huizinga's biography of Erasmus and its lack of information on Erasmus' intellectual and study habits. Truth be told, that is why I read the book (though secondarily to get more information on his editions of his Greek New Testament).

Ben Byerly pointed out an interesting resource. It is the Moule Memorial Lecture given just the other day by Wright about the interaction of scholarship and Christian discipleship. Here is the full transcript. It is most definitely worth your time.

This post is for all of you who found the earlier long-winded posts too...well...long-winded. The following are the guidelines we've discussed so far:

Though the content is most important, the physical characteristics of the reader can make a reader better or worse. If you are putting a reader up on the web you don't have to worry about the physical aspects of the book, and many of those will probably be decided by your publisher (I imagine...I've never worked with one). But here we're discussing more than the physicality of the codex form; we're also discussing page layout, font, etc.

So I've been blogging on types of readers and vocabulary considerations for readers. Now we're on to other potential aids for students that you can consider putting into your reader.

Sidenote on "Student"

I forgot to mention this earlier, so I'm making a sidenote here. I'm trying to use the word "reader" to consistently refer to the annotated text and "student" to refer to the person using this annotated text. Though "reader" would be perfectly appropriate for both, I figured that would be confusing. No promises on consistency though!

And I also want to point out that by "student" I mean anyone who is still working on learning the language...which I think includes just about anyone who wants to use a reader. I certainly include myself. So this is not meant to refer to someone in school...just someone who is learning. Now, without further ado...

There are several different types of readers. If you are writing one, not only do you need to decide up front who your audience is, you should probably go ahead and be clear about it. Different types of readers will require different skill sets, from you and them.

I have a great fondness for Greek readers, i.e., editions of Greek texts with notes that allow you to read them with greater ease. Those with text-critical notes are great, but the things that really help are notes on vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and idiom. Soon after I first started Greek I remember seeing Perschbacher's Refresh Your Greek and thinking, "Gee, I wish there was more of that around." Actually, I don't say "Gee" in normal speech. Regardless, this out-of-print work was great. Of course now you can get the Reader's Greek New Testament. Is it as good? Well, it's better than nothing at all, for sure, but it's not ideal. I don't own it yet and I'm not planning on buying one for general use as I love my NET/NA27 diglot. I'm just writing vocab in the margin that one as I feel the need.

I love reader's versions of ancient texts. I think they are a great thing for learning. So in my continual attempt at not being completely useless, I present to you a gallery of readers for ancient Greek, with a few Latin sprinkled in for good measure (all pulled from my library save one). I'm doing this for a few reasons. First, some of you may not be familiar with these resources though you should be. Second, though some of these are out of print and/or not directly relevant to my perceived audience, I want to give you some samples to spark your thinking. I'll be following up with a post tomorrow, based on this one, with some of my musings on what makes a good reader and where that can fit into one's education.

So I have a question for all of you. If you have learned a language (living or dead) and gotten to the point were you feel comfortable with it (yes, that is very vague), how long did that take you? Can you think of something that would have sped that up (other than just studying more)? Can you think of anything that you think slowed you down?

Doug, over at his blog on Metacatholic, just made a comment about my recent post on pragmatic concerns of learning Greek or Hebrew. I'm going to respond to that in a moment, but a few thoughts/questions first.

Should you learn Greek or Hebrew, the languages in which the Scriptures were originally written? (Yes, Aramaic is in there too, but not much, and everything I say about Hebrew would apply to Aramaic as well as they are related) I bet this is a question that many a Christian ask. As someone who has learned biblical Greek and some Hebrew and Aramaic, indeed as someone who teaches the former, I am going to give you my perspective. The answer is not straightforward (even though part of me wants to tell you all to learn them), and there are a number of questions you have to ask yourself. And no, I am not going to try to word these questions in such a way that a definite "yes" seems like the only appropriate answer. My intention here is to give you practical advice on considering learning a biblical language.

Nathan is learning Greek. Good for him. I recommend it highly myself! He's been pondering the best course for a while, and just posted again about how he's thinking of moving forward. He's considering Athenaze, and I think that is a grand idea if you want to learn to read the New Testament. On the surface this doesn't make any sense as Athenaze is for learning Classical Greek. But it is, and here's why.

The other day I put out a query about distance education for ancient Greek. All I got was crickets, but that is what I expected since I don't have a massive blog readership among classicists (or anybody really...). But I did make a few emails, and got several recommendations to drop a message off to the Classics-L list. So I did. Crickets...for a few days. And then I got a couple answers.

So I'm looking for any online or distance education in ancient Greek. After all, I spend so much time on it, why not :). If anyone knows of any universities that are doing this sort of thing, please drop me a note (you can get my email address on my about page) or leave a comment here. I would greatly appreciate any help!

I just finished reading this today:

I found Tauber's presentation on his approach to a graded reader very interesting. You can view a presentation like what he did at Bibletech 2008 here.

I was thinking about Greek tense and mood stats yesterday evening. I've actually been thinking for some time that infinitives need to be moved up in the traditional Greek curriculum. Looking at the numbers, along with a few other factors, confirmed this. First, some numbers (based off of MorphGNT...hope I didn't parse your data wrong Tauber...):

I ran across a post at the Said at Southern Seminary blog today. It was about whether or not all seminary classes are worth someone's best attention. I decided to reproduce my comments here. After all, my comment is still pending moderation and they may erase it because I'm a DTS grad :). If you are in seminary, I encourage you to read this. I could say so much more and may at some point, but for now this is it.