I am beginning this blog with a deceptive title, but I had to name it something. This is not a review. Reviews are written by peers who are qualified intellectually to take on a discussion of something like Campbell's work. I am not. Neither is this a response or a reply, for the same reason. This blog is at a much more emotional level, like the reaction of a man who finds after 40 years that he has been using the wrong grade motor oil in his cars and wondering why his engines failed, or like that of a man who has been driving to work for twenty minutes over the years only to find out that an unknown shortcut would have lowered it to fifteen, if only he had known about it.
I also need to tell the reader that this blog is esoteric. It is aimed at pastors and teachers who remember "lego, -eis, -ei, -omen, ete, and -ousi" and who parsed and declined faithfully in pursuit of the deeper meanings of the very words of God. Anyone else is certainly welcome to come along.
Advances in the Study of Greek is an examination of the recent impact of both secular and Christian studies in linguistic theory on our understanding of New Testament (Koine) Greek. Readers may recognize names like Chomsky and Nida, but the other scholars mentioned in Advances will probably not be well known to the average pastor. More recent studies (meaning from the late 1800's to the present) are challenging the way Greek has been taught in Christian colleges and seminaries. At present there is overlap between the old and newer methods. But the times they are a'changing. Here are some major points:
(1) New Testament Greek needs to be de-Latinized. I took two years of Latin in high school (back when a foreign language was required!). When I took classical Greek in college, I found it relatively easy, because we squeezed Greek into the Latin system of conjugations and declensions. That worked fine until we came to those weird moods (optative) and voices (middle), and a host of deponent verbs (passive forms translated as active). I was taught that those forms were, well, weird, and I should accept that fact and move on. That was the result of insisting that Greek follow a Latin paradigm. There is of course a historic reason for this. While there were a number of Greek scholars during the Middle Ages, the fall of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism @1500 meant a wider audience for Greek studies. And since the West had preserved Latin in the church and university, it was natural to use a Western approach to Greek, which to my understanding included Eastern concepts such as complete/incomplete action (difficult for the Western mind to grasp).
At any rate, breaking the Latin mold freed Koine Greek to be itself. Some modern scholars are questioning whether there is any such thing as deponent verbs, and are looking at the middle voice as something more than an unexplainable half breed between the active and passive forms. In fact, the middle (in which the subject participates in the action of the verb) may be a “normal” voice, and the passive an extension of it. Scholars are also questioning whether the perfect tense is really perfect, and whether the aorist is merely punctiliar in time. OK. I’m now over my head. The point is that de-Latinizing Koine Greek has allowed the language to speak on its own terms and a newer method of teaching and learning is developing.
(2) Koine Greek needs to be put into its context historically and grammatically. Prior to the late 19th Century, New Testament Greek was considered a “Holy Ghost” language. But the discovery of “everyday” documents on papyrus and clay show that the same Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman world, and the New Testament was written in a totally comprehensible common language. It was also a language that had evolved over time. That means that my practice of reaching for Liddell and Scott’s classical Greek lexicon (the Greek of Plato and the dramatists) when preparing a sermon was a major no-no.
Likewise, grammatical context is important. Any word can have multiple meanings, but it does not have all those meanings in every context. When I used to do exegesis I developed the habit of listing all possible meanings in the lexicon and reading them into a word in the text without considering the context, or transposing the meaning from the same word in another verse. That too is a no-no. This is common sense, but the practice is an indication of too loose an approach to biblical language, a type of linguistic mysticism.
(3) Pronunciation has evolved over time. This was a real shocker to me. I was taught to use classic Latin pronunciation of the Greek text. (I once took a class with Phillip Hughes, an Australian who used a different system that made the dative singular of “pas” sound like the English “panty,” a bit disconcerting. He always read the Greek text out loud himself before we translated, because he couldn’t handle our barbarisms.) But I digress. According to Campbell, there was a radical shift in pronunciation between the Homeric/classical periods and the rise of the Koine. Spelling errors on papyrus and clay receipts, invoices, and personal letters show that vowel sounds were overlapping and merging. Campbell believes that Koine was pronounced much more like modern Greek than classical.
Using modern pronunciation means that most vowels and diphthongs (except a, e, ei, and ou) sound like the letter “i” in “pin.” Delta sounds phonetically like “dh” (th as in “then”), and initial gamma before some vowels is like the consonant “y.” Beta is pronounced like “v,” as it is in the Cyrillic alphabet. So “boulomai” is “voolomi,” “ginomai” becomes “yinomi,” and “didomi’” is “dhidhomi.” Of course this means that all my years of dazzling parishioners and students with high sounding Greek words were filled with inaccuracies.
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The fact is that most of us who took courses in biblical languages simply learned how to use resources that told us in our own language what term meant in another. We learned to use lexicons and word study books that translated meanings into our own language. What Campbell and others are trying to do is to get us into the heart of another language and (if even briefly) allow us to see reality through those thought forms. Anyone who has taken Koine Greek in the past and is committed both to biblical inerrancy and precise exegesis needs to read Campbell’s book.
