ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

There are likely dozens of other blogs that discuss Greek. In fact I know there are. But the majority of NT blogs tend to be more interested in historical and theological questions than linguistic ones. These blogs will mention Greek in passing or make a comment about a particular word or phrase, but its neither their interest or focus. What that says about the state of Greek studies, I’m not sure. From what I’ve heard that situation is similar in Classical studies as well. The blogs listed below are the ones that jumped out at me as I perused the list of 360 blogs in my Google reader.[1] They are the blogs that actually write posts about Greek rather than merely mentioning Greek. Many of these blogs are written by students, so you won’t necessary find an impressive grammatical treatise or lengthy commentary of the text, but you will find people who are honest about wanting to understand the language better and work hard at it. And there are a few blogs on this list on this list whose authors, though not teachers, probably understands and reads Greek better than most professors.

So the blogs first and second lists though regularly dealing with the text, also consistently examine grammatical and lexical questions either as a stepping stone to or from the text. The words “regularly” and “consistently” say nothing about how often they post and should be understood in light of the content of their writing. The first list tends to be completely or nearly completely focused on Greek, even if there is the occasional post on a different subject (e.g. Steve’s howling dog). The second list tends to have a greater variety of subjects discussed, but still has discussions of Greek. The third list consists of blogs that, whether regularly or sporadically, discuss the translation and exegesis of Greek texts or issues related to Greek texts (e.g. textual criticism).

Finally, there may very well be other blogs that I’ve either missed, forgotten, or am simply unaware of. I would definitely welcome suggestions and links. I’d like to see this list grow.

Blogs that Regularly Discuss the Greek Language:

http://www.billmounce.com/blog (also seen as Monday’s with Mounce at Zondervan’s blog)

http://grklinguist.wordpress.com/

http://greeklinguistics.blogspot.com/ (in Greek, my Modern Greek reading skills are extremely poor, but I can read some of this with consistent recourse to the dictionary)

http://www.hellenisti.com/ (not posted since January)

http://www.ntdiscourse.org/ (not posted since April; he should be back soon though)

http://ntresources.com/blog/

http://evepheso.wordpress.com/ (questionable)

Blogs that On Occasion Discuss the Greek Language:

http://jeltzz.blogspot.com/

http://readbetterpreachbetter.com/ (group blog)

http://powerscourt.blogspot.com/

Blogs that Discuss Greek Texts (whether regularly or on occasion):

http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/ (group blog)

http://sonofthefathers.wordpress.com/

http://www.archaicchristianity.com/Blog/ (quiet lately)

http://benjiovercash.wordpress.com/ (quiet lately)

http://www.jgelements.com/ (lots of Ephesians exegesis) (now: http://allthingsephesians.blogspot.com/)

http://www.katagraphais.com/

http://www.pastoralepistles.com/

http://www.supakoo.com/rick/ricoblog/

http://textcommunitymission.wordpress.com/

http://agaphseis.wordpress.com/ (author has inconsistent internet)

Other:

http://cybergreek.uchicago.edu/index.html/ (Helma Dik – not much there, though. She should write more).

http://biblicallanguages.wordpress.com/

http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/

http://betterbibles.com/

Dead Greek Blogs:

http://knowgreek.blogspot.com/

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[1] That may sound like a big number, but the majority of them do not post regularly and a numbe of them or dead. Practically speaking, 360 blogs converts into about 100 blog posts a day that I at least read the titles of. Typically there are only about 5- 10 posts that I actually read through each day. I just don’t have time and I’d rather read a few and be able to comment intelligently on a couple blogs that read a lot and not have time to comment at all. But I like being subscribed to so many so that when the Greek posts do come, I get to see them.

I complained about the dearth Greek blogs recently.

But in a great conversation about particples at Text, Community & Mission, I’ve found that Dr. Micheal Palmer began a blog back in March of this year.

He and I had e-mailed each other a bit a while back about discontinuous phrases last year and he’s made a few comments on my own blog on a variety of topics.

If you’re interested in the Greek language, you’ll want to check out his blog and website. We need more Greek linguists blogging. He’s listed on my blogroll as Greek Language and Linguistics.

He’s written a number of posts since March and has asked several questions in the process. Go give him some answers.

I just added New Testament Interpretation to my blogroll and my Google Reader.

Its written by David Stark, a PHD student under Andreas Köstenberger at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s been blogging since December and it looks like he’s already developed a pretty nice collection of posts on a variety of topics – note the Greek ones, especially.

Let’s hope that he sticks around because it looks like he’s got some good things to say.

Be sure to read John Hobbin’s interview with Steve Runge over at Biblioblogs.com. I only met Steve a few months ago back in September when Phil Gons gave me a tour of Logos Bible Software. I also got to meet in person Rick Brannan and Mike Heiser.

Its been great to get to know Steve and talk about Greek with him through blogs and in person.

OR: How to fit a large number of books into a very small apartment.

OR: My library – a visual tour.

This post also responds to a question from Nick.

My wife and I don’t have the biggest apartment in the world. Its probably our second smallest. Thankfully, unlike out last place in Dallas, we’re not in a studio any more.

But its still difficult to find space for books. Over the past couple months I’ve worked to find creative places to put books. Here are a few of my solutions:

This is the only bookshelf that was actually in the apartment when we arrived. Its not big, but it did fit all of our language books on it. The top shelf has Greek and Latin texts and textual criticism. Some might thinks it a little over the top to own five copies of the Greek New Testament, but only two of them are identical texts and one of those two is my wife’s Greek-Latin Diglot. That’s right. My wife knows both Greek and Latin.

The middle shelf has the grammars. Last year I printed Funk’s grammar off the internet. Its definitely worth having in print. Beside it is Dr. Decker’s Greek reader. Then LaSor, Wallace, Anne Groton’s Classical Grammar, Zerwick, Machen, Goodwin, a grammar by W. Bell from 1821, Discontinuous Syntax (that I’m bloggin through), Campbell’s new book on aspect, Campbell’s 2007 book on aspect, Wong on Semantic Case Relations, McKay on Aspect, and Porter on Aspect. Then comes the Latin grammars, which are mostly my wife’s and I don’t know them as well. I’m planning on opening them up at some point.

The bottom shelf claims to be lexical, but some how How Biblical Languages Work got in there. Then we have Deissmann’s Bible Studies, Lee’s History of New Testament Lexicography, Silva’s Biblical Words and Their Meaning, Louw & Nida, Thayer (yes, it does still have value), a reprint of a 1800’s analytical lexicon that I haven’t used since college, Danker’s Shorter Lexicon, BADG (2ed), and NIDNT.

I won’t do this for every bookshelf. Moving on:

This is my travel shelf. Milk crates and boards. My wife and I have lived in four places in the past 18 months and this is the most practical way to always have shelving. Now I repeated the middle shelf, but from top to bottom: books I’m reading/can’t fit else where, Monographs and commentaries from Matthew through Romans (Cranfield), Romans (Moo) through 1-3 John by Marshall. I don’t have print books covering the NT or OT. Note the middle of the middle shelf is nearly all on Ephesians. Of particular note is the small brown book directly to the right of  Harold Hoehner’s giant tome. That’s an 1856 first edition of Charles Hodge’s commentary on Ephesians. Finally the bottom two shelves are Old Testament and then hermeneutics. The spiral notebooks are a prepub version of Dr. Bateman’s Workbook for Intermediate Greek. Beside them are a few more random books, Dead sea scrolls, Jewish Lit Between the Bible and the Mishnah…etc.

This is my meager (Biblical) theology & children’s literature collection. Its not much, but I’ve read them all – well, I’m still working on Carl Henry.

But this is our most creative endeavor. English & world literature and literary criticism above the kitchen cabinets with a pound of Starbucks Verona Blend on the left.

In a way this might be more creative – in that I built it myself. Its crooked and ugly, but it holds books. Actually its made completely from poorly cut scrap wood I picked up from a theater guild at the end of their play season. I didn’t have too much say it how well it would turn out because of that. Anyway, it holds linguistics books.

This is easily my favorite group of books, sitting on the coat hanger shelf in the front entry way. These are the oldies. My favorites are: Lightfoot’s commentaries, the Cambridge Greek Testament, Expositor’s Greek Testament, Alford’s Greek Testament on Paul’s letters, Gesenius-Kautsch-Cowley’s grammar, a one volume edition of Conybeare and Howson’s Life and Epistles of St. Paul (not the people’s edition), and a copy of Bibliotheca Sacra from 1856 – very interesting articles dealing with slavery in scripture.

So there you go. There are also random books just lying around that someone is reading too, but…you don’t need to see those too. It was fun trying to find places for everything in a 350 sq foot apartment.

I recently created a google alert that would inform me whenever someone used the words “New Testament Greek” in a blog post. A lot of what I’ve found I’ve already known about or has been pretty worthless scholarship.

But one blog came up today that caught my eye:

Biblical Studies Notebook

The author, Karl Möller, is “Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies (focusing on biblical studies) and Course Leader for the MA in Theology at the University of Cumbria and Senior Tutor at the Lancashire and Cumbria Theological Partnership.”

He has good discussions of books and commentary sets. He’s been around since 2006, so I’m surprised that I hadn’t seen his blog until now.

I’m putting him in Google Reader and on my Blogroll and looking forward to future posts.

I’ve comes across a new blog via – Nathan’s comments:Compliant Subversity. The author has some excellent thoughts on language and translation. Particularly this post about “Sins and Errors of Language and Translation Thinking.”

If that title interests you, be sure to give it a read. Its an excellent post. There are a number of other good ones. Hopefully we’ll see more posting from him in the days to come!

One of the many Biblica/theo blogging Brijyanns has finally switched to WordPress. When will the rest of you????

He’s definitely going on my blog roll now!

Eric, over at Archaic Christianity, has written an interesting couple posts about learning Greek or Hebrew and what it means to know a language.

I’d like to throw my two cents in on the second post. Doug Chaplin’s comments on the topic are also interesting.

Eric covers three languages that he “knows” in some way, English, Greek, & German.

I’d like to look at the first two.

For English, he means that he is fluent in the language. “Sure, I make a grammatical mistakes and do speling erors. But I am fluent.” For one, that’s a very clever little sentence. But also these are not the kind of errors that we who are fluent would make while speaking – probably just writing. And even when we do make mistakes speaking, we can recognize pretty quickly that what we said was awkward or ungrammatical.

But even still, in a sense, Eric probably knows Greek better than he does English. The fact is, being fluent in language doesn’t mean you understand how it functions. One of the first rules we learned in our grammatical analysis and field methods courses in linguistics is to never ask the native speaking the significance of any grammatical issue. They probably don’t know. They probably haven’t thought about it. Describing a language grammatically, syntactically or even semantically is very different than being fluent in the language.

And that is why in a sense, Eric (and others such as Peter Kirk, David Ker, Kurk, John Hobbins – though he may very well be fluent in Hebrew too! – and plenty of others I have not named) actually know the languages of the Bible potentially better than than their first languages.

They are able to answer the question, “Why?” Why does this occur in the language? And even when they don’t have an answer to “why” they generally do know how to go about figuring it out.

Knowing a language as in fluency and knowing a language as in linguistic description are very different.

But in either case, the best case scenario is having both fluency and linguistic description. It is the person who has both in both the receptor and source languages that will make the best translator.

And that is why translations are so often done by committees. Nobody has completely mastered both.

Rick, over at the Logos Bible Software blog, has written a very interesting post about searching the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament. Apparently, its possible to search it using the Bible Speed Search window – which is significantly faster than doing a regular syntax search.

Go give it a read – there’s a video and a couple of helpful files, too!