What learning Greek feels like

Your Future Experience with Greek

We have seen that the responsibility to learn Greek rests with the church broadly. That raises the question of ability. Not everyone has the ability to learn Greek and Hebrew, just as not everyone has the ability to fulfill the call to be a pastor. But that doesn’t mean you should dismiss the opportunity before you. The fact that you’re reading this suggests you’re at least asking the right question.

Before we talk about what learning Greek is like, we need to review what we are trying to achieve. A common mistake is to assume that all roads lead to the same outcome, but the outcome we seek is directly tied to the method we use. The task of the exegete, the theologian, and the pastor is not merely to read Greek but to analyze it, so that we can faithfully establish and defend our conclusions about God, man, ourselves, and the world from the inspired text. Even if you never do a formal exegetical study, and simply want to deepen your engagement with the word of God (which should be the goal of every Christian), the reading outcome of natural language approaches differs from that of someone who learns using grammar. Natural language approaches aim at rapid reading with comprehension. I propose that rich engagement with the word of God is a better goal for the church, and I call it exegetical reading.

What is exegetical reading? It is reading with comprehension, plus an added awareness that prompts you to consider as you read how a syntactical form is being used, why a particular word was chosen, or how a word’s formation might add to the author’s flow. Granted, these are not the exclusive products of the learning method I explain below, but they are inherent to it. Exegetical reading doesn’t depend on pronouncing words to a particular standard (though that may help), nor on composing Greek sentences in your head (though that may help too). It lets you translate as you read, whether implicitly or explicitly, with clarity about both the vocabulary and the syntax. If you love precision and clarity, you’ll love exegetical reading.

You may have heard that you do not really know a language until you can read it without translating in your head. Linguists often hold this as the mark of real proficiency, and it is a fine goal if you choose to set it. It is not required for what this book has in view, and setting it first is unwise for two reasons.

First, it puts the outcome so high that most people conclude they have failed long before they have gained anything. Reading Greek the way you read English is rare, and requires a lot of practice and a wide range of reading experiences. Even many who speak English as a second language are translating to their native language in their head. Second, as we saw in chapter 4, the route to that kind of fluency does not give you the analysis exegesis needs. You may be able to follow a Greek sentence and still be unable to say why the author chose a perfect where he might have used an aorist, or to weigh an exegetical commentary’s argument against the text.

If your aim is fluent reading and not exegesis, that is a legitimate goal. Determining what you want to achieve is not a moral issue. But the church needs people who can analyze the text and argue from it. I often find myself translating in my head when a passage is difficult, and I slow down on purpose, because careful reading is what I want from the Scriptures, especially in my devotional time. You do not need to meet a linguistic standard to be changed by the word of God, and I would far prefer that you are changed by the scriptures into the image of Christ, rather than reaching a linguistic standard.

My goal for you is that you’ll be able to pick up a Greek New Testament in the morning and read it as part of your devotional time. You won’t struggle through just a verse or two. You’ll be able to read a whole chapter at a time, understand it, and take notes about how the authors used the language to present their ideas. It may take little more time than it currently takes you to read a translation, but the additional time yields richness well beyond your reading in a translation. Then, as you prepare to teach a study or preach a sermon, you’ll work directly with the Greek New Testament, with no English translation. You’ll be able to quickly identify where you need to spend your time, and you won’t feel the need to tell everyone “the Greek actually says…” because you’ll see why the translators translate it the way they do. You’ll use translations far less, if at all. Even in quick cross-reference reading, your Greek will be good enough, particularly in the books you’ve mastered, which you’ll be able to read right away.

Don’t think of this as the limit. It is an achievable goal, but you may surpass it, or you may struggle to reach it. Struggling is not failure. Even if you only make it through the first phase, you’ll have skill with the language far beyond what you have now, so the journey is worthwhile either way. How long it takes matters less than that you keep going. It may take you longer than someone else, and that’s fine. This isn’t a race, and the goal is not to demonstrate intellectual prowess but to develop new skills with God’s word beyond those you’ve already developed. From that perspective, even a small increase in skill is a meaningful one.

If that sounds like a good goal to you, let’s talk about how you’ll get there.

What you’ll need

The ability to read and analyze Greek depends on both understanding and skill, and this is again where methodology matters. Some approaches build skill without explaining why the language works as it does. A language app, for example, can drill you in forms without ever telling you what a case is. We want both: the understanding that lets you analyze the text, and the skill that lets you read it.

Understanding: Grammars

Grammars exist to help learners develop an understanding of the language. They define terms, explain concepts and forms, and describe how the language works. That information can feel abstract until you put it to use, and authors differ on how much of it a student should take in. As a result, the grammars on the market run along a spectrum from simple to verbose.

A simple grammar covers the language briefly, in a small number of pages. Examples include Ray Summers and Thomas Sawyer, Essentials of New Testament Greek and, to a lesser extent, David Alan Black’s Learn to Read New Testament Greek. More expansive grammars include Bill Mounce’s popular Basics of Biblical Greek and Rodney Decker’s Reading Koine Greek. Between Summers and Decker lies a range of works that make different choices about what to include and how much to explain.

Simple grammars give the student a minimum of information, to prevent confusion and keep the focus on the big picture. Verbose grammars explain concepts in more detail, often showing how forms came to be and what they signify. The risk with verbose grammars is that the student feels they must learn everything in a lesson before moving on. This is rarely the author’s intent, and it is often unnecessary. The risk with simple grammars is that the student is left wondering why a form they learned earlier differs from the one in the current lesson, and when and why to expect the difference. A simple grammar often skips that level of detail or summarizes it in abstract terms.

Matching a student’s learning style and background to a specific grammar is hardly an exact science, so there is no perfect grammar. I’ve reviewed numerous grammars over the years, and while I like things about each, there are things I’d do differently in each.¹ There are some simple guidelines, however. Perhaps most obviously, some students prefer the big picture and are happy to fill in the gaps later, while others can’t move on until they’ve mastered every element of a lesson cold. Which are you? Verbose grammars suit the second kind of student, and concise grammars can help the first in the early stages.

I also recommend a recent grammar over an older one, for two reasons. First, older grammars such as Machen’s New Testament Greek for Beginners (1923) assume a classical education in which you learned grammar and Latin. That is generally not true of anyone born in the West after 1950, which makes them challenging for modern students. Second, research into how Koine Greek worked has advanced significantly since the early 1990s, and scholarship on the verb in particular has reshaped how verbs should be taught since the 2010s. Some older grammars have been revised to reflect this, but many have not.

Finally, I recommend a grammar that is clear about what you need to learn in each lesson and detailed enough that you won’t need another grammar to fill in the gaps. If you choose a brief grammar, expect to add a more detailed one later. Ideally, though, a grammar that focuses on the main points and explains the detail clearly will let you identify and retain the big picture of each lesson, while giving you somewhere to go back when you need the detail.

During Beginning Greek, the concepts of each lesson should be your primary focus. As you gain experience with these big building blocks, you’ll naturally want to fill in the details and understand why something works the way it does. A good grammar serves both needs without overwhelming you.

Skills: Tools and Texts

Developing skill means taking what you’ve learned from a grammar and putting it to use. Some of these skills are built with tools, such as vocabulary cards and flashcard apps, and others with Greek texts, most specifically the Greek New Testament.

Vocabulary: Without a solid working vocabulary, you will always depend on tools to supply it for you. Each word you have to look up slows you down and hinders your comprehension. Lexical skill, the ability to identify a word and its meaning, is a core requirement for reading, and lacking it is one of the primary hindrances to reading comprehension. That is a large part of why Reader’s Editions are so popular today.

Recognition: Knowing vocabulary lets you identify a word’s lexical meaning, but Greek words change far more than English words do. In English, “I eat,” “you eat,” and “they eat” all use the same verb form, “eat,” distinguished only by the pronoun serving as subject. In Greek, these would be ἐσθίω, ἐσθίεις, and ἐσθίουσιν. Similarly, “they ate” would appear in most cases as ἔφαγον, which uses a different root altogether. A grammar will explain why, but you also need to build the skill of recognizing these forms, seeing why they differ, and knowing what each one communicates. Two practices help here: learning to parse forms, and meeting those forms in sentences until you can identify them quickly.

Practice with the language: As you encounter words in phrases and clauses, you not only continue to build recognition but also learn how words relate to one another. This happens in two stages: first with simple phrases designed to build skill, and later with larger texts. Both help, but working with actual texts gives you a sense of how the original authors used the language, and that is irreplaceable.

Historically, students created and carried paper flashcards for vocabulary. For parsing, they memorized paradigms and completed quizzes provided by the teacher. And practice with the language depended on a teacher crafting Greek sentences or extracting texts from the New Testament. A student bought a grammar, perhaps a workbook and some flashcards, then depended on the professor for quizzes while studiously memorizing paradigms to pass them. These approaches work, and many teachers still use them, but the effort they require makes them hard to sustain. Software builds a smoother bridge from reading the grammar to translating the text, and it does so more consistently day by day. One student recently told me he wanted to get away from his phone, buy a grammar and practice by hand. That is a respectable instinct, but he would be giving up a great deal, and students who skip the tools only make the task harder for themselves. These tools let you spend your time learning Greek much more efficiently and build your confidence faster.

Where does AI fit?

You may wonder where artificial intelligence fits. General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) tools are useful for the understanding half of the task. They can explain a concept in plain words, define a term, or quiz you on what you have just read. What they do not do well is build your skill. Skill is built by working in the language, over and over, in a sequence designed to take you from one step to the next. An AI solution can give you practice sentences if you ask, but that is a streamlined version of the old manual methods, and it lacks the structure and scheduling a purpose-built tool provides.

There is a second caution. General-purpose AI tools draw on a large and uneven body of material, some of it out of date and some of it in conflict. The more Greek you know, the more often you will find yourself correcting what they tell you, particularly on fine grammatical detail. Use them to understand, build your skill with tools designed for it, and check anything that matters against a reference grammar.

AI is in its infancy, and I expect its usefulness to change with time, but right now, it is useful for explanation, uneven on detail, and it falls short for skills development.

Skills: Underappreciated

Skills are the transformative component. For you to change means you need to develop your own skills. As you do, working with the language becomes an internal reality, something you are doing, rather than an external reality, something someone (or something) else is doing on your behalf. The internal transformation is the rewarding aspect of learning to work with the original texts.

The phases of learning

I divide the task of mastering Greek into two main phases. The first, what we normally call beginning Greek, is by far the most challenging. During this phase you’ll learn the basics of the language: the grammar, and how words work together to form sentences and meaning. Most people who talk about “learning Greek” mean this first phase. However, if you stop at Phase 1, you will always feel uncomfortable with the language, and you are more likely to lose the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired. Phase 2 is therefore critical to cement and develop what you learn in Phase 1. In fact, Phase 2 is the end for which Phase 1 exists, so it seems criminal that while many students finish Phase 1, few actually progress into Phase 2.

Let’s look at these two phases in more detail and at what it takes to master them.

Phase 1: Beginning Greek

This first phase is easily the most difficult, for reasons I’ve touched on in previous chapters. We used to learn grammar in school. If you received a classical education, you learned grammar and Latin. Those days are long behind us, and while you may have been taught some grammar basics, it is unlikely you remember concepts like participles and infinitives. If your first language is English and you have never learned another language, you may assume other languages work like English, using word order to provide sentence structure. In this respect English is closer to an exception than a norm. Greek is an inflected language: nouns change form according to their function in the sentence, and verbs change form to show person, number, tense, voice, and mood. Word order is more about where the author wants to place emphasis than about signaling grammatical roles.

This is one reason this phase is so hard. Between the grammar education you probably didn’t have and the assumptions you bring from your experience of language, you’ll find yourself feeling like a child learning the alphabet. You’re not only learning the language but laying the foundations of what language is and how it works generally, not to mention how Greek or Hebrew works. Learning Greek or Hebrew is a process of learning to learn as much as a process of learning a language.

Learning Greek begins with the sounds of the alphabet. Many grammars teach you to recite the alphabet. That has some utility, but perhaps not as much as it once did. Double-clicking a word in a digital tool, for example, means that looking up a word alphabetically is no longer a necessity. I therefore focus on the sounds of the letters, alone and in combination, rather than on the names of the letters and their order.

Learning the sounds of the language introduces the subject of pronunciation, a subject of some scholarly discussion and much unscholarly conviction. In short, I recommend one of two paths: the practical path of Modern Greek pronunciation, which is largely consistent with how Koine Greek was pronounced, or reconstructed Koine, which is more precise and aims for 100% consistency. I learned using Erasmian pronunciation, but Erasmian has become academically untenable in light of recent scholarly study.² Modern Greek is still in live use, so there are plenty of resources available and native speakers who can provide pronunciation support. In my personal view, reconstructed Koine lacks the resources of Modern Greek and aims for a level of accuracy that was likely never present in the Koine period, given the pronunciation variations around the Mediterranean basin.³

After the sounds of the language, you’ll begin learning how basic Greek sentence structure works, how it differs from English, and how nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are formed and inflected. You’ll learn that there are five cases, four moods, three declensions, three genders, and two numbers, along with roughly 5,400 distinct vocabulary words behind the more than 138,000 words of the New Testament. Learning how all of these work together to convey the authors’ intended meaning takes time.

Phase 2: Reading

Most people who finish beginning Greek find it very challenging to move into reading the New Testament. One of the main reasons is how they learned their vocabulary.

Often students learn vocabulary by frequency of occurrence. That is a good solution to the constraints of a college or seminary environment, where the professor has about 14 weeks to shovel as much information into your head as possible in the time available. Knowing the roughly 330 words that occur 50 or more times in the Greek New Testament gives you the lexical meaning of approximately 80% of its words. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. In reality, it keeps students dependent on lexical tools such as Reader’s Editions and, more importantly, it holds back reading comprehension. If you have to stop and look up one word in every five on average (and many sentences will have more than that), then work out how to parse the form, and then translate it before you can rebuild the sentence you started reading, your reading will be fragmented into small phrases.

So this second phase leans heavily on learning vocabulary before you get to the reading stage. Personally, I recommend learning every word in the Greek New Testament, including the ones that occur only once. That lets you select and read any book of the Greek New Testament freely, and it enables you to read beyond the New Testament (for example, the Septuagint and the Apostolic Fathers) with much less burden and work. Knowing the vocabulary also speeds up your parsing, since you’ve removed one task from the cycle I just described. As your parsing improves, you’ll spend much less time identifying forms and can simply read with greater comprehension. You’ll see the same root at work in nouns and verbs across verses and chapters because you’ll move between them much more naturally.

Further, many words that occur only once in the New Testament occur multiple times outside it. For example, γάζα, a royal treasury, occurs only once in the New Testament (Acts 8:27) but six times in the Septuagint. Learning a word once means you can read it every time you meet it. It sounds simplistic, but it is amazing how much learning vocabulary before attempting to read improves your ability to read and comprehend.

The temptation at this point is to select the New Testament book you love most and start reading it as soon as you finish beginning Greek. If you heed my advice to learn every word, you’ll need to learn each word in that book, and the logical way to do that is chapter by chapter. But as one of my students discovered, this can be a trap. His goal was to start with Matthew’s Gospel. Having recently finished beginning Greek, he was enthusiastic to read passages like the Sermon on the Mount and the Transfiguration. But the number of words required proved overwhelming: to read Matthew entirely, he would have to learn around 1,380 new words! Not only that, but some of the parables and other texts in Matthew are more challenging than anything he had encountered before.

There is a better way, and it is the way we teach Phase 2 at Biblical Mastery Academy. We provide a list of New Testament books ordered roughly from easiest to most difficult. The ordering takes into account both a book’s syntactical difficulty and the number of words required to read it chapter by chapter (its lexical variety or difficulty). By far the easiest books in the New Testament are John’s epistles. They are short and easy to read, and once you’ve learned the vocabulary that occurs 50 or more times, there are just over 90 words to learn to read 1 John through in its entirety. 2 John and 3 John are easy next steps. From there we introduce students to Paul’s writings, starting with the short book of 2 Thessalonians. Having learned the common vocabulary and the words in John’s epistles, you have only about 100 words to learn to read 2 Thessalonians in its entirety. At a rate of about 30 words per week, in less than a month you can add 2 Thessalonians to your reading repertoire.

When you first encounter 1 John, it is likely you’ll find it quite challenging to read. Paul’s writings are a significant step up again: his sentence structure is harder for English readers, and he uses infinitives much more regularly than John does. But beyond learning vocabulary, there is a simple way to develop the ability to comprehend these writings and their syntax: read repeatedly. The first time you read a Greek text, it will likely feel unfamiliar. Once you’ve read it, go back and read it a second time. I recommend you aim to read a text two to three times during the week while you learn the vocabulary for a later text. Each time, your speed and comprehension will improve, and your recognition of forms will come from memory rather than from stopping to decipher each word. The more you see forms, the faster you’ll recognize them. You’ll learn that a verb with an augment and a –σεν ending is a third person singular aorist active indicative, and you’ll recognize it with little thought. The more you read, the faster you’ll comprehend and the better you’ll understand.

We provide students with a plan to read book by book through the entire Greek New Testament. Each lesson includes a text from the Greek New Testament, around 30 new words to learn for a later text (one to four lessons ahead), and a brief explanation of some of the grammatical concepts you’ll encounter in that text. For each lesson, we encourage students to read the text several times through the week (you’ll already know the vocabulary), learn the new vocabulary well, and review the grammatical concepts as they find helpful. This means you can read the Greek New Testament as part of your daily devotional time, or separately if you prefer, and progress step by step.

We provide this in Tutor, our platform, which offers the vocabulary and lesson material, videos, and written content, including a Greek New Testament with lexical and parsing support. Our vocabulary system is designed to let you learn each word once, remember it, pace yourself without becoming overwhelmed, and exclude words from your review cycle as you master them. Tutor also quickly identifies words you find difficult and gives you a simple way to shorten their review interval so you can master them. During Phase 2 I also encourage you to keep practicing parsing the new forms you learn week by week, to increase your speed of recognition and your confidence with them. Tutor includes this functionality as well.

Phase 1 focuses primarily on your understanding of the language and how it works. Phase 2 takes that understanding and turns it into a comprehensive reading skill. The end result is that you’ll be able to read the Greek New Testament and understand how the language is working, so that you can exegetically derive your own conclusions from the text and compare them to scholarly works. You’ll be able not only to understand the scholarly arguments but also to weigh how their authors reached their conclusions, test your own conclusions against their work, and develop careful arguments that will benefit your own walk with the Lord and that of the people you serve.

How Long, O Lord?

One of the challenges of learning a language like Greek is coming to grips with how long it takes to build the skills you want. We live in a society that tries to shorten the time to every outcome we want, and we make the mistake of expecting this to take very little time, when in reality building skills of this kind takes considerable time and repetition. We have to set our expectations rightly rather than hoping for short-term results. If your expectations are too short, you’ll become frustrated at your lack of progress and give up. Estimating how long it will take to read the entire Greek New Testament is not easy.

Several considerations will speed up or slow down how long it takes you to master the Greek New Testament. Some are obvious but often overlooked: your age, the time you have available, and how many things are contributing to your cognitive load. If you’re juggling many responsibilities or have little time, set your expectations by what you can do rather than what you’d like to do. None of these factors should prevent you from learning and even mastering Greek, but they will affect how long it takes.

This is another reason learning Greek in seminary is difficult. Students generally have competing classes with their own deadlines, along with families, jobs, and ministry responsibilities. In many ways, the 14-week semester with a GPA hanging in the balance works as a stick driving the student to do the bare minimum to pass (survival). This is part of why, at Biblical Mastery Academy, we have created smaller lessons and spread them over a longer period. Students can work on discrete elements of the language over a period that suits their schedule and move forward at a pace appropriate to them.

Another factor not always taken into account is how God has created you. We don’t all have the same cognitive, mnemonic, or attention capabilities, and some of us struggle with routine and discipline more than others. Each person is uniquely made, and placed in unique circumstances by the sovereign will of our Creator. These things need not prevent someone from learning Greek or Hebrew, but they can make the task easier or harder.

Principles for progress

Whatever your timeframe, four principles are worth keeping in mind. These will help you maintain a consistency mindset and help you keep moving forward.

First, any progress is progress. If all you do on a particular day is review your vocabulary, you’ve helped solidify those words in your memory. If you’re using a tool like Biblical Mastery Academy’s Tutor, each review increases the interval before the next review and moves you toward the next lesson. I find it unusual to have a day when I can’t at least review some vocabulary. Vocabulary review mostly means using time that would otherwise be idle, or swapping an idle activity like scrolling social media for scrolling through (and recalling) vocabulary. You can review in one- to two-minute chunks while waiting in line, brewing coffee, eating a meal, or traveling (as long as you’re not driving). If you can do more, by all means do more!

Second, the temptation is to look at how far you have to go, consider how insurmountable the task appears, and simply say, “why bother?” Many students have succumbed to this line of thinking. If any progress is progress, then even completing ten percent of a beginning Greek course gives you understanding of concepts and texts in the New Testament that you never had before. These small insights are not insignificant, and learning Greek builds on them. Small progress, even after just a few lessons, will put you ahead of someone restricted to translations, and the further you progress, the greater the difference grows. As the one experiencing it, you don’t notice, but others around you do. One day you might be reading a commentary or a comment in an online community and suddenly realize, “I understand, and can follow this!” We often hear this kind of comment in our membership community, and every time I read one, I rejoice! Once you see the progress you’ve made, your motivation to continue grows.

Third, give thanks to the Lord for what you’ve been able to learn. Not everyone has the ability to learn Greek or Hebrew. Not everyone has the circumstances that allow them to learn to read the Bible in its original languages. Not everyone has the tools or environment that enable learning the languages as you do. But for some unfathomable reason, the Lord has made all these things available to you. Most Christians who have ever lived had neither the literacy, the tools, nor the freedom you have to study the inspired Scriptures in the language in which they were first written. This is from the Lord, and it is His will that we give thanks for the good gifts He has given us (1 Thessalonians 5:18)!

Fourth, patience is a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23). Learning Greek is not only a way to enrich your knowledge of the Scriptures and of Christ but also a way to develop godly character. Rather than succumbing to the desire for instant results, learning to read and master Greek is a way to discipline yourself for the sake of godliness (1 Timothy 4:7). The long challenge of developing new skills and understanding of the word of God is worth the time for its own sake. But how much more valuable is the journey when it helps build the very characteristics the Holy Spirit is given to develop in us? In this sense, the journey itself is the reward. Learning Greek is a task the Lord will often use to shape you into the person God is calling you to become in Christ! The goal is not merely to read and study the text, but to be transformed by it.

Rule of thumb

Having given those principles, here is my rule-of-thumb guide to how long it takes to get through the stages. It is merely a guide, not a rule, nor a standard you must meet. Typically, we find that getting through Phase 1, beginning Greek, takes 12–15 months of consistent work each week. That normally means about 30 minutes a day on average, with some days requiring more and others less. Phase 2 can take as little as two years, though we find most students manage it in three to four years of consistent work. Again, this varies from person to person and through different seasons of life. We often find students slow down significantly for a while, then return to the task, sometimes doing some review and sometimes simply carrying on from where they left off.

Expect your own timeline to shift. One student began with the goal of reading the Greek New Testament in a year. After a year it became two, and after two years, four. On the surface, this sounds like compromise. But for this student it changed how he saw the task of learning Greek. The learning burden was lightened, and progress was manageable. As he entered Phase 2 and began reading, the work became something he looked forward to, and the pace stopped mattering as much.

If you are older, you may wonder whether you have the years ahead of you to complete the task. Go back to the four principles. Any progress is progress, and even a year or two of reading the New Testament in its own language is time well spent. You will benefit from every step along the way, whether or not you reach the end, because the Spirit of God uses the word of God to change us into the image of Christ. This has value regardless of your age.

What if I’m relearning?

Many people who join Biblical Mastery Academy to learn Greek are not starting for the first time. You may have learned Greek years ago and lost it, begun and stopped more than once, or stalled somewhere in Phase 1 and not known how to restart. You’re in good company. Many stop and restart. This does not mean you cannot learn Greek. It usually means the steps you were taking were too large for the season of life you were in.

If you are starting again, shrink the steps. A few minutes of vocabulary review is still progress (any progress is progress), and it keeps the habit alive until you have room for more. Look back at what you have already learned (give thanks), not ahead at what remains (don’t say “why bother?”). Even if you stopped in the early lessons, you understand things about how the language works that a translation never showed you. Slow down and let the learning fit your stage of life and capabilities. Biblical Mastery Academy’s Tutor lets you slow down, speed up, or work through Beginning Greek again as many times as you need, so starting over costs you far less than it once did. And do not do it alone. Students learn more steadily alongside others, and a good community will come alongside you rather than compete with you.

Make it inevitable

Consistency is the key. If you remain consistent, working five or six days a week, whichever phase you’re in, you will inevitably get to the point where you’ve mastered the entire Greek New Testament. Small, consistent steps inevitably result in arriving at the destination, even if it takes longer for some than for others. Each day, just take one more step that you can manage. If you are walking ten kilometers and are uncertain you can finish the whole distance, take your eyes off the end point and focus on the next step. Just put one foot in front of the other, and you will get there as long as you do not stop. This is why our mascot is an elephant: you eat an elephant one bite at a time. Learning Greek can seem like a huge challenge, but broken into small, consistent steps, it becomes inevitable.

A life of learning

Learning Greek is more than a task to complete or a short journey to take. Theology, church history, and ministry are also lifelong studies, but Greek is different in kind: it is a skill that gives you direct access to a world of primary sources, and it keeps opening new doors for the rest of your life.

Most modern Christians are restricted to reading in their own language. To be sure, there is an unprecedented quantity of resources to read and study in English, not to mention other languages. However, being able to read Greek means you can read not only the New Testament but also the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament widely read by first-century Greek-speaking Jews and Christians and frequently quoted by the New Testament authors. This opens a new window onto the first-century worldview and helps significantly with understanding how the New Testament uses the Old. The writings of the Apostolic Fathers also open up for reading and study. They are rich in instruction on how believers of that time thought they should live, and on how they interpreted and applied the Scriptures. Some serve as good examples; others diverge from what we would consider wise or faithful. All of it is interesting and useful for understanding how the early church grasped the work of Christ and developed.

Of course, the New Testament itself is the starting point, the gateway into the first-century world and the main reason to learn Greek. But skill with the language also opens up a broad corpus of writings closely associated with the New Testament that is normally inaccessible to modern Christians. Knowing New Testament Greek puts you in a position to explore the theology of Clement of Rome (a disciple of Peter), the life and death of Polycarp (a disciple of John), second-century apologists such as Justin Martyr, and even Koine historical and philosophical works such as those of Josephus or Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

If all you ever reach is a little time in the Greek New Testament on a regular basis in your devotional time, you’ll find yourself constantly challenged, growing, and increasing in the knowledge of Christ (Colossians 1:10; 2 Peter 3:18).

Footnotes

1. For a list of my top 10 grammars and a video review of each take a look at my guide to beginning Greek grammars. ↩

2. For a comprehensive academic treatment of Koine Greek pronunciation around the Mediterranean, see Benjamin Kantor. The Pronunciation of New Testament Greek: Judeo-Palestinian Greek Phonology and Orthography from Alexander to Islam. Eerdmans Language Resources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), 2023, or his abridged work A Short Guide to the Pronunciation of New Testament Greek. Eerdmans Language Resources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), 2023. ↩

3. Kantor documents pronunciation variations in different areas around the Mediterranean during the first century for each of the letters and sounds of the language. If your goal is to be absolutely precise, you should select a location, and conform your pronunciation as best you can to that location. However, even this will be difficult as there are no native modern speakers of Koine Greek to correct you, so you’ll never have certainty about where your pronunciation is accurate. ↩