Who should learn Greek?

Asking the right question

Who should learn Greek? It is possible to assume that scholars should learn the languages. After all, they write the books that pastors and the rest of us use for our study. It is also possible that we might want to include pastors, since pastors are tasked with the proclamation of the scriptures to the church. When I recently told a pastor I was writing this chapter, he said that the answer was one word: “everybody.”

One of my former employers used to say, “The fastest way to starve a dog is to ask two people to feed it.” This harsh saying exposes the problem with saying “everyone should learn Greek.” If it is everyone’s responsibility to learn the language, then everyone thinks someone else will feel the obligation and do it. But nobody actually does it. As a result, we all use second-hand materials and depend on the few who know the languages to preserve them for us.

Indeed, it appears that it has worked so far. We have our translations and books. The manuscripts have been carefully preserved and are safely stored in managed collections around the world. The text itself has been made available in multiple media formats and is distributed widely throughout the world, possibly even on your mobile device or desktop computer. But with all this availability, relatively few are able to effectively use these texts. The question is not how we preserve the text itself; nor is it simply who should learn Greek. The question is, how do we preserve knowledge of the text?

It is not merely the availability of the text that contributes to its preservation; the understanding of the text is what makes the availability of the text significant. What value do ancient manuscripts and widely distributed texts have if nobody can read them, study them, benefit from them, and help others understand the blessings of the heritage we have been handed? The challenge the church faces is that the sheer quantity of original texts far surpasses the church’s ability to actually use and benefit from them.

So, the question comes back to you and me whether or not you ever open a Greek New Testament. If you teach, your first-hand knowledge of your faith speaks to your competence to fulfill the stewardship Christ has given you. If you are taught, it speaks to what you may reasonably expect from those who teach you, and to your capacity to tell whether you are getting it. Regardless of these, it also speaks to what you are willing to fund, encourage, and expect in the church you belong to. The preservation of the knowledge of the original texts is a problem for the entire church, and something every believer should care about.

The trust held for us

The New Testament is the most abundantly attested ancient text in the world. We hold thousands of manuscripts. Multitudes more than other ancient texts. For example, while we have fragments of Plato’s writings from the second and third centuries (~600-700 years after he penned them), his primary Greek sources are a few dozen medieval manuscripts. By contrast, the first extant entire New Testament in a single codex (Codex Sinaiticus) is dated to ~250 years after the last book was penned. But there are extant copies of entire books dated well before that, and fragments of texts dated by many in the first half of the second century, perhaps within fifty years of being penned.¹ The number of New Testament texts (including fragments) we now possess is approaching six thousand. Not only do we have a rich treasury, but as we saw earlier, the variation between copies is smaller than the variation between our English translations. Whatever else is at risk, the text is not. It has been copied, collated, printed, photographed, and digitized beyond any realistic possibility of loss.

What is closer to being lost is the ability to read and study it. That capacity has no physical storage. It does not sit in a library or a database. It exists only in living people who have learned it, and it passes to the next generation only when someone takes the time and effort to learn it. A church can hold a hundred Greek New Testaments on its shelves and have nobody in the congregation who can open one. The availability of the text is the easy part.

This is why the loss described in the last chapter went unnoticed while it was happening. When a competence disappears, it takes with it the capacity to recognize its absence. A congregation with no readers of Greek cannot detect that it needs any. A seminary that no longer produces exegetes cannot measure what its graduates are missing, because measuring it would require the very skill that is gone. The professor who shrugged and said they would cross the bridge of teaching exegesis when they came to it had lost sight of the need for exegesis!

We have seen this pattern already, from both directions. The Greek text survived antiquity because the early church valued it, read it, and copied it. In the ancient world, you preserved the text because you could read it. You benefited from it and valued the transformation it brought, and so you took the time and effort to handwrite your own copy. This task was broadly recognized as valuable to the church, so for fourteen centuries the church’s textual heritage was sustained by generations of people who labored to copy these manuscripts because they knew what they contained. But even through this process, the knowledge of the language itself was being lost as Latin displaced Greek as the language of the church.

So, when the Reformers called the church back ad fontes, the call was only possible because a generation had recognized the need to read and study its texts and had begun to rebuild the ability to answer it. Erasmus published his Greek New Testament in 1516. Had there been nobody in Europe able to read it, the edition would have been an antiquarian curiosity, and the Reformation would have been a dispute about which authorities to trust. What made it a reformation was that men could go to the text and see for themselves.

What the church holds in trust is not merely the text but the ability to directly interact with it, without intermediaries, translations, and commentaries. This ability is a gift held on behalf of those who benefit from the work of God in, through, and for us.

Which raises the obvious objection. Is this not what scholars are for? We have a body of trained specialists who read the languages professionally, publish critical editions, and write the commentaries. Why should anyone else feel obliged?

Because a competence held outside the local church is a competence the local church cannot use, cannot value, and over which it cannot exercise its responsibility as a steward. Scholarship serves the church, and we should be grateful for it. But scholarship cannot function as the church’s memory. Specialists write for other specialists, are corrected by other specialists, and because today the languages are often missing from the church and restricted to specialists, they answer to academia rather than to the church. When the only people who can read the text are people the congregation will never meet, the benefit to the congregation is remote. It has gained access to a small number of intermediaries, whose work it must accept on trust because it has no means of assessment. That is the second-hand condition described in chapter two, and no matter how highly qualified the scholars, the benefit to the local church is not improved.

The trust, then, belongs to the church, and it belongs to the church in the local sense: local congregations, with pastors and teachers and Bible study leaders and members. It does not belong to other churches “out there” but to individual churches everywhere. How it is held there, and by whom, is what the rest of this chapter is about.

Reading is not a specialist function

Before we ask which members of the body should learn the languages, we should consider what kind of activity reading Scripture is. If handling God’s revelation is a technical operation, like tuning an engine, then it belongs to those with the aptitude and the training, and the rest of us are right to bring our Bibles to a specialist. If it is closer to what human beings are for, the picture changes.

Man was created in the image of God. That image was corrupted at the fall, though it was not erased. In the New Testament, only Christ is said to exist currently as the “image of God” (Col 1:15). Every reference to man being in the image of God refers to the creation of man, not to man’s current reality.² God created us to be image bearers, and the new covenant is intended to form the image of Christ in us, restoring us to our original created order.

Bearing the image of God is a matter of function and structure together. Our function is clear from God’s first command in Genesis 1:28: man is delegated responsibility and authority by God to represent Him and His rule upon the earth. But the image goes beyond function to structure. Man was created theomorphically, meaning that the immaterial structure of man reflects God’s own.³ As Jeremy Pierre puts it, “every thought, desire, and choice is designed to show the physical world the personhood of God.”⁴

If the human person is structured to think, desire, and choose in a way that displays God, then apprehending what God has said is not an operation performed on our behalf by specialists. It is the exercise of the faculties we were made with, directed at the one outcome God created us for. The work of redemption does not add a new capacity to man, so much as begin to restore the one we already had, which is corrupted through our sin. Through our union with Christ, the Spirit of Christ renews our mind (Rom 12:1-2), establishes godly desires (Gal 5:16-18), and reorients our choices, so that a person increasingly thinks God’s thoughts after Him, and reflects the moral goodness of Christ on the earth.

Your mind cannot be renewed by proxy. Someone else can tell you what a text says, and you may believe them, and you may benefit. But if someone else is doing the work, the degree of transforming how you think is much less than if you had been transformed by your own direct encounter with the text. This is the difference between being taught and learning. If you are a member of the body of Christ, then you are saved for this very transformation into the image of Christ. This is why the question of who should learn Greek is not merely about who teaches us. It is about who we, as the church, are to become, and the tools God has given us to bring this transformation about.

Transformation is the task of each individual Christian in the body of Christ. In Ephesians 4, Paul explains how transformation works in the body, starting with Christ’s gifts.

The gifts are given to the church

Paul’s explanation of the gifts that Christ gave to the body in Ephesians 4 is not the same as the way he presents the gifts in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and as Peter presents them in 1 Peter 4. Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 present the gifts as many parts of the same body, and 1 Peter 4:10-11 explains that they are given so we can serve as good stewards of the varied grace of God. But Ephesians 4 is different in two ways.

First, it presents the gifts as being given by Christ, not to individuals but to the church. Paul writes that the ascended Christ “gave gifts to men” (Eph 4:8).⁵ We might expect him to individualize this, as he does in 1 Corinthians 12:7, saying “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit.” Instead, he says, “and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers” (Eph 4:11).⁶ In this passage, the gifts are not capabilities distributed to individuals. The gifts are people, specifically in this passage four groups of people. The triumphant Christ took captivity captive and then gave gifts to mankind, identifying these gifts as apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers.

Second, and more importantly for our question, Paul tells us what they are for. He gave them πρὸς τὸν καταρτισμὸν τῶν ἁγίων εἰς ἔργον διακονίας, “to the equipping of the saints for the work of service” (Eph 4:12), and εἰς οἰκοδομὴν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ χριστοῦ, “for the building up of the body of Christ.” The gifts are given to the church, but the work is not theirs. The equipping is of the saints, and the service is the saints’ service. The gifted men are not the ones who do the work of service; they are the people Christ uses to build the local congregation so they will serve Him.⁷ Read this way, the four groups are not a class to whom the church’s real business has been assigned. They are the instrument by which Christ unifies the body and compels them into His service.

Paul makes this explicit in verse 13: μέχρι καταντήσωμεν οἱ πάντες εἰς τὴν ἑνότητα τῆς πίστεως καὶ τῆς ἐπιγνώσεως τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and the knowledge of the son of God.” The unity of the faith is not merely for the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers on behalf of the rest, but οἱ πάντες, the whole church. We are to serve, unified in the faith thanks to the ministry of these gifts.

Gifted people

The four groups of gifted people given to the church are apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers. Some discussion exists about whether the last of these is one group or two. The μέν … δέ construction itemizes the list into four, and a single article governs the final pair, τοὺς δὲ ποιμένας καὶ διδασκάλους, “the pastors and teachers,” which suggests a combined set.⁸ This does not mean that all teachers are pastors, though most would argue that pastors generally are teachers. The issue here is not the distinction between the two but that both are given as gifts.

All four are given to the church, and all four have the church as their scope, but their functions and places differ. In Ephesians 2:20, Paul describes God’s household as “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone.” He picks the same building metaphor up again in 4:12, εἰς οἰκοδομὴν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ χριστοῦ, for the building of the body of Christ. Using the building metaphor twice in one letter, Paul places these groups at different points in the same construction. The foundation was laid as God revealed His redemptive purposes through the apostles and prophets, and the church now builds on that foundation with the word of God. Evangelists, pastors, and teachers are not named as the foundation. They carry the work forward toward the anticipated outcome, “until we all reach the unity of the faith,” and they continue through the church age.

Evangelists are primarily concerned with winning those outside the church and equipping the church to do the same. Paul places the responsibility to teach the faith to the church on pastors and teachers. But the congregation has the responsibility to grow in understanding; the goal is that the whole body will understand the faith.

The pastor’s task

Timothy was Paul’s protégé and was serving the church in Ephesus when Paul wrote his final letter to him. In it, Paul ties the work of pastoral ministry directly to the nature of Scripture. “All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.”⁹ To call Scripture God-breathed is to say that God is its source, and a text that comes from God carries the authority of God.

If the church is to grow into the image of Christ, we need to know who God is, the significance of Christ, what God has said about His purposes, and how He calls us to live. In short, we need teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. According to Paul, Scripture is beneficial for, or provided for, this very end.

The apostles treated that work as their first obligation. When the practical needs of the congregation began to press on them, the twelve refused to leave the ministry of the word to address them (Acts 6:2, 4). This doesn’t mean the practical needs of the church are not important. Instead, it points to the primacy of the preaching and teaching of the word of God for the apostles. The apostles recognized that their calling was to teach the Word, and it was not acceptable for them to abandon this to serve the body in other ways. The same logic applies to prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers. Again, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t serve in those other areas, but these four roles are appointed specifically for the ministry of the Word. If other responsibilities draw them away from these responsibilities, then the primacy of the Word of God is potentially undermined in the church in which they are called to minister. Not everyone is called to teach (1 Cor 12: 29, James 3:1), so if those who are called to teach and preach are negligent in this task, the church’s growth in sanctification and Christlikeness is significantly undermined.

This is why Paul, having stated the nature of Scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, immediately issues the charge: “I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and teaching.”¹⁰ For Paul, the nature of Scripture is the mandate for expository preaching.

But the charge to preach the word is not the whole of what Paul asks. Earlier in the same letter, he tells Timothy to present himself to God as ἐργάτην ἀνεπαίσχυντον, ὀρθοτομοῦντα τὸν λόγον τῆς ἀληθείας, “a workman who has no need to be ashamed, cutting straight the word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15). The verb ὀρθοτομέω is used in the Septuagint of making a road run straight (Prov 3:6, 11:5). Paul is not instructing Timothy to be sincere about the text, or enthusiastic about it, or confident in it. He is instructing him to cut it straight, and provides the contrast immediately before it using the word ἀνεπαίσχυντον. Those who preach and teach exist on a spectrum before the Lord, between being ashamed and unashamed, and the way they handle the word is the key determinant of where on the spectrum a workman of the Word will sit.

The quality of a workman’s work comes down to competence, and competence is not merely a matter of desire or the will. A man can be devout, disciplined, and diligent, and still cut the text crooked, because cutting straight is a skill and skills have to be acquired. The charge to preach the word therefore carries an implied charge to be able to read it. Which leads to an uncomfortable question about the men we currently produce.

Second-hand pastors

With the rise of the modern seminary, we have never been better placed to produce pastors and teachers equipped for this task. The resources available to a student today would have astonished many faithful pastors throughout church history. Yet, as we have seen, the difficulty of teaching the languages has been growing for decades, driven by changes in general education and the absence of grammatical foundations among those arriving at seminary. Many pastors have studied Greek. Many did not learn it well, and as a result are not reading and studying the Scriptures in the original languages now.

It is also possible to remain a second-hand Christian and take a pulpit, being convinced you are equipped merely because you can read Greek. But far more common is the pastor who cannot read the text at all, who is not merely working with fewer tools. He cannot see the places where questions arise. He reads Ephesians 4:12 in English and cannot see the different ways the punctuation can be contested. He reads John 3:16 and easily misses that οὕτως tells him the manner of God’s love rather than its magnitude. His sermon doesn’t lack weight because he made a bad decision. It lacks weight because he never had the depth with the text that yielded the full scope of the wording. Even if he consulted commentaries that explored the text well, he lacked the understanding to make use of the information. This is the invisible loss described earlier: the congregation that has never sat consistently under rich teaching rooted in sound exegesis is used to sermons that lack weight.

Lest I am accused of overstating the case that all pastors must know the languages, I am not saying that knowing Greek and Hebrew is a condition of being called into pastoral ministry. Faithful men have preached faithfully without it, God has used them, and He continues to. Spurgeon was no exegete, as mentioned earlier, and his ministry fed a generation. My argument, however, is that competence in the languages is a reasonable expectation for the church to hold of those who preach to it, and a reasonable ambition for a pastor to hold of himself.

Nor does this stop at ordained men. The shepherd’s work in Scripture is feeding (John 21:17), and the food is the text. That work is carried on in every congregation by regular believers who hold no office. The woman who leads the Wednesday morning Bible study is teaching the text to others who will believe what she tells them. So is the man who takes the youth group through Romans, and the elder who prepares the mid-week study, and the parent who answers a hard question at the dinner table. If the argument above applies to competence rather than credentials, then it applies to all of these roles, and the gap between a pastor’s task and the works of service the body engages in is narrower than it might first appear.

The equipping has a destination

Let us return to Ephesians 4:13 for another terminus of our discussion. The anticipated outcome is that “we all reach the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God.” The idea of “the faith” as a single entity was established in verse 5, where Paul lists “one faith” alongside one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one baptism, one God and Father of all. We may not fully grasp the faith, but we recognize that we hold one in common. What Paul joins to it is knowledge: τῆς ἐπιγνώσεως τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ, the knowledge of the Son of God. The faith is not merely propositional knowledge. Knowing the Son of God is knowing how these things are experienced, how to think, feel, and choose, which is why Paul finishes the verse with maturity, “for a mature man, for the measure of the maturity of the fullness of Christ.”

Then comes verse 14, the purpose of all that has come before: ἵνα μηκέτι ὦμεν νήπιοι, κλυδωνιζόμενοι καὶ περιφερόμενοι παντὶ ἀνέμῳ τῆς διδασκαλίας. “So that we are no longer infants, tossed about and carried around by every wind of teaching.” This is the alternative to maturity. It is being at the mercy of whoever is teaching you. The immature believer in this description is not someone with no views; he is someone whose views are set by whichever teacher reached him most recently and most persuasively. He has no means of resistance, because he is not anchored in the text for Himself. He moves when the wind moves. That is a description of second-handedness, written by Paul, in the middle of the passage about pastors and teachers, and it is offered as the outcome those gifts exist to bring to an end.

Verse 16 completes the picture. The body grows ἐν μέτρῳ ἑκάστου μέρους, according to the working of each individual part. Growth is not measured by the performance of the church’s pastors and teachers, but by the maturity of the church’s members. It is the development of the members’ contribution, which the pastors and teachers exist to make possible.

So the trajectory of Ephesians 4 is not to allocate the specialist knowledge to pastors and teachers. Certainly, Christ gave teachers, and therefore teaching is their primary responsibility. But Christ gave teachers to bring about a maturity in the congregation anchored in the text. A congregation that depends on being told what the text says is a congregation that has not yet developed this maturity. The pastor’s work is not done until the body is firmly rooted in the Word. A church that cannot work from its knowledge of the Word cannot be described as “well-shepherded.” Paul describes it as νήπιοι, infants.

The languages belong to the whole church, not merely to its leadership. This has implications for the lives of the members and works of service they engage in.

The congregation

Consider a woman who leads a Bible study on Wednesday mornings. Six women meet in her lounge, and they are working through 1 Thessalonians. She has prepared. She has read the chapter several times, made notes, and looked at two commentaries. Then, in the meeting, someone reads 5:10 aloud from her ESV, “so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him,” and someone else looks up and says that hers says “we will live together with Him.” A third has the King James, which says “should live together with him.”

Six women look at her, understanding different implications from their reading of the translations. Will we live with Him, or should we, or might we? One of these promises something certain, one describes an obligation, and one leaves the matter open. She is not a scholar. She is not a pastor. She has limited time to answer, but doesn’t know why translators differ here. So she says something about how the different translations bring out different aspects of the truth, and moves on, and everybody senses that the question was set aside and is no more mature for it.

This happens weekly in churches everywhere. This woman is doing exactly what Ephesians 4:16 describes. She is a part of the body, working according to her gifts and calling. She is not incidental to the congregation’s teaching ministry. She is a substantial part of it. The use of the subjunctive in 1 Thessalonians 5:10 is a question she can reasonably be expected to be able to explain.

But this also raises the benefits for the women in her study, not to mention the rest of the congregation, and a reason for them to learn the languages: so that the church can check what it is taught.

The Bereans are commended for precisely this. When Paul preached in Thessalonica and then in Berea, Luke says the Bereans were εὐγενέστεροι, more noble than the Thessalonians, because they received the word eagerly and then examined the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so (Acts 17:11). The participle ἀνακρίνοντες, examining, the word for a judicial examination explains how they received the word, not with idle acceptance, but with eagerness, and checking for themselves. Apostolic preaching was submitted to congregational verification; the congregation went to the text to evaluate what they were taught, and Luke’s verdict on the practice is that it was noble.

To some, this may sound adversarial, as though the congregation was being armed against the pulpit. It is the opposite. A preacher who knows that six people in the room can follow his exegesis preaches differently, and better. He cannot get away with the nice story that glosses over a difficulty, or the word study that would not survive a simple reading, or the confident claim about the aorist that goes unexamined. A pastor with a congregation grounded in the original languages has a congregation that can tell the difference between his careful work and his lazy work, and that can, therefore, express thanksgiving for the one and gently challenge the other. Every pastor I know who has taught his people Greek says that it made him a better preacher, though he was made a little uncomfortable as a result.

The Reformers recovered direct access to God without a mediating priesthood. A church member who has direct access to the text independently of the pastor is showing the same conviction and is living out the principle of ad fontes in their local congregation.

The second and more obvious implication for the congregation that learns to read the original languages is that learning to read the text yourself changes your own relationship with it. This means the benefits we saw earlier- clarity, confidence, efficiency, and vitality apply to a plumber as much as to a pastor. Nothing in that chapter depended on the reader holding an office. Reading slowly, understanding the author’s choices, and noticing what the translators had to leave behind are all beneficial to any Christian willing to do the work, and the pleasure of it is not a professional pleasure.

The third implication is apologetic. A member of my church recently sent me a social media post arguing that Greek prepositions often used to argue for penal substitutionary atonement did not support this doctrine. The post had mischaracterized several of the prepositions, and left an important one out entirely. A Christian who cannot read the original languages is defenseless when someone arrives with a claim about what the text says, whether that claim comes from the Watchtower at the front door or a video that a friend forwards. With knowledge of the languages, the claim can quickly be assessed rather than being allowed to undermine the Christian’s confidence in the Word, or their apologetic witness in the moment.

None of this amounts to an argument that every Christian must learn Greek. Nobody should feel guilty for recognizing that the Lord has not called them to this task. However, we should all want to normalize the reading and study of the original languages in the church. It should be normal for a congregation to contain several people who read the text. It should be unremarkable for a Bible study leader to have opened a Greek New Testament, and it should generally be expected that a man who regularly preaches can handle the language that contains his source material. That is what competence held in trust looks like, and there is nothing in our situation that prevents it. We have more and better resources for learning the languages than any generation before us. What we lack is the expectation.

Two objections

You might be asking, “What if this is not for me?” Not everyone is called to learn the original languages. However, that doesn’t mean this doesn’t apply to you. Here are three applications, even if you don’t learn Greek yourself.

First, expect more of those who teach you. Pastors and teachers should know the faith they proclaim from the sources rather than from summaries of the sources. We expect this of scholars, and we do so for a reason: their work will be read and checked by other scholars who can read what they read. But who checks the sermon? The one place in the Christian life where competence is least likely to be examined is the one place where the consequences of its absence are most significant for the work of Christ. Ask what your pastors’ practice with the text actually is, not as an accusation but with genuine interest in the effectiveness and impact of their ministry. Encourage them to grow, and support them as they seek to do so.

Second, support those around you who are pursuing the ability to read and study in the original languages. If someone in your congregation is trying to keep knowledge of a biblical language alive in the margins of a working week and family and ministry responsibilities, they need your encouragement, support, and the opportunity to share what they’re learning. Ask them to share what they’re learning and seeing in the text as they encounter the scriptures in the original language for the first time. Benefit from their growth.

The third is to stop treating the languages as an academic specialization. The moment a congregation decides that Greek belongs to the professionals, the trust described at the beginning of this chapter has been handed off to scholars who are outside your church, and possibly outside the church. If a congregation decides not to engage in the original languages, it has abdicated involvement in preserving our collective heritage.

You may have also considered a second objection. We now have tools that will parse any verse, explain any construction, and answer any grammatical question in seconds. If a machine can tell me what the aorist is doing in Acts 3:13, why would I spend three years learning to see it myself? The reasons for a congregation learning the language apply to this question well. The task of verifying what is taught takes too long if we have to do research consistently. And we won’t even know what questions to ask, which stones to turn over, or how significant something is unless we understand the language for ourselves.

Not only that, but if we outsource our knowledge and study to tools and trust what others say about the language, we are not transformed by the process and benefits of knowing, reading, and studying the language for ourselves. We remain second-handers.

The apologetic value of knowing the language is also lost. In a conversation about the gospel, if we are not equipped to handle objections, even those based on the language. We are hardly going to ask the person we are speaking with to wait while we consult our tools and do our research to “fact-check” what they are saying the Greek says. If you know the language, you are much more likely to simply know if what they are saying is true or not, even if you can’t put your finger on why in the moment. The confidence that comes from this is important in these discussions.

Take up the call

The church has lost knowledge of the languages before. Then, as now, we lost it slowly and unintentionally, and recovered it only when a generation went back to the sources and learned to read and study them. Today, despite the multitudes of texts available to us, the church is closer to losing its knowledge of the languages than recovering it. We need to develop the church’s skill to read, analyze, and study the original text, so that as a church we use sound exegesis, and can powerfully exposit the word, so that the message of the gospel and its application to the hearts of people is hindered less by our lack of understanding.

The question is whether the church you belong to will contain anybody who engages the original languages in the near future, or in twenty years, and what part you intend to have in the answer. Collectively we all share in this trust. It has been given to the church by the Lord. It is a possession to enjoy, benefit from, and develop as something held for both our benefit and the benefit of those who come after us.

Which leaves the practical question. If this responsibility belongs in some measure to me, what does it take? How long, how hard, and what does the work of learning Greek actually look like?

Footnotes

1. Andreas J. Köstenberger, L. Scott Kellum, and Charles L. Quarles. The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament. (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2016), 36-37. P52, a fragment of the gospel of John is the oldest papyrus we currently have, and is dated by most papyrologists to the first half of the second century. If John’s gospel was penned in the late 80s or in the 90s of the first century, then this is mere decades after it was penned. By contrast, most ancient Greek manuscripts depend on medieval copies. See Stanley E. Porter, “Manuscripts, Greek New Testament,” in Dictionary of New Testament Background: A Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 675. ↩

2. Passages such as Genesis 9:6, James 3:9, and 1 Corinthians 11:7 refer to man in the image of God at the point of creation, and this is often used to justify the value of man. Man’s value is based on God’s creational intent, and the reality that while the image is corrupted, it is not eradicated. These passages, however, do not argue that our current reality as image bearers is complete. The fact that it is said of Christ, ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου, who is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), clearly indicates that He is something that man otherwise is not. The distinction between Christ, as God united with man, and all other humans that is relevant to our discussion here lies in His moral perfection. ↩

3. Jeremy Pierre, The Dynamic Heart in Daily Life: Connecting Christ to Human Experience (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2016), 11. ↩

4. Ibid. ↩

5. Paul is adapting Psalm 68:18, where the Hebrew and the Septuagint both have the victor receiving gifts rather than giving them. The interpretive options are reviewed thoroughly in Hoehner, Ephesians, 524–32. The different views do not affect the point being made here. ↩

6. Most translations omit the article “the” before each gift. Personally, I think adding it in English is helpful as it represents each gift as a class or group of people. ↩

7. The three prepositional phrases in verse 12 have been punctuated in more than one way, and on some readings the “work of service” belongs to the gifted men rather than the saints. The change of preposition from πρός to εἰς works against that reading, and most recent commentators take the saints as the ones equipped for service. See Hoehner, Ephesians, 547–451. ↩

8. On plural constructions of this kind (article-noun-καί-noun), see Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 270–90. Plural constructions of this type indicate overlap between the groups rather than strict identity, which fits the observation that pastors generally teach while not all teachers are pastors. ↩

9. 2 Timothy 3:16, LSB. ↩

10. 2 Timothy 4:1-2. ↩