Tuesday, July 17, 2012

All Greek to Me

I saw an article recently on Twitter or Facebook - one of those that you click on, read a paragraph for the main point and then click away from. The point of it was that Bible study for Christians might take on new depth and meaning if, instead of looking for what's new, we went back to something old - the original text in Greek.

Yeah, right. Like I have time in my life to learn a foreign language. I minored in French in college and refused to use it ever again once I graduated. My favorite Bible prof is not likely to personally tutor me in Greek, so I didn't think anything more about it.

Then, in church last week at the family reunion, the pastor was talking about a passage in Mark where Jesus feeds 4000 people. This is AFTER Mark's story of Jesus feeding 5000 people. In the message, the pastor specified when Mark used different Greek words than what our translation might indicate. And the idea of the nuances that could be gleaned from reading Scripture in Greek started to grow on me.

Oh, I still have NO time for Greek-as-a-second-language classes, but the original article's premise seemed a lot more reasonable than it did when I first perused it.

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