I Should Have Pledged Geek

Let me get geeky with Greeky.

It’s strange, the one class I tried to get out of ended up being my favorite course in my first year of seminary. I relish the New Testament like any card-carrying Christian, but I was never attracted to its original Greek manuscript. I don’t know if you “feel” a language like I do, but I find I’m initially attracted to some and not others. The blocky, bendy Hebrew letters on traffic signs in Israel called to me, but the swordlike slashes and dots of the Arabic font directly beneath left me cold. I had been drawn to French sounds and French food in my youth, but I was unimpressed by the Greek letters that kept inserting themselves into math books and college sweatshirts. Math and frats did not speak to me. I sort of tried. I was dragged to one frat party my first week of college and found it so awkward that I pretended to fall asleep on the couch just for an excuse to go back to my dorm room. One week into my adult life, and it was clear the only Greek pledge I’d ever make would be my undying commitment to gyros. 

No, I was never attracted to thetas and sigmas (or Sigma Chi’s), and yet here my seminary track was getting all up in my face about it. I wanted to take Hebrew, but I’d have to do gymnastics around the degree plan unless I took Greek, too. It was like the ugly sister who has to tag along when the pretty one goes on a date. I’m generally handy with languages, so I don’t know why I resisted. I guess I thought we’d be learning a few boring words to make a few boring exegetical points from Scripture. I was fine leaving that to the pastors. It was finally too much trouble to work around, and I realized my classmates would know stuff about the Bible that I skipped out of petty avoidance; so I gave in. What do you know—the ugly sister ended up being just as lovely and good-humored as the former paramour, and with possibly more to say. Is it right to love two ancient languages at once?!

The classroom approach was to tailor Biblical Greek into a bite-size (gargantuan) single-serving package. We learned just enough grammar and vocabulary to translate, by ourselves, an entire book of the New Testament. It was like learning just enough stitches to knit that one hat you really want. I’d always had a vague dream of reading the Bible in its original languages, but it seemed overwhelming, like you’d have to learn the entire lexicon, live with the language and culture for years, and order from an insouciant waiter with a perfect accent before ever hoping to read and comprehend. In Greek I and II, we learned what we needed to exactly read I John, no more no less. For me, this is, literally, a novel approach to language: learn enough to read the book you love. I would sign up for this kind of language class over and over again: just enough French to read The Little Prince, or Russian for Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn. You gain an immediate sense of success, as well as a basepoint for stretching further into other books. Nor is the work superficial; surprisingly, you master enough grammar and vocab to begin hearing the author’s voice, the cadence and the nuance of the writing. Best of all, you end with a real-world application. Look Ma, a whole book!

It’s been one of the most gratifying academic experiences I’ve had. I’m obviously geeking out, and I won’t bore you with the full chart of m’Greek smarts; but I thought it might be fun to pull out some bullet point observations, by way of an introduction. You’ll get a taste of Greeky, with tzatziki. Perhaps it will give you, as it did me, some dimension to the New Testament and the world Jesus and the apostles inhabited.

~Remember the dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who kept insisting (along with the wonders of Windex) that every English word can be traced back to Greek? He’s not completely wrong. Sit down in the middle of Scripture, toss a rock and you’ll hit a word you recognize. Some are obvious, like phobos for “fear” and therapeuo for “I heal,” or ophthalmos for “eye.” Others are curious, such as the word for “heaven,” ouranos, which inspired the naming of our planet Uranus. (Which then became the butt of grade school jokes everywhere. Shame on you, English.) Others are subtle surprises. I read in Matthew where Jesus says the temple moneychangers have turned his Father’s house from a house of prayer into a “den of thieves.” The Greek here can also be translated “cave of robbers,” which is fun, and as I looked closer and noticed the word for cave is spelaion, I suspected that this is the same word from which we get “spelunking.” See? Little delights like that. (Oh yeah? What do you do for fun?) 

~Greek has been described as a language of precision. Sheesh. In all my dabbling in Romance languages, I never saw a noun get squeezed into so many forms. Take the word “dog,” for example. For us, a dog is a dog is a dog. The Greeks would say, be more specific. Is this dog the subject of your sentence, or the direct object? Is this dog possessing something, like a bone? Are you giving something to the dog, like a meat patty? Because all of these dogs must change form to reflect this. To simplify for illustration, imagine having to memorize different endings for the root of “dog” depending on their grammatical function: The DOGOS [subject] is chasing the DOGON [object]. The teeth of the DOGOU [possessive] will give a vicious bite to the DOGOH [dative]. And this is just for one dog. There are four more forms to use if the dogs are plural! Don’t get me started on the gender of nouns, which require, again, further forms.

~We haven’t even touched on adjectives, or participles, which morph based on the gender and number of those nouns we were just talking about. The fun of this (or the nightmare) is that each word carries its own grammatical function, like self-contained GPS coordinates. Thus, it doesn’t much matter where the word is placed in the sentence. Greek sentence structure can get really wonky. It tends to follow a somewhat stable pattern, but every now and then, it’s like the Greeks throw a bunch of words at a wall and say, “That’ll do.” ‘Tis a test of sheer willpower to untangle such sentence clots.

Yet I imagine it is just this specificity that lends precision to the language. And I began to think about the vehicle of human language in communicating theology. God sent his revelation to us, initially, through certain human languages and not others; we didn’t read the 10 commandments in hieroglyphs or the wisdom of Solomon in ancient Akkadian. I wonder if more primitive languages can express the same ideas as more developed ones? Or to get chicken-and-the-egg about it, does heightened language develop after heightened thinking, or does finely tuned language give birth to increasingly complex ideas? This is probably more suited to the study of linguistics. Still, it’s interesting to consider that God chose the Hellenistic world, with its elaborate thinking and expression, as the linguistic vehicle for the next-level revelation of the Messiah to the world. I’ll be curious to see what kind of nuance and vibe there is to Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament. Greek, however, seems to be a fascinating and fitting choice for both the earthy theology of John and the vigorous mental gymnastics of Paul. 

~Scriptural Greek is very active. For all the abstract philosophizing we ascribe to Greek thinkers, the Greek used in the New Testament communicates very clear, active concepts. For example, the word poieo, “I make or do,” is used to refer to actions we don’t usually take in English. I John says if we walk in the darkness, we do not “do” the truth (1:6), and we either do or don’t “do righteousness” (3:10). English tends to render these things more fuzzily—I might try to be truthful, or I might like to think I am righteous; yet in I John, the emphasis is placed on an active, ongoing doing or not doing of these Scriptural precepts. In fact, for John, one is not abstractly sinful so much as one habitually “does sin,” and one cannot claim to be righteous if he does not “do righteousness.” From a 30,000-foot view, you are either doing one or the other. It is clear. In fact, a word John uses repeatedly is phanera, which means “clear” or “manifest.” It comes from the same cognate word group as “shining,” another word John employs meaningfully. His emphasis is that the works of God are clear, so obvious as to be shining. The works of the devil are also clear (John calls the works of the devil “lawlessness,” and again, the active voice is used: “Everyone who does sin also does lawlessness, for sin is lawlessness.” (3:4 emphasis mine). To be clear, the use of the present active indicative form of these verbs denotes persistent sinful lifestyle and character choices, not the legitimate struggle against sin, which is a daily reality for each one of us. 

From the candid hand of John, what stood out to me, a creature of this hazy, shady postmodern age of confusion, is that God’s word and God’s works are really quite clear. I am often tossed about by a culture of words and spin, half-truths and fake news, self-righteous relativism and hair trigger outrage. But God’s directives are pretty straightforward, and the way of truth-doers is shiny and obvs. The verse that pulled it all together for me is 3:10: “In this the children of God and the children of the devil are plain/visible [phanera]. Everyone who does not do righteousness is not of God, and also the one who does not love his brother.” Clear, manifest, shining. If peeps are acting shady, doing sin as a rule, yet claiming to walk in the light, John pretty bluntly says, “Nope.” Modern folk like to say, “Well, my heart is in the right place.” According to John, if we persistently “do lawlessness,” well, no, it’s not. Clearly.

There’s more, but I see some of you pretending to nod off on the couch over there. Don’t worry, I’ll be taking next level NT Exegesis this term, so there will be plenty more nerdy treasures to share! Hope you’ve enjoyed this Windexed window into my language love. I never thought I could say, “It’s all Greek to me” and mean it as a good thing. 

Photos by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash, Inside Weather on Unsplash, Schattenstern on Unsplash, https://medium.com/@humayra.ahsan/the-origins-of-the-meme-12439ec68abf,  Ben White on Unsplash