Morphological Ambiguity

I bet most read the title of my blog and said "whaaaat?" That has been my reaction for the last eight months sitting in Greek class. I have been in almost three full quarters of Basic Biblical Greek. With a frustrating professor it has been a long three quarters filled with many paradigm memorizations and all kinds of grammar charts. After hours spent cramming 2nd Aorist verbs and prepositions in my head I was beginning to wonder what the use of taking Greek was in seminary.

One assignment during the last quarter was to translate 4-5 verses in 1 John (the easiest Greek to translate in the New Testament) and share an exegetical insight (an insight that we had gained from looking at the verses in Greek) with small groups of my Greek classmates as a devotion. Nervous about the assignment, I sat down in the library with a pile of books--an interlinear Greek-English Bible, a NRSV Bible, a NIV Bible, my Greek textbook, my lexicon and of course my Greek Bible. I wrote out the passage in Greek and tackled it word by word...verse by verse. It took me some time to look up some words and tenses but in time I realized I had translated 4 verses of the Bible in the original language!

I had a brief celebratory moment in the library and then moved onto the next part of the assignment--an exegetical insight. Having not had Exegetical Methods I wasn't quite sure how to do this. I started out by comparing the English versions of the verses with my Greek translation. To my surprise there were differences! When translating the Greek the editors of the English Bibles had added in words to make several words and phrases plural that were originally singular in the Greek. This didn't change the meaning of the verses significantly by any means... What it did do though was take away emphasis on the communal body of Christ--the passage was addressed to one person (one body of Christ). [I won't go into more details here if you want to know more, just ask].

All this to say that it was at that moment in the library--that it clicked--THIS is why I took Greek!