Lecture

Hi, my name is Elodie Emig. I teach Greek at Denver Seminary. I’m also an alumna of Denver Seminary. So I thought I’d show my wonderful T-shirt. As you think about learning Greek or learning a little bit about Greek, trying to decide what your goals are, do you want to really know first-year Greek (the whole shooting match), or do you want to know just enough to understand the helps? If you’ve got a goal in mind, it will be a lot easier to deal with when things get a little bit confusing or boring. For me I wanted to learn Greek because, back many years ago, I was confused by the same Greek text being translated a whole bunch of different ways. You can see at the bottom of your screen the Greek of Romans 8:28. You’ll see the English translations—three English translations.

So, I’m going to read from the King James, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.” Now, if we flip over to the New American Standard, we see that “we know that God causes all things to work together for good.” So “all things” in the King James is the subject; in the New American Standard, God is the subject. That seems a bit odd. When we look at the NIV we see, “And we know that in all things God works together for the good.” And I’m assuming you can read the rest. But believe it or not, all of those are legitimate translations of the Greek. So, you’ll see up there in red the word panta, you can take my word for the fact that it’s panta now.

So as we go along, “and” or “but we know that all things work together for good,” or it could be, “we know that in all things,” or “God himself works all things together for good.” That is because panta, being a neuter noun, could either be the subject or the direct object of the verb. And you may be thinking, well, wait a minute, panta is “all things.” That’s plural. If the other option is that God could be the subject, that’s singular. What’s up with that? Well, one of the amusing, wonderful, and odd things about Greek is that very often neuter plural subjects can take a singular verb. So it really could be he, or God, works all things, or “God works all things.” And at that point, quite frankly, it is a matter of interpretation theology. I happen to like, “and we know that to those loving God, he works all things together for good.”

But again, that’s a theological decision; and we’re going to just stop right here and say a lot of the decisions that we make in terms of translation and interpretation are theologically driven. That’s okay. We all do it. What’s important to know is what’s theologically driven. What’s actually grammatically driven when you read the Greek. Now, from this point, if I were you, I would want to know the alphabet. I think it’s really important that we be able to pronounce the alphabet, even though there’s actually kind of hot debates on how Koine Greek sounded. To be honest, I don’t think anybody is exactly sure because the empire was pretty darn large and, depending on where one was, there were dialectical differences. The pronunciation we’re using is kind of an Erasmian version.

So we’re going to pronounce alpha like the “a” in father, beta like a “b,” boy, gamma like a “g,” unless gamma is followed by another gamma, a kappa, a xi, or a chi, and then we have what is called a gamma nasal. And then the first or only gamma will be pronounced like an “n.” So, for example, aggelos starts with alpha, gamma, gamma, even though we pronounce it in Greek and in English ange, angelos. Delta, we pronounce like “d.” Epsilon, a short e, “eh.” Zeta, I pronounce with a double consonant d-zeta to remind myself that there’s really a “d” and “z” in there. Eta, a long “a.” Theta, a “th.” Iota is “e.” So let’s just forget iota. Kappa, “k.” Lambda, an “l.” Mu, an “m.” Nu, which looks like a “v,” is “n.” Xi, I also pronounce as a double letter, kind of an “xs” kind of deal, “xi.”

Omicron, I pronounce a little bit differently than a lot of conventions just to make alpha and omicron sound a little bit different. I pronounce omicron like the “awe” in “soft”; and again, I doubt it’s original, but it makes spelling phonetically easier. Pi like a “p.” Rho like an “r.” Sigma—notice, by the way, in the lowercase letters they’re two different sigmas—the medial sigma looks like a cursive “o” with a tail on it. There’s also a final sigma that looks like an “s.” Most people just actually write it like a normal “s” in English. This particular font looks more like, I don’t know, kind of a cobra. But anyway, something that looks vaguely like an “s.” A tau, a “t” sound. Upsilon, a “u.” Some people will pronounce it as “eu.” I don’t know anybody who does, but you certainly can. Phi is a “ph.” Chi is a “ch.” Psi is a “ps”—and that’s where we get psychology. And omega, a long “o.”

Once you have learned the alphabet, I think you’ll find life an awful lot easier, even if all you’re doing is looking at an interlinear. It really helps to be able to see what’s going on, to be able to pronounce the stuff so that we can pronounce a little bit better.

In our next segment we’re going to learn all about diphthongs.