Author: Micheal Palmer

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Spoken κοινή?

Michael W. Halcomb is offering an online spoken koine Greek class starting in late January. The price is $30. That makes is very affordable.

Given the recent growth of interest in learning to actually speak Hellenistic Greek, I’m not surprised to see another class offering that goal. What I do find surprising is that it’s online, and that it only costs $30. Once I recovered from the surprise, though, I realized that Michael is exactly the person to do this. He is very proficient at both blogging and video production and has already produced a string of youtube videos on speaking Koine Greek.

I wish the class success.

Here’s the add:

View the ad full-page.

 

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Nestle-Aland 28: The Newest Standard Critical Text of the Greek New Testament

NA28The 28th edition of the Novum Testamentum Graece (the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament) is now available. It was unveiled in November at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.

It has been nineteen years since the last revision, and a great deal of text critical work has happened in the intervening years. The Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) in Münster deserves significant praise for this new edition since it is they who have provided the scholarship and expertise to bring about this publication by the Deutshe Bibelgesellschaft.

Among the many advantages of this new edition over the previous one are the online tools for reading it.

Dan Wallace has provided a nice evaluation of the new edition in which he discusses some of the more significant textual differences between the 27th and 28th editions and critiques the diglot version in which the Greek text is accompanied by the English Standard Version. You can read his evaluation on his blog. His evaluation is the bottom half of the blog post you will see when you click on the link.

Another multilingual edition is available that includes the New Revised Standard Bible and the Revised English Bible. Yes: that’s two English translations alongside the Greek text. Right now Barnes & Noble is offering preorders of this triple-text edition at $49.26 rather than the $72.99 price that is being advertised for after publication. [They say this is 32% off, but their math is questionable. $49.26 is actually 32.51% less than $72.99. That rounds to 33%, not 32%, but I’ll be glad to have the extra change!]

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A Little More on the LMPG, the Lexicon of Magic and Religion in the Greek Magical Papyri

While the DGE (Diccionario Griego-Español) announced a few days ago is still quite limited, its counterpart, the Lexicon of Magic and Religion in the Greek Magical Papyri (LMGP for its initials in Spanish) is well worth visiting. It is a fully functioning model of what the full DGE will be when completed.

LexicoDeMagiaYReligionBookCoverThe LMGP offers electronic access not only to lexical entries, but to a wide range of Greek texts that were previously unavailable online. The image below shows the interface. Notice that the column on the left has four tabs at the top. By selecting “Textos” you get a list of the texts that contain the word you are working with. By clicking on a word in the list, the column on the right updates to show that word, a Spanish gloss, a line of text from the papyrus identified beside the word you clicked on the left, and a Spanish translation of that line of Greek text.

ἐχολεθρεύω

Even if you are unable to read the Spanish translation and gloss, you can see the Greek text! It’s pretty cool.

For those of us who can read Spanish, it’s a real boon!

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Thomas Hudgins' Discourse Analysis of John 17

I have added the following article by Thomas Hudgins to A Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics.

Hudgins, Thomas W. “An Application of Discourse Analysis Methodology in the Exegesis of John 17.” Eleutheria: Vol. 2: Iss. 1 (2012), Article 4.

Here’s the comment I made on it there:

Hudgins applies discourse analysis methodology to the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel. The familiar prayer of Jesus in that chapter has traditionally been analyzed in terms of the three referents (Jesus, his contemporary disciples, and future disciples). Hudgins, however, gives greater attention to the “mainline verbs,” shifting the focus to Jesus’ requests and final commitment. By giving greater structural significance to these verbs, he is able to present a fresh understanding of the structural division and natural outline of Jesus’ prayer.

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Google Group: Ancient Greek Best Practices

Paul D. Nitz introduced me this week to a new Google Group entitled Ancient Greek Best Practices. The group is intended for discussion of “the Communicative Approach.” Here’s the way their welcome page explains it:

The Ancient Greek Best Practices Group exists to discuss communicative approaches to learning/teaching Greek.  This approach views Greek as communication, not code.  This discussion board is rather disinterested in debating whether the Grammar/Translation method is superior.  We are all convinced (or deeply interested) in a Communicative Approach to teaching Ancient Greek.

The Communicative Approach can include such methods as Total Physical Response  (TPR – James Asher) and Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS – Blaine Ray), picture books and audio (Living Koine), “shadowing,” or other methods we will invent here on this discussion board.

You can join the group by here.

You can see Paul demonstrate the method with his students in Malawi on Youtube. He has posted videos of several lessons there.

I would like to thank Paul for sharing his work with me and invite him to tell us all more about it.

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Updates to bibliographic entries for Bortone and Luraghi

I have updated the entries for the following two books

  • Luraghi, Silvia. On the meaning of prepositions and cases: Semantic roles in Ancient Greek. Studies in language companion series 67. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003.
  • Bortone, Pietro. Greek prepositions from antiquity to the present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

in A Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics. The updates include a brief description of each book and a link to Mike Aubrey’s reviews.

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Thank you for a very successful 2012

In 2012 the readers of this blog have come from 140 different countries. I want to thank you for your overwhelming support!

It has been a real pleasure to interact with such a wide diversity of readers!

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Coptic fragment presenting Jesus as saying "my wife"?

The following video from Harvard professor Karen L. King has received a huge amount of discussion online over the last few weeks.

Is the fragment directly relevant to the discussion of Hellenistic Greek? No. It is written in Coptic, and there is no credible evidence that it is a translation of an earlier Greek original. While Dr. King assumes the fragment to be a translation, I have found no evidence to support this assumption.

Do I think the Coptic fragment is authentic? I’m skeptical. The provenance of the fragment is unknown. This is a serious problem for any attempt to argue for authenticity.

Dr. King’s assertion that the fragment is evidence of a previously unknown Gospel is highly questionable. It rests on assumptions that I see as difficult to support. If authentic, the fragment was once part of a larger document of some kind. Was that document a Gospel? Perhaps. But it could also have been a letter or a work of religious fiction.

Dr. King has been clear that the fragment does not provide evidence that Jesus was married. If it is authentic, it provides evidence only of what a later group of Christians thought about whether he was married, not evidence of the historical reliability of their thinking. By assuming the fragment to be a translation of an earlier Greek original, though, Dr. King is able to assert that the view it represents on Jesus marital status dates to an earlier period than I believe the evidence actually supports.

While I think it is unlikely that the fragment is actually authentic, that does not mean that I reject the idea that Jesus could have been married.

The question of Jesus marital status did not arise until at least a hundred years after his death, at a time when the early church was struggling with whether Christians should marry, or at the least with whether clergy should marry. The canonical gospels are entirely silent on the issue. [O.K., so here’s the only possible tiny connection between this post and the Greek texts!] They say neither that he was or that he wasn’t married. They never mention a wife, but neither do they assert that he didn’t have one. The assertion that he was single throughout his life is based on theology, not the Greek texts.

If responses appear to this post, I will try to steer them toward discussion of the relevant Greek texts and meanings of particular Greek words and phrases.
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Greek-Spanish Lexicon and LMPG Online: new digital resources

On Dec. 19, Juan Rodríguez Somolinos notified me of the online publication of a small part of the new Diccionario Griego-Español (DGE). Here’s what he had to say:

The members of the Diccionario Griego-Español project (DGE, CSIC, Madrid) are pleased to announce the release of ‘DGE online’ (http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge/), first digital edition of the published section (α-ἔξαυος) of our Lexicon. Although still in progress, the DGE, written under the direction of Prof. F.R. Adrados, is currently becoming the largest bilingual dictionary of ancient Greek: it already includes about 60,000 entries and 370,000 citations of ancient authors and texts. Simultaneously, we are releasing the edition of ‘LMPG online’ (http://dge.cchs.csic.es/lmpg/), the digital version of the Lexicon of Magic and Religion in the Greek Magical Papyri, written by Luis Muñoz Delgado (Supplement V of DGE). The digitization of this smaller Lexicon is considered as a successful prototype of this ambitious digitization initiative: further on DGE online will be improved with similar advanced features, such as the implementation of a customized search engine. Any critics and suggestions on that matter will be very welcome. We hope these new open access dictionaries will be of your interest and will become, to some extent, valuable tools for Ancient Greek studies.

What is available right now is limited, but the project should eventually provide a very valuable resource for students of Ancient Greek who are able to read Spanish.

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Αλφα (and coming posts on pronunciation)

I added a page today giving a brief history of the pronunciation of Α/α.

This is the first in a set of pages I intend to write on issues of pronunciation. These pages will not be linked from the main page of this blog, but will form part of the materials supporting my online grammar. You can find the one on ἄλφα here. It is not intended to be an authoritative source, but a simple explanation for the curious.