Do You REALLY Know Greek?

Daniel Streett has posted again on the teaching and learning of New Testament Greek on his blog, καὶ τὰ λοιπά. He shares the story of distributing a quiz on Greek words, most of which occur somewhere in the Greek Bible but not all of which are in the New Testament, at a conference. The quiz gave the English and asked for the person taking it to provide the Greek. The result was that no one got more than two of the ten correct.  Click through and see how you do.

I confess that for some time I have had as one of my goals to spend more time reading things in Greek besides the New Testament – Josephus and Philo in particular. But spending time working on Mandaic meant that I ended up doing far less reading in Greek than I hoped.

For those who want to try making a stab at modern Greek, the Pimsleur course and Teach Yourself Greek Conversation are good places to start, since you can put them on in the car.

What audiobooks are available of ancient Greek texts besides the New Testament?

In almost entirely unrelated news, a recent article pointed out that a man named Ken Maley is producing the “New New Testament” – in other words, rewriting it as he sees fit. See Bob Cargill’s thoughts on the subject and also Jim West’s brief mention.

In actually somewhat related news, Chris Brady expresses appreciation for high quality digital images of manuscripts.

And finally, the provost of Butler University has started a blog, asking in one of her first posts what makes quality education, and suggesting that access to higher education is going to be one of the next big civil rights issues.