Course Objectives:

1. To increase the students’ speed and accuracy in translating the Greek New Testament

2. To expand the students’ knowledge of Greek grammar & its implications for exegesis.

3. To help the students gain a better sense of the writings of the NT within the context of Greco-Roman culture and literature.

A few remarks about translation work for this course:

The goal in the translation work will not be to analyze and identify each grammatical point, but to translate as much material as possible. While learning grammatical constructions and uses, along with how to use a reference grammar, will be part of the course, it is not necessary or advisable to spend excessive amounts of time trying to track down a confusing or obscure construction. It is ok to bring grammatical questions to class!

It is VITALLY important that during the week, the student return to the texts covered in the previous class meeting (at least those from Colwell & Tune and the NT) and read them again in Greek (at least 5 times), without English notes anywhere on the page. Read them out loud. Read them several times until you can actually READ the Greek text itself.

With regard to the assigned sections from the NT and other hellenistic literature that we will cover, students are asked to translate in class from the Greek text without any English notes (i.e., don’t just read your prepared English translation, and don’t work from a "marked up" Greek text). It is always ok to admit you don’t remember or recognize a word and then check your prepared translation (be sure to have one written out, with whatever grammatical identifications you found necessary to look up). However, it will be necessary to train your eyes to read GREEK in order to increase your speed and proficiency.

Students in the class will no doubt be able to work at different speeds. You may not be able to get through all of the assigned translations. Work through as much as you reasonably and responsibly can do. You may, of course, be asked to sight read parts of the text that you did not have time to work on. That’s part of learning!