for greek geeks only

Back in ye olde HSBC days, Matt Johnson and I were mercilessly ridiculed as "Greek geeks." OK, maybe it wasn't so merciless [except for Julia--she was especially brutal :) ], but the label fit--you know we were geeked for it--NT Greek was at 6:40am, MWF--and, just to make it interesting, I had security duty Sunday night until 3am Monday.

Anyway, after several years of studying Classical and New Testament Greek, I'm still a Greek geek--use it all the time. So I was especially geeked to learn about the online Codex Sinaiticus Project. What is Codex Sinaiticus, you ask. Glad you asked. It is a 4th century Greek manuscript of much of the Bible, and is the oldest manuscript extant of the entire New Testament. Now these pages will be available to all for study and making huge posters for your wall.

Run, don't walk, to The Codex Sinaiticus Project -- goes online Thursday, July 24!

blast from the past: egregious greekin'

(From 11/2007)

Watched a few minutes of Pastor Melissa Scott on the TV last night, and boy was it bad! It caught my attention because she was working on a big whiteboard with the Greek text of the New Testament, and I've always enjoyed my Greek.

I got a hint that she didn't know what the hell she was talking about when she pronounced a psi in a word as a pi several times. But then she pulled a ridiculous stunt.

"Pastor" Melissa Scott had two Greek words on the board, euangelisasthai (a form of the word "to tell the good news") and iasasthai (a form of the word "to heal"). Then, emphatically circling letters, she showed how the words both end in -sasthai, alleging that the commonalities made it impossible to "spell 'the Gospel' without 'healing'!"

Her website claims that she knows 20 languages, but I can testify that Greek is not one of them. The -sasthai ending has nothing to do with the root meaning of the word. It is an aorist infinitive ending and does not control the meaning of the term itself. It would be like saying that "helped" and "opened" are similar because they both end in "-ed".

In the Greek words that she was trying to dovetail, the parts of the respective words that govern their core meaning are the first part, not the last part, of the words. The root of iasasthai is ia-, not -sasthai. And the same principle holds for euangelisasthai.

The sad part was that her audience actually stood and applauded her when she demonstrated this nonsense. Some people know just enough Greek to be dangerous.